Speech

Instructions

1-3 Introduction to Vocal Variety and Body Language

This project focuses on the fundamentals of delivering a speech—vocal variety and body language.

Purpose: The purpose of this project is to practice using vocal variety or body language to enhance a speech.

Overview: Learn or review the importance of vocal variety and body language. Present a 5- to 7-minute speech on any topic at a club meeting. The primary focus of the evaluation is your vocal variety or your body language and gestures. You will identify the skills you are working on for your evaluator before you deliver your speech and be evaluated on those skills. Your speech can be persuasive, humorous, informational, or crafted in any style that appeals to you and supports your speech content.

Speech timings: 5:00, 6:00, 7:00

Script

It’s the summer of 1945, you’re the President of the United States. The second World War is nearing its end: Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy have been defeated, but Japan, in the Pacific, has still not surrendered. Your top-secret program, the Manhattan Project, has detonated the first ever atomic bomb in the desert of New Mexico. You are faced with the following two choices:

1. You continue the war and invade Japan and all Japanese-occupied territories in Asia, home to half a billion people.
2. You drop an atomic bomb on Japanese cities, hoping to make the Japanese Emperor surrender and end the war.

Put yourself in these shoes now.

• Raise your hand if you would continue the war?
• Raise your hand if you would drop the bomb?

We all know what Harry Truman, who was in that very position, did. He dropped a bomb first on Hiroshima, then, 3 days later, on Nagasaki. The second bomb was called the ‘Fat Man’. The death toll of 300 thousand people made the Japanese Emperor surrender. And just like that, the bloodiest war in the history of humankind ended in the most dramatic and horrendous fashion.

Was this hard, horrible decision the right thing to do? Was it the moral thing to do?

Good evening fellow toastmasters and guests. Tonight we will be going on a journey of moral dilemmas and philosophical reflections.

These kinds of moral dilemmas where a decision needs to be made about the lives of people: Who to save, who to kill? are called the “Trolley Problem”. A trolley as in the cart or wagon of a train. Two pioneering, female, philosophers, from the University of Oxford, have written a lot about this problem: Philippa Foot and Elizabeth Anscombe.

For our first trolley scenario, let’s imagine you are on the side of a train track. A train, consisting of trolleys, is going full speed, and you realise the brakes are not working anymore. You are next to a lever, which can direct the train onto the left or right track. The left track has 4 innocent people attached to it, the right has only one innocent person.

• Raise your hand if you would choose the left track with 4 people?
• Raise your hand if you would choose the right track with one person?

I see that most people chose to send the train on the right track, to kill one person. This is in line with the theory of utilitarianism, which comes from the word utility. Its core idea is summarised as such: “It is the greatest good to the greatest number of people which is the measure of right and wrong.”

When faced with a decision, the one that will cause the least harm, or most good, is the right decision to make. This is transforming decision making, something which seems subjective, and imperfect, into a science. You should objectively calculate how many lives you would save or how much pleasure you would bring.

This is exactly the argument Harry Truman made during the war using the atomic bomb. He believed dropping the atomic bombs would kill less people than invading the whole of Asia. But how did he really know that? How could he accurately measure this? This leads me to the main critic of utilitarianism: “A philosophical problem is not an empirical problem.”

Let’s then move on to our second scenario. The situation is similar as before, the brakes of a speeding train are not working, but now it is only racing on one track, where 4 innocent people are attached to it. You are on top of a bridge, overlooking this imminent disaster. Next to you, there is an innocent Fat Man, leaning over the bridge, also looking down. If you push him, he will fall in between the train and the people tied to the tracks, and will make the train stop, saving the 4 people.

Picture yourself in that situation right now.

• Raise your hand if you would push the Fat Man?
• Raise your hand if you would NOT push the Fat Man?

Some of you decided to not push the Fat Man, even though the final result would be exactly the same as the first trolley scenario. This is in line with the idea of deontology. Deontology is a kind of moral absolutism where certain actions are never acceptable. In this case, killing another human being, under any circumstance, is forbidden.

Philippa Foot and Elizabeth Anscombe, the two female philosophers I mentioned before, actually believed in this. They passionately opposed the awarding from their university, Oxford, of an honorary doctorate to Harry Truman after the war, famously saying: “men […] (that) choose to kill the innocent […] (is) always murder.”

These are the kind of questions our justice system is wrestling with all the time, still today. Can we torture 9/11 suspects in Guantanamo Bay? Can we strip them of all humanity, in the hope of saving future lives from terrorists? According to deontologists, no potential benefit ever outweighs the harm caused by some of these forbidden actions, like torture.

To summarise, we have explored two important theories. The first, utilitarianism, is that one should make decisions based on the total amount of harm or good it will cause. The second, deontology, is the idea that certain actions should be prohibited, no matter what.

Coming back to Harry Truman, after the war, he said that “If I had to do it again, I would do it all over again.” Does this decision separate him as an exceptional, ethical leader or an evil, immoral one?

These moral dilemmas do not have a wrong or right answer, I don’t believe there is an absolute truth here. Life is just not that simple. Life is uneven, blurry and grey. But, personally, I find it extremely important to think about these questions, however absurd they may seem. The way our laws are drawn up and political, economic and military decisions are made are based on how we view these situations.

I would like to leave you with a quote: “[The Trolley Problem], a lovely, nasty difficulty.” And I couldn’t agree more.