Issue43 【CSMY作文互改小组】第三组第8次作业

meichengyuUID: 2121098

TOPIC: ISSUE43 - "To be an effective leader, a public official must maintain the highest ethical and moral standards."
WORDS: 475          TIME: 0:42:50          DATE: 2007-1-27

The speaker asserts that a public official must maintain the highest ethical and moral standards to be an effective leader. In this highly developed society, more and more people participate in evaluating the leaders who is in position through the exposure of mass media of the officials. In my point of view, I do not agree with the author that the highest ethical and moral standards should not be the requirements for every effective leader. The reasons supporting my conclusion will be listed as follows.

To begin with, if we cast a look back to the history of human society, it is easy to notice that most of the great leaders whether in the east or in the west were not so perfect in ethic and moral standards. For instance, the emperor of Qin Dynasty Ying Zheng, who was considered to be the greatest and most effective leader in the history of China, set a lot of cruel laws to force the people to go in for construction of the Great Wall in a large scale and caused countless men died. Besides, some barbarous punishment like decapitating the whole family if one it committed a big crime were also created at that times carried out by the emperor. We could not deny that such brutal leader did make a lot of contribution to the nation and push the society into the most flourishing period. Thus, from this typical example, we could get the point that the highest ethical and moral standards are not the necessary conditions to an effective leader.

In addition, some people may hold the opinion that the ethical and moral standards in the ancient times were different from nowadays and maybe it was the highest in that time though seems cruel today. However, we could list other examples which are in our modern society to disprove it. Take the ex-president Bill Clinton as an example. As we know, the economic condition and international influence kept increasing fast and steadily during the whole tenure of Clinton, although the sexual scandal forced him to quit ultimately. We could not to appreciate the relatively lower ethical and moral standards of Bill, but we could not ignore his achievement in governing the most developed coountry in the world either. So, the highest standards in ethic and moral could not be used to evaluate recent leaders.

All in all, though the high ethical and moral standards should be the target of each person including the leaders, it is not the key factor to value any leader in their work. From what I mentioned and analyzed above, it is comfortable for us to arrive to the conclusion that whether in the past or in nowadays, whether in the east or in the west, the highest ethical and moral standards never become the necessary requirement for a effective leader.