You guys are smart ...
I'm trying to get my teachers' college students to look at life (and their own future students) in a more sophisticated way. The aim with this assignment is to get them thinking at a higher level than "good/bad, right/wrong." Do you think it's effective?
http://prezi.com/nvqtj7latm0b/the-stanford-prison-experiment/
they should redo the experiment, but make the fake guards try to control real prisoners...
that could be the next big thing in reality tv..
Depends on what specific learning objectives you're after. I've been working on game-based learning at my school, and I've found it quite effective in small-scale for developing critical thinking skills as well as promoting much better understanding of particular relationships and processes. PM me if you want to discuss it further.
I wouldn't agree that there's a higher level than right and wrong.
NASA had some really good exercises used in training the astronauts. One was a scenario where your team was stranded away from Lunar base with a broken Rover and limited supplies. As a team you had to prioritize and develop a plan to survive and return to base. Afterwards the ideal solution was presented and you could then compare and get the explanation for the choices. The info might still be available from NASA. By the way, my team died!
02Pilot wrote: Depends on what specific learning objectives you're after. I've been working on game-based learning at my school, and I've found it quite effective in small-scale for developing critical thinking skills as well as promoting much better understanding of particular relationships and processes. PM me if you want to discuss it further.
game based stuff is neat. I was reading on the BBC the other day about a "bug" on world of warcraft where players are spreading a plague. By all accounts, it is perfectly mimicing all the worst case scenereos that the they have come up with for dealing with it.
A small bunch are trying to help
A larger bunch are running into the wilds to stay safe
A deranged group is running around infecting people on purpose
scardeal wrote: I wouldn't agree that there's a higher level than right and wrong.
That's a good illustration of the point.
Many times, there are multiple solutions to situations. How do you effectively decide of the best solution? Right and wrong may not even apply- degrees of good or better could apply, and condersely, all of the choices may have other degrees of impact later on.
Framing it totally in right or wrong will miss a lot of the details.
02Pilot:
PM sent.
scardeal wrote: I wouldn't agree that there's a higher level than right and wrong.
You don't think it's a cover for lazy moralizing and broad, unjustified simplification?
I don't want my students to think only in terms of right and wrong for the following reasons:
In my experience it is often a cover for lazy moralizing and broad simplification.
I want them in uncertain, unfamiliar territory. This means I need to rob them of their assumptions. As noted by Machiavelli and many others, most people don't entertain new ideas without being in some way shaken up.
It discounts the importance of environment which, as the study in question shows, can be far more influential on behavior than any internal moral code.
They all want to become teachers. If they are thinking of students as being good or bad (we are very quick to assume people get what they deserve, regardless of their ages or circumstances), they are going to waste a lot of potential in students who happen to be from difficult backgrounds. This is defensible on its face. However, I also have a lot of personal experience seeing this process in action. I've been widely seen as both good and bad, based on nothing more than my surroundings, and the results are incredibly ugly. The more people who operate above the level of "good person and bad person," the better.
It makes it harder for us to look at horrible actions and think "I would never." Nothing is more dangerous than a person who is deluded about his/her own potential for atrocity.
Don49 wrote: NASA had some really good exercises used in training the astronauts. One was a scenario where your team was stranded away from Lunar base with a broken Rover and limited supplies. As a team you had to prioritize and develop a plan to survive and return to base. Afterwards the ideal solution was presented and you could then compare and get the explanation for the choices. The info might still be available from NASA. By the way, my team died!
Triage is fascinating. I'll have to look that up.
alfadriver wrote: Many times, there are multiple solutions to situations. How do you effectively decide of the best solution? Right and wrong may not even apply- degrees of good or better could apply, and condersely, all of the choices may have other degrees of impact later on. Framing it totally in right or wrong will miss a lot of the details.
Right and wrong is the first most important checkpoint. If it's wrong, then it doesn't matter how effective it is in terms of utility. However, I definitely agree that it's not the whole of the decision/action.
There's definitely a lot that goes into decision-making in addition to its rightness/ethics. If that's what you're getting at, then I'm all for it.
scardeal wrote: I wouldn't agree that there's a higher level than right and wrong.
Train coming down the track, no brakes, going 100 miles an hour. No chance of stopping it, however, you control the switch. On the left, there are 15 people tied to the track. On the right, there are 5. Which way do you switch it?
Okay, got your answer? Lets throw a kink in there: The 15 are all convicted felons and the 5 are girl scouts. Did you change your answer?
1 of the convicted felons is also a well respected medical researcher, and is the man with the best chance ever to come up with a cure to cancer.
Another kink: The 4 of the girl scouts have terminal cancer and 1 month left to live at best, but 1 is healthy.
Another kink: Of the 15 felons, 2 were wrongly convicted and are completely innocent.
There are much higher levels than right and wrong.
There are clearly things well beyond right and wrong. Just considering that there can be two sides that say they are right tells you that (depends on how you are defining "beyond" of course).
There are many things going on today that are presented as right and wrong that clearly are not. Probably no way to use those though, they are way to political.
I highly encourage this teaching though. In fact, I would almost say that working from the perspective that there is no true right and wrong might be useful.
Pseudonym wrote: Train coming down the track, no brakes, going 100 miles an hour. No chance of stopping it, however, you control the switch. On the left, there are 15 people tied to the track. On the right, there are 5. Which way do you switch it? Okay, got your answer? Lets throw a kink in there: The 15 are all convicted felons and the 5 are girl scouts. Did you change your answer? 1 of the convicted felons is also a well respected medical researcher, and is the man with the best chance ever to come up with a cure to cancer. Another kink: The 4 of the girl scouts have terminal cancer and 1 month left to live at best, but 1 is healthy. Another kink: Of the 15 felons, 2 were wrongly convicted and are completely innocent. There are much higher levels than right and wrong.
This is a classic example of the principle of double-effect. Your intent can't be to kill. Your intent has to be to SAVE who you can. If your intent is to kill certain persons, then you've already lost.
Anyway, the person on the switch, unless he himself disabled the brakes, etc. can't be culpable for a runaway train killing people. He's only choosing who to save, and, so long as he's intending to save who he can, there's no pat answer.
Actually, there is one pat answer: within your scenario, if the train is unmanned, and there's plenty of runoff room before the train got to the girl scouts or felons, then derail the thing. It's certainly doable at a switching point.
Higher level, not a chance. Determining whether available actions are right or wrong is the first consideration in making a decision. Then, out of the morally permissible actions, one tries to select a best course of action.
scardeal wrote:alfadriver wrote: Many times, there are multiple solutions to situations. How do you effectively decide of the best solution? Right and wrong may not even apply- degrees of good or better could apply, and condersely, all of the choices may have other degrees of impact later on. Framing it totally in right or wrong will miss a lot of the details.Right and wrong is the first most important checkpoint. If it's wrong, then it doesn't matter how effective it is in terms of utility. However, I definitely agree that it's not the whole of the decision/action. There's definitely a lot that goes into decision-making *in addition to* its rightness/ethics. If that's what you're getting at, then I'm all for it.
The very first problem with that- how do you define what is right and what is wrong?
Killing someone is wrong, correct? It's pretty easy to come up with a ton of scenarios where we have decided that it's not wrong. And even for that, there's a pretty good distribution of people that will give you different answers based on the situation. That's for a very basic "10 commandmants" item. Heck, even you just put a caveat on killing that the point is to save the most- thus justifying violating the commandment.
That's why critical thinking is so important.
If I just ignored the switch and let the train go wherever it was headed is that worse that killing either the girl scouts or felons?
That's probably, realistically, the best choice there. It's not really a determination of right or wrong, but it does sort of remove you from a situation where there is no real answer (let fate decide).
(Wally wins the un-winnable scenario)
alfadriver wrote: The very first problem with that- how do you define what is right and what is wrong? ... snip ... That's why critical thinking is so important.
Isn't the practice of defining what is right and wrong called ethics? Maybe we should all go read Aristotle and come back to this.
Of course critical thinking is so important. Totally agreed.
scardeal wrote:alfadriver wrote: The very first problem with that- how do you define what is right and what is wrong? ... snip ... That's why critical thinking is so important.Isn't the practice of defining what is right and wrong called ethics? Maybe we should all go read Aristotle and come back to this. Of course critical thinking is so important. Totally agreed.
Still, sometimes the question isn't an ethical problem at all, just a problem. And the "right" and "wrong" definitions may vary based on who is dealing with the problem.
That is why it's so important to cover critical thinking- just keeping it in an ethical or moral format really dillutes the nature of problems and solutions. you can't apply ethical questions to many decision making things. The answer is far, far more than right or wrong. And a lot deeper.
alfadriver wrote: Still, sometimes the question isn't an ethical problem at all, just a problem. And the "right" and "wrong" definitions may vary based on who is dealing with the problem. That is why it's so important to cover critical thinking- just keeping it in an ethical or moral format really dillutes the nature of problems and solutions. you can't apply ethical questions to many decision making things. The answer is far, far more than right or wrong. And a lot deeper.
That's the thing. It's a fundamental part of any decision. It helps you filter out a range of decisions, despite it often being a sort of automatic thing. Do I want to eat beef, pork, tofu or poison? Do I want to make my living in finance, farming or bank robbery?
I think we can both agree that it's not the whole, or even a primary part of the decision process in many cases. Heck, there's often an a priori rejection of unethical responses. However, there's some ethical element in every decision, no matter how small. What color do I wear? That is part of the larger decision to wear clothes for warmth and cultural acceptance. In this case, the ethical portion is present, but decided a priori.
What I don't understand is why you think that deciding the details of implementation is fundamentally "more" or "deeper". It's like saying that the route is more important than the goal in a philosophical sense. You can't measure progress without a standard against which to measure. Then it's just change for change's sake.
In reply to scardeal:
You claim is that there isn't a level that's higher than right or wrong. For a handful of problems, there are only two states- right and wrong.
Most problems have side states that look like a tree root, so that you end up with both good and bad side effects and that one has to decide which of those are acceptable to deal with. Having to understand all of the impacts of a decision is a lot deeper than just basic right or wrong. That's my point.
Even still, assigning some kind of morality to that becomes scary- when it's just a decision. And it bothers me that people want to think that you can simplify many complex questions by a simple yes or no. Just as bad when people pretend that it's "common sense". Maybe worse.
You keep bringing up personal decisions, I keep pointing out that there are a technical decisions too? Do I decide on camshaft profile A or B? That depends on what I'm doing with car, and if the resulting performance/compromises can be acceptable. How is that ethical?
Anyway, that's no help to the OP, it's up to him to decide if "right or wrong" is enough to teach. And there's no right answer, as i see it. 
Like I say, it depends on how you look at higher level. You can say higher level, as in beyond right and wrong, but you can also say the most extreme points are already "right" and "wrong", so everything else lies within that. Not sure if that is what Scardeal is taking about.
The point about Morals / ethics is actually very interesting, and maybe a great discussion / lesson for the OP:
There seems to be a very strong assumption for many that morals / ethics are a defined thing, but in reality, they are simply a set of guidelines / rules to determine right and wrong. People / societies have different sets of morals, and thus different definitions of right and wrong (or define things along that line differently).
Maybe there is something along the path of morals / ethics that can be used as a lesson. Might still be hard to avoid politically sensitive topics though.
Aircooled,
That assumption that morals are defined is exactly what I'm playing with. One of the really interesting findings of the Stanford Prison Experiment, and a lot of obedience experiments, is that morality is dynamic, inconstant and very subject to environmental factors even within a single individual. In fact, it is almost always a relatively simple thing to change a normal, healthy person into a sadistic monster.
In the strictly pragmatic sense (I'm doing a class for aspiring teachers), I want to get them thinking of their own future students in more complicated terms than "good and bad." It's very easy to assume that a misbehaving kid misbehaves because he/she is naturally bad. It's also complete horse manure in my experience.
In the larger sense, I think it is important to break people of making lazy explanations for evil. I hate, hate, hate it when people say Hitler was a monster. I completely agree that what he did was monstrous, but there is absolutely no way in hell he murders all those people without hundreds of millions of perfectly ordinary central Europeans seeing his actions, agreeing and being willing to die in order to advance his ideals. Normal people put him in power. Normal people manned the extermination camps. Normal people cleansed their neighborhoods of Jews and Romani. Monsters didn't carry out the Holocaust, normal people did. In fact, I'd argue the monsters aren't that dangerous. If you are a cackling madman, nobody is going to follow you. This means you top out at serial killer status. If you are a morally normal person in the wrong environment, if you haven't really examined your own capacity for barbarity, you are capable of almost anything. Only when we realize this can we go about intelligently stopping the next outrage.
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