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How do we decide the right thing to do in difficult circumstances?
Students will:
STARTER 1. Put the students into small groups, and give a set of Decision Cards (from the handout sheet, cut out in advance) to each group. Explain to the students that their task is to make a decision, and the question that they must decide upon is 'What will you do this weekend?' Ask them to mix up the Decision Cards and turn them over one at a time. Each card provides one piece of information which may be useful to them in coming to a decision. As the students turn the cards, they should discuss whether they think the information is relevant or irrelevant to their decision. Once all of the cards have been revealed, they should reconsider their assessments – have any of the things that they thought were irrelevant become more significant in the light of later cards? Once they are agreed on which cards are relevant, ask them to decide which cards are major considerations, and which are less important. Finally, in the light of their verdicts on the various cards, ask them to come to a decision on the question of what to do at the weekend. The text on the Decision Cards is as follows: • You have a big exam on Monday morning • Dan is having a party on Sunday night • Your friends are going to a theme park on Saturday • You haven't got much money at the moment • You can get extra shifts at your part time job, but only if you work Friday night and Sunday night • Your parents are concerned about how your schoolwork is going • The boy or girl that you fancy will be at Dan's party • You are allergic to cheese • This decision is taking place in April • Doctor Who is on television on Saturday Take feedback from the groups. Did all of the groups come to the same decision? Which pieces of information did people consider to be the most important? Why? Draw out that the final decision that each group made almost certainly reflected whether they thought that their education, their love lives, or a day out at a theme park were more important to them at this moment in time! The choices they made revealed what they thought was important, and what they thought was important had a profound influence on their decision making. In today's lesson, you are going to be looking at how people make moral decisions, and how the way people see the world makes a difference to their moral decision making. MAIN ACTIVITIES: 2. Introduce the first clip from Torchwood: Children of Earth (BBC DVD, 2009, certificate 15). Click here to buy the DVD online. Explain that the British government is negotiating with an alien creature from a race known only as 'the 456'. The aliens visited Britain many years ago, and the government is attempting to keep that earlier visit a secret from the public and other nations. As the students watch the clip, ask them to pay particular attention to the request that the 456 make, and to the revelation of what happened on their earlier visit to Earth. The clip is from day three of Torchwood: Children of Earth, which is on disc one of the DVD. Start time: 0.52.36 (Beginning of chapter 11 of the episode) End time: 0.57.39 Clip length: Five minutes and 3 seconds The clip starts with the American general saying, 'Ask it why it came to Britain.' It ends with Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) saying, 'As a gift', which is also the last line before the end credits for the episode. Ask the students why they think the government in 1965 agreed to give twelve children to the 456 as 'a gift'. Do they think this was a good decision, in order to maintain good relations with an alien force of unknown and superior power and technology? What about the 456's demand for 10% of the children on Earth? Challenge the students to defend their answers, asking questions of expedience to those who think the deal was a bad idea, and asking questions of morality to those who think it was a good idea. If anyone argues for the 1965 deal and against the latest one, ask them to explain what is different other than the numbers involved. 3. Give out the What Should I Do? worksheets and explain the different approaches to moral ethics that are outlined there. Ask the students to consider how someone with each of the worldviews described would be likely to respond to this dilemma. This activity could be done either as a whole class exercise led by you, or in small groups. You could also ask the students whether they can recognise their own approach to the dilemma in any of the descriptions on the worksheet. In pairs or small groups, ask the students to apply each of the ethical frameworks from the worksheets and apply them to the situation faced by the humans in the clip. How would someone who behaved strictly according to each of the frameworks be likely to respond to the demand of a gift of 10% of the children of Earth? 4. Ask the students to apply the ethical frameworks from the worksheet to one or more of the following moral dilemmas: • In a difficult time for the economy, your parents have lost their jobs and have little or no money coming in. They are struggling to pay household bills and your whole family is going very short of food. You are in a shop and notice that the shop assistants are all too busy to see you. Do you steal some food? • You are in charge of the points on a railway line. A train is out of control and is hurtling towards a bus full of passengers, which has stalled on a level crossing. The emergency doors of the bus have jammed making it impossible for anyone to get out. If you switch the points, the train will miss the bus, but will go down another track where a car containing your family is stuck. Do you send the train to kill your family or the bus full of strangers? • After a party, a friend of yours who has been drinking heavily all night offers to drive you home. What do you do? Do you try to persuade your friend not to drive? Do you physically restrain him from driving? Do you decline the lift but say nothing? Do you accept the lift? • Your next door neighbour is an elderly widow with cancer. You are working as a security guard at a local pharmaceutical company which produces a cancer drug with a high success rate when used to treat this particular form of cancer. Sadly, your neighbour cannot afford the drug and you are unable to raise enough money to pay for the treatment on her behalf. You would be able to create an opportunity to steal sufficient quantities of the drug for her treatment. What should you do? Ask the students what problems they can see with any of the ethical approaches on the worksheets – which ones tended to produce solutions that the students were particularly unhappy with? Which ones were hard to apply to different situations? Do the students feel that any of the approaches provided a consistently good and useful response to moral decision making? 5. Introduce a second clip from Torchwood: Children of Earth. The clip occurs on day four, which is on disc two of the DVD. Senior government ministers are meeting to decide what to do about the 456's demand. Start time: 0.30.37 (in chapter 6 of the DVD) End time: 0.36.12 Clip length: Five minutes and 35 seconds The clip starts with the Prime Minister (Nicholas Farrell) saying, 'With regrets, ladies and gentlemen.' The clip ends with him saying, 'John, you have your criteria. We've selected the 10%.' Please note that this clip includes two instances of mild swearing ('bastards' and 'bloody'). If you feel this is inappropriate for your class, do not use the clip. Ask the students for their reaction to the discussion they have just watched. Are they sympathetic towards the ministers for having to make such a difficult decision, or critical for the decision that was finally arrived at. Although the Prime Minister says, 'we don't have time for a discussion on ethics', do the students agree that it is possible to remove ethics from decisions like this? Is it possible to say, as the ministers implicitly do, that some children are inherently worth more than others? Ask students to defend their reasons for either agreeing or disagreeing with the ministers' view. You might like to suggest that, despite the Prime Minister's comments, it is not possible to completely separate the 'vital and practical questions' from the ethical ones. As we saw in the opening exercise, worldview and a person's sense of values will always influence the way people make moral decisions. Ask the students which of the six ethical worldviews from the What Should I Do? handout sheet seem to be influencing the government ministers in the clip. You could argue that in agreeing to sacrifice over 300,000 children to save the rest of the country, their thinking is influenced by utilitarian values. Alternatively, their willingness to guarantee the safety of their own children and grandchildren ahead of those of other people may indicate a degree of egoism or even emotivism (although some may argue that our emotions clearly tell us that it isn't right to give away thousands of children). SUMMARY / ASSESSMENT OF LEARNING 6. Ask the students whether they think that moral considerations are a help or a hindrance in making decisions like this. Are they a good thing because they stop people from logically deciding to write off hundreds of thousands of children, or a bad thing because they get in the way and stop people from behaving in a completely rational way? As a final exercise, which could be set as a homework task, ask the students to describe how they would approach a difficult moral decision. What factors would they take into account? Could their approach be described, to a greater or lesser extent, by one of the six ethical frameworks described on the worksheet? What place does a sense of right and wrong have in their decision making?
A copy of Torchwood: Children of Earth and the means to play it Decision Cards handouts, cut out and ready in advance of the lesson What Should I Do? Worksheets
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