ETHICS INSTRUCTIONS!

 
1. Go to K:\Staff_To_Students\IB Subjects\Core\TOK\Trolleyology and find the audio podcast entitled "Trolleyology 1". Listen to this podcast carefully, making some notes as you go along.
 
2. Go to the blog site and look for the thread corresponding to your particular TOK teacher. Read the contribution made by your teacher (and those made by other students who may have got there before you). Participate by adding your own contributions.
 
3. When your teacher gives you the go ahead, go back to to find the podcast "Trolleyology 2" and listen to that. Discussion will continue on the same threads on the blog - continue to make your contributions.
 
Although you may well wish to make contributions that add a new direction to the interaction, please remember that it is a "conversation" that we want - in other words, you should try to take what other people have written and move the discussion onward - by agreeing, disagreeing, developing, etc., always with justifications.
 
At the end of this event, you will be required to compose a blog tracker like the ones you made last year, and your quantity and quality of involvement will be assessed.
 
We are very excited by the possibilities of this event. Let's work hard to make them real. Good luck to us all.

Mr. Oduro

Is denying someone medicine that might save their life because the drugs are very expensive and the person is old the same as killing him or her? If not, what is the difference? 

Mrs. Hutchful

In which situations do our emotions assist/inhibit moral decisions?

Mr. Kamau

What position will you take, push the fat man, and save the five lives, or leave the fat man and let the trolley run over the five people?  What are some of the reasons for your choice?

Mr. Kidane

1.     In the program it says that during the WWII the British fooled the Germans into bombing suburban areas in order to spare Central London. In what ways can we say Churchill acted morally right?  

Mr. Kitching

Hi everyone,
What a fascinating programme! I was struck very particularly by one of the 8-year-old girls interviewed at just after 17 minutes on the first podcast. She said, in response to the “transplant problem”:
“I think that you should do it, but it’s not right, but… it’s right at the same time...”
Listen and think about the situation with which she was presented – I think actually she gave a rather a smart answer. What do you think she was trying to say?

semester grades

Dear Students,

This message is to provide a little clarification about grading in our TOK course so that you fully understand what you have been awarded and can use that as a benchmark for the improvements you are going to make next academic year! Try to think of the assessment not as an end in itself but as a way of measuring the quality of your thinking about what you know. In the end, the really important thing about TOK is broadening of your intellectual horizons, not the letters in the boxes. But wouldn't you feel proud if your achievements were recognized in a public manner with a grade A?

As you know, TOK is graded on an A-E scale:

A = excellent work
B = good work
C = satisfactory work
D = mediocre work
E = elementary work

Now this semester (and next semester), this grade will be mainly determined by the scores you achieve in a presentation (out of 20) and in an essay (out of 40). This semester, it is the TOK Weekend presentation and the essay you are now receiving back that will count. Next semester it will be your final presentation and final essay. The most important thing is that you learn from your experiences this semester in both of these components so that what your work next semester is the very best quality you can produce.

Grade A is reserved for the very best work, and therefore a substantial achievement when awarded. You would need a total of 48 (out of 60) or more for this. For a B, it would be at least 38, and a C at least 29. Then we take into account your relationship to this blog and consider raising the grades of those students who who provide high quality contributions. In quite a number of cases, we have done so.

Let's keep the conversations going. The great advantage of this medium is that we don't need to start and stop according to any school timetable. I will try to put some things up during the vacation. When we return in August, we will find some new ways to use this blog for learning, so watch out for that!

a conviction in malawi

We will shortly be turning our attention in this course to the field of ethics, and we will need to examine how people should and do employ reason to arrive at moral judgements. Here is a story that is "breaking news" today:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/africa/10121618.stm

The judge convicted the couple on the grounds that what they were doing was "against the order of nature". Leaving aside for now what he might have meant by that, consider the following:

What OTHER moral claims could be made that would (a) support the conviction, or (b) help to overturn it? In more general terms, what grounds are there for condemning or accepting the actions of a couple such as this?

Each reply to this thread should include at least one example of each please! I don't want your personal judgement on the matter; I want you to identify the grounds that could be invoked on either side. We want to get beyond instant opinions in order to access the premises and assumptions that lie at their roots.

statistics and the world

Here is a thoughtful article about the relation between mathematics (statistics, really) and empirical data about the world:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/magazine/16FOB-WWLN-t.html

What does this imply about mathematical knowledge?

learning history in texas

Here's the link:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/16/texas-schools-rewrites-us-history

What are the purposes of history and how might they affect its production and use? To what extent are historians themselves responsible for this, do you think?

what do you believe is true even though you can't prove it?

Some of you might be interested in articles found at http://www.edge.org/.

At the end of each year, prominent academics are asked for their response to a question. That question in 2005 was:

What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?

Here are some of the responses offered:

1. that all human languages have a common origin
2. that extra-terrestrial life exists
3. that consciousness does not survive death
4. that Homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthal Man) became extinct because Homo sapiens (our ancestors) ate them
5. that there is moral progress
6. that some works of art have eternal value
7. that most ideas taught in first-year undergraduate Economics courses are wrong
8. that neuroscience will never fully explain the nature of thought
9. that the Riemann hypothesis is true
10. that animals have feelings

Pick one or two of the items on this list and suggest (a) why it is difficult to establish that they are true, and (b) what methods we might nevertheless try in order to do so.

prescribed essay titles

Well, you will be getting back your semester essays immediately after the forthcoming examination period, and it is usual for us to turn our attention at that stage to the prescribed title list for the year. But, considering all the discussions going on at the moment, I think it might focus our minds a little if we had these titles at the back of our minds now. So here they are:

1. Consider the extent to which knowledge issues in ethics are similar to those in at least one other area of knowledge.
2. How important are the opinions of experts in the search for knowledge?
3. “Doubt is the key to knowledge” (Persian Proverb). To what extent is this true in two areas of knowledge?
4. To what extent do we need evidence to support our beliefs in different areas of knowledge?
5. To what extent are the various areas of knowledge defined by their methodologies rather than their content?
6. “There are no absolute distinctions between what is true and what is false”. Discuss this claim.
7. How can we recognise when we have made progress in the search for knowledge? Consider two contrasting areas of knowledge.
8. “Art is a lie that brings us nearer to the truth” (Pablo Picasso). Evaluate this claim in relation to a specific art form (for example, visual arts, literature, theatre).
9. Discuss the roles of language and reason in history.
10. A model is a simplified representation of some aspect of the world. In what ways may models help or hinder the search for knowledge?

general comment

Dear All,

It is great that this blog has become so active in recent days. Some of your comments are extremely interesting and worthy of further exploration.

I just wanted to make a general observation at this point. It is similar to something I wrote earlier but that is down at the foot of some thread and may not be read by everyone.

As some of us said last week in class, successful TOK is a marriage between students and teachers (yes, yes - I know, that doesn't sound too attractive!). Students bring real life experiences and opinions about knowledge issues, along with the youthful energy to think about and discuss them in a lively manner; teachers bring established ideas and approaches to these knowledge issues so that discussion is rooted in the intellectual activities of humanity as a whole.

We do not expect you to agree with all of the ideas that we contribute in class (indeed you couldn't because some are contradictory positions); what we do hope is that you will engage with them and not ignore them. This is because they are often well-thought-out positions adopted by eminent scholars and are therefore worthy of respect. That was the purpose of the little "test" we gave you in class last week - to see whether you have been keeping up to date with our side of the bargain.

So, for example, a question such as "what is language?" on the thread below is not a "bolt from the blue" requiring your thinking from first principles but a question to which we can relate previously introduced class material. You might disagree with some these respectable ideas, and that is fine (as long as you try to support what you think) because that is also a form of engagement. Engagement with the whole of TOK is the key.

Looking forward to many further interesting contributions.

language

Many students who wrote their TOK essay on the title on language considered all sorts of communication as language. But is every mode of communication language? Can we say animals have language? A painting communicates ideas and expresses emotion; is a painting language? What should our definition of language be?

4'33''

Since we are talking about the arts at the moment, we might do well to think beyond the visual arts for interesting examples. Like music...

The composer John Cage produced a piece in 1952 called 4'33'', which consists of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of... well, the performer sitting at a piano and doing nothing except opening it at the beginning and closing it at the end (actually there are supposed to be three "movements").

As you can imagine, some people were outraged by such a piece of "music". They thought it was a "con", or a joke or a hoax. But let us not be totally dismissive at the start - what about some of the characteristics of art that you identified in your lessons last week? Would it be possible to comment on this example using any of them? Let's try and see if we can get anywhere.