ethics – Page 11 – dangermouse.net

If I could talk with the animals…

I spent most of today thinking about talking with animals. This is this week’s topic for my ethics/critical thinking class with the younger students. I spent time this morning writing the lesson plan and questions, and then had the first three classes tonight.

I introduce the topic by talking about Doctor Dolittle, and the fanciful way in which he learns to speak with animals. Then I go into discussing the experiments we have done with chimps like Washoe and subsequent research that has cast doubt on the initial optimistic early findings about ape intelligence and communication skills. I ask questions about the importance, relevance, and humaneness of such experiments.

And then I go into speculative mode and ask the kids questions about how our attitude to animals might change if we could communicate with them, and what we should do in various hypothetical scenarios in which we talk with animals. Should we continue eating cows and pigs and chickens if they could talk to us? If pet dogs and cats tell us they want their freedom, should we let them run free, or treat them more like children and confine them to keep them safe? If cockroaches could talk to us, should we still treat them as vermin to be exterminated? What would the world actually be like if suddenly we could communicate with animals?

In other items, I did a 2.5k run this morning. And baked the sourdough loaf I made last night and let rise overnight. It’s a special loaf with dried apricots, dates, and walnuts in it, by special request of my wife who likes a fruit and nut loaf now and then.

The weather has been glorious the past few days. Beautiful autumn weather, with cool mornings and evenings, and a pleasantly warm day in the middle – great weather to be out in, without being too hot. The deciduous trees are turning colours. We don’t have a lot – 99% of the trees around here are evergreen eucalyptus, ficus, bottlebrushes, wattles, banksias, and other native species. But there are dots of imported deciduous trees in places, and some are going lovely shades of red or yellow. I like the liquidambars the most, because of the vivid red leaves. The ginkgos are starting to go their beautiful butter yellow. Unfortunately there are also a lot of plane trees, which just go a dull brown colour and drop tons of leaves.

Oh, today is ANZAC Day too, so a public holiday here in Australia. It ends what I think of as the “public holiday season” – the four months from 25 December to 25 April contain 8 public holidays: Christmas, Boxing Day, New Year’s Day, Australia Day, Good Friday, Easter Sunday, Easter Monday, and ANZAC Day. The remaining 8 months of the year only have two holidays: The Queen’s Birthday (I guess the King’s Birthday this year for the first time in over 70 years) in June and Labour Day in October.

New content today:

Science fiction cloning

This morning I wrote my lesson plan for this weeks new topic of “Science fiction cloning”. And tonight I’ve run the first three lesson, which were a lot of fun. It’s a good topic for getting the kids engaged and interested, and there were some very interesting and diverse opinions on some of the questions. Some of the questions include:

Would you like it if there was another copy of you, who looked the same and had the same personality and memories?
If it were possible to create a copy of someone like this, would that be okay? Under what circumstances?
Should we clone people as backups (“extra lives”) before sending them into dangerous situations?
Would you feel okay taking a risk that could end up in your death if there was a perfect clone of you who could take your place if you died?
In a world where cloning was common, should originals and clones be treated the same, or differently?

The first one was very polarising. Some kids said it would be creepy and they wouldn’t like it at all. Others said it would be cool, they’d have someone like a new brother/sister to play with, and they’d like all the same things, so it would be great!

At lunch I took Scully for a long walk – she was really tired by the time we got home. Which was good, as she slept for much of the afternoon.

For dinner tonight I was inspired by a friend who made a roasted pumpkin, coconut, and ginger soup the other day. I improvised my own version, and it turned out very nice!

New content today:

The ethics of experts

It was chilly again today. We had a very sudden flip from hot summery weather to cold wintery weather in the space of about a week. Today really felt more like a winter day than autumn. There’s already been snow on the mountains. But at the same time we have a tropical cyclone threatening to hit Western Australia as a category 4 storm some time tomorrow. (That’s a very very long way from me, thankfully, and in a mostly uninhabited part of the country.)

Today was my first day back at teaching ethics online, after my COVID and Easter break. I still have a bit of a cough but it’s improving daily, and didn’t affect my classes too much this evening. Although it is definitely more of a problem when I’m speaking, rather than just sitting quietly. The topic for this week is “Trusting Experts”, and we examine the idea of what makes someone an expert and should we trust experts more than average people, and why. And also ponder why in some cases people, or governments especially, don’t trust expert advice.

I also spent some time doing part 2 of cleaning the kitchen, involving moving stuff around and cleaning underneath things, and so on. It’s all done now, and I feel much better abut it because it was long overdue, especially judging by some of the dust I found!

New content today:

Ethics of activism

This morning I went for a 2.5k run, while it was still cool and cloudy, before the sun burnt off the morning cloud cover. Then I had to make a new Darths & Droids comic – I’m working a bit close to the bone at the moment because of lack of time to build up any buffer, alas.

Then I had to work on writing my lesson plan for the older kids’ ethics topic this week, which is on Activism. I could have chosen many historical examples, but I chose to structure it around the campaign for women’s suffrage in the UK, as it included good examples of both peaceful and violent protests. I didn’t quite finish the lesson as I had other more urgent things. I need to get it done by 9am tomorrow, and if I don’t I’ll just have to wing the second half. I have plenty of questions, but need to come up with introductory passages for each question.

Oh, Scully had a haircut today! And is wearing her St Patrick’s Day bandana, ready for Friday.

New content today:

Ethics of archaeology

New ethics class week starts on Tuesday and this week we have the topic of Archaeology for the younger students. I spent this morning writing up the lesson plan. It was fairly easy, as I had a lot of questions and supporting background material based on Howard Carter and the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, the Lake Mungo fossils, and the Elgin Marbles. With three classes this evening I quickly found I had plenty of material, and didn’t get to cover it all. Which is good – much better than running out of material partway through a class, let me tell you.

It rained heavily this morning. I took Scully for a walk in what I thought would be a break in the rain at lunchtime, but it started raining moderately heavily a few minutes in and was steady throughout the remainder, so she was pretty wet by the time we got home. (I took an umbrella, but my shoes and socks were wet.)

Also today I booked the final hotels for our trip to Japan in June, in Kyoto and Tokyo. That’s everything booked in advance, so we can relax a bit now before departure.

New content today:

Another busy day…

Today I had to concentrate on writing a new lesson for the older kids ethics class – this week on the topic of artificial intelligence. There’s a lot of potential material for this topic and lots of discussion questions. I had plenty written out and had about a third of the questions left over after I’df fleshed the first 2/3 out with scenarios and information. So I have heaps of backup material if the classes run short, which I don’t think they will.

Did a 2.5k run this morning, and took Scully for a few walks. And…. oh! I had the 4th class of 6 in my current iteration of the board game design class. The student and I are converging on a design for a game involving players having various fantasy roles, and potentially involving families of vampires competing, or maybe witches and wizards… it’s a bit in flux still. I need to distil it into a workable game design by the weekend and send her the file and rules so she can playtest it with family ad friends before next week’s class.

New content today:

Ethics of offence

Tuesday means a new ethics topic for my online classes. I had to write my lesson this morning, since the past few days have been too busy to do it early. This week’s topic is “being offended”. I had plenty of questions to ask, and tied them together with some short scenarios, so managed to get the lesson written fairly quickly.

I took Scully for a few walks during the day. The weather is getting a little cooler, which is nice. This afternoon I assembled and uploaded the rest of this weeks Irregular Webcomic! strips. I’ve been working close to deadline on a number of things, after last week’s ISO meeting ate up so much time last week.

I’ve also started learning Japanese using Duolingo. I started German not long ago, but decided I should probably concentrate a bit more on Japanese, since I’ve also booked tickets to Japan in June, for the next ISO meeting, which will be held in Okayama. My wife and I will be flying into Haneda Airport in Tokyo and catching a Shinkansen down to Okayama for the meeting. Then we’re planning to spend a few days in Kyoto, and a couple in Tokyo before flying home. We also have time to stop off somewhere else along the way for a day or so, and I’m trying to find somewhere conveniently close to the Okayama-Kyoto-Tokyo Shinkansen line, that is not a big city, so we can see something a bit more rural and countryside-ish.

I wondered if Duolingo would just teach Japanese conversation and not bother with the written language, but no, the very first lesson throws hiragana at you! Which is good, because I could certainly do with learning those.

Tonight I had the first three classes on “being offended”. It’s very interesting seeing what examples of potentially offensive behaviour are in fact considered offensive or not by different students.

New content today:

Planning a lesson on UFOs

Today I wrote my lesson plan for an upcoming class (starting next week) on the topic of UFOs. This was a special request from one of my students. It’s definitely more a critical thinking topic than an ethics one, although I did manage to think of some ethical questions to ask, such as: Is it ethical of media to publish stories of UFO sightings? If they know most of them have mundane explanations?

I found some very interesting graphs to show to the kids, such as the ones in this article indicating UFO sightings peak in the northern hemisphere summer, and have been growing year by year since the 1960s (after an initial peak in the 1940s and 50s). And ones in this article indicating the global distribution of UFO sightings (hint: over 80% of all sightings are in the USA; less than 20% in the entire rest of the world). And then I’ll ask them what could explain these trends. it should be a very interesting class!

But today I started the topic on Lying. This is a retread of one of the first topics I did two years ago when I started the class. Since none of the same kids are still enrolled I’m able to rerun the topic. That saves me some time writing a new lesson plan (which I can spend writing classes for the older students…)

Last night I finished watching the movie Viking Wolf on Netflix. As the second Norwegian creature film I’ve watched recently, I rate it higher than Troll (2022), which was very formulaic. It’s not the best werewolf film I’ve seen, but I enjoyed it enough to recommend it.

New content today:

New pizza tray

It was a pretty bog-standard Monday. Three ethics classes, to wrap up the topic of Games with the younger students. One particular question that I asked was very interesting. It needs a bit of introduction to set up, and there were other questions I asked along the way, but I’ll condense it down to the essentials for the pertinent question:

Tegan, Josh, and Adele are playing a board game together. They roll dice and play cards and move pieces on the board, chatting and laughing while they play. At one point in the game, Tegan makes a really good move which forces Josh to lose a bunch of points.

Later, as the game nears the end, an interesting situation develops. All those points that Josh lost put him in last place, and he only has one turn left. He knows he can’t score enough points to win. Tegan is currently in the lead, and she will win the game… unless Josh uses his turn to steal points off her. If Josh does this, Adele will win the game. Or he can just try to score as many points as he can, in which case he’ll still come last and Tegan will win.

While Josh is thinking about what move to make, Adele sees that he can steal Tegan’s points. She says, “Josh, if you take her points and make me win, I’ll give you a chocolate bar!”

If you were Josh, how would you respond to Adele in this situation?

Most of the kids throughout the week said they’d accept the chocolate and steal Tegan’s points, letting Adele win the game. (One of the earlier questions asked if it was okay for Josh to steal Tegan’s points, and most said yes, because it’s within the rules of the game.) A few kids said that accepting the chocolate would be bad, because it’s bribery outside the game – there are no in-game rules for chocolate bars, so it shouldn’t be allowed, and Adele was bad for trying it.

But in all the classes I did this week, one kid said:

I’d turn to Tegan and say, “If you give me two chocolate bars, I won’t steal the points from you.”

Honestly I burst out laughing at that point. I thought it was a brutally honest and clever answer. One of the other kids in the same class said, “Ooh, start a bidding war!” It was a great moment.

The rest of my day was pretty standard. Took Scully for a couple of walks, got fish and chips for lunch, made a sourdough loaf, and also made pizza for dinner tonight. I tried using the brand new pizza baking tray I bought last week, so we have a second one, to enable me cooking multiple pizzas on Friday night when the guys come over for Dungeons & Dragons. Our first pizza tray has holes in the bottom, which allows heat to bake the crust from beneath, making it crisp. But I didn’t find any with holes, so this new one is a solid aluminium pan, and the pizza turned out with the base a lot less crisp. I considered a pizza stone, but they’re expensive and I didn’t want to start messing around with that. I’m wondering now how difficult it would be to drill some holes in the aluminium pan.

New content today:

Planning population growth

I slept in today, after getting up early yesterday after a slightly restless night. I did a 2.5k run as early as I could manage, which was after 9am. It was still cool enough, but sunny and warming up rapidly to another warm day.

I spent most of my time today writing a new ethics lesson plan for the older kids, on the topic of population growth. This required a bit of research, and grabbing some graphs to show to the kids. I learnt that in the year 10,000 BCE, the human population of the world is estimated to be around 4 million people, which is fewer than live in Sydney, which is only about the 100th most populated city on the planet.

I didn’t really do much else today… Cooked an Indian style curry with eggplant and paneer for dinner. Um. Yeah…

New content today: