Tag: ethics

International ethics of fighting

First though: there was no rain today! 😃

The ground outside was very soggy though. I took Scully for a big walk at lunch. It was good to get out and into the fresh air after being cooped up against the elements for so long.

This morning I had my first lesson on the current ethics topic of “Fighting” with kids in American time zones. Most of my classes are in the afternoon or early evening, and attended by kids from Australia or Asia (in similar time zones) or Europe (where it’s morning there). Those classes are in the middle of the night in American time zones. My opening story is about the Burr-Hamilton duel, and the first question I ask is: “Is it okay for two people to agree to have a fight?” (I don’t specify with or without weapons – those are follow-up questions.) The kids from Australia and Asia and Europe have almost all said it’s not okay; people can get hurt or killed, and it’s better to solve an argument by talking.

This morning I had a class at 9am, which is afternoon/early evening in American time zones, and so I had my first batch of kids from the USA in this class for this topic, three of them. I was slightly taken aback when every single one said that it was fine if two people agreed to fight one another. And when I pressed and asked if it was okay if they fought with weapons, they all continued to say it was okay; they agreed, they knew what they were getting into and the dangers, there was nothing wrong with that.

It’s small number statistics, but I’m amazed by the clean split in opinions between non-American and American kids on this question.

The theme continues with other questions: “Is it okay to defend yourself if you get attacked? To try to hurt your attacker to get them to stop?” Almost all the kids so far said yes. But when I asked: “Is it okay to defend yourself with a deadly weapon, like a knife or a gun?” all of the Aus/Asian/European kids said either outright no, or yes but you shouldn’t try to kill them – you could shoot in the air to scare them off, or shoot a limb, but not shoot to kill. However, all of the American kids said if you’re attacked it’s absolutely fine to shoot and kill your attacker. One went so far as to add that you should be praised as a hero for doing so.

So yeah… this theme continued throughout the whole class. The American kids were much more comfortable with the idea of fighting, and of solving things with violence. Again, small numbers, but there are obvious statements that could be made about this. I’ll be interested to see what happens when I have more American kids in this class on Monday morning.

New content today:

Not so rainy day

The rain eased off a bit today and we had intermittent showers, although it rained heavily overnight. Sydney is well on track to record its wettest year since rainfall records began. We’ve recorded 1768.6 mm since the start of 2022, and the wettest year ever recorded was 2194 mm in 1950. We’re barely halfway through the year, so if the second half is similar to the first we could potentially end up with over 3000 mm.

A new week of ethics classes started today. I wrote up the new topic: Fighting. I’m asking the kids questions such as:

  • Is getting into a fight ever justified?
  • If two people agree to have a fight, should it be allowed? With fists? With weapons?
  • Is it okay to carry a dangerous weapon, for the sole reason of self defence?
  • Are combat sports like boxing or mixed martial arts, where the goal is to actually hurt your opponent, okay or not?

I think this is a good topic, as it’s generated some interesting and diverse answers in the first three classes tonight!

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Back to ethics and games

I got a bit more sleep last night, but didn’t sleep through, waking up for a couple of hours in the middle of the night. I think one more night should reset my body clock to the right time zone.

So I was still quite tired today. But I had the first two ethics classes, restarting my teaching after my trip. It was little a bit of a struggle against yawning, but not too bad once I got into the material.

And tonight was face-to-face games night with friends. We did COVID tests before going there – all negative. I picked up some Thai green curry chicken from the Thai place near where we used to work, since the hots lives near there. It’s the best Thai place I know, and I seldom get to eat there any more, so it’s a special treat when I can.

Four of us played some casual Apples to Apples while waiting for the fifth player to arrive. Then we played a new game: Nusfjord.

Nusfjord

This is a worker placement/action selection game played over 7 rounds of 3 actions for each player. There are several actions you can select, involving gaining various resources: fish, wood, gold; building ships or buildings; recruiting village elders; and issuing shares in your fishing business or buying shares in others people’s fishing businesses. The buildings, ships, and gold are worth points at the end of the game.

Unfortunately I made a critical mistake in interpreting the rules and wasted about a dozen fish on one turn that I thought I had planned out, which set me back a lot. Another player also made a similar mistake, and we ended up on significantly fewer points than the other three players. Oh well… first game is always a learning game! It was fun – I’d definitely try it again.

New content today:

Starting ethics of employment

Today I started my new ethics topic: Employment. I made the following diagram, showing how many hours Alice, Bob, and Carol work at the same travel agency, and how many customer bookings they make in a typical week:

Alice, Bob, and Carol's work

Alice gets paid $1000 a week for her work. I asked the kids in the first three classes tonight how much Bob and Carol should be paid.

Most kids said Bob should be paid $500, since he’s only doing half the work (despite the fact he’s working the same hours). A couple said a bit more than $500, two said $750. Exactly one said that he should be paid $1000, as long as he’s actually working the whole time and not just goofing off. Maybe he’s just a slower worker, but if he’s putting the time in he deserves the same pay.

Most kids thought Carol should be paid $1000. Two of them actually argued she should be paid more than that, because she’s doing the same work as Alice, but doing it more efficiently so she deserves more.

This is kind of a very simple toy example, but it was enough to get the kids thinking. I pointed out afterwards that there’s no one “right” answer, and in real employment situations things are more complex because people are doing different mixes of different tasks and they will all have different skills. So deciding what’s fair pay for everyone is not easy.

In trip preparation, today we got the suitcases out of storage. We’re starting to put aside things we know we want to pack. We’ll be packing bags on Thursday, because Friday morning will be busy dropping Scully off at a friend’s place for petsitting, before we return home and then head straight to the airport.

And also today I’ve been churning through generating enough comics and annotations to last through the trip.

New content today:

Ending ethics of ghosts

I finished the Ghosts topic with my online ethics classes today. It was a very interesting and fun topic to discuss with the kids. When asked if people’s spirits should go on to the afterlife or whatever happens after we die as is natural, or if it’s okay for a spirit to hang around on Earth as a ghost, about half thought being a ghost was okay, while half thought it was unnatural and people should just do the normal, expected thing when they die. But when I turned the question around and asked what they would prefer to do if they died, nearly all of them said they’d like to stay on Earth as a ghost.

A surprising question to me was when I asked them the following scenario: You’re a police detective investigating a murder, but you have no clues or evidence or suspects. It looks like you’re not going to find the killer. But then the victim’s ghost appears to you one night in your home, and tells you they saw the person who murdered them. They tell you the name of the murderer. What do you do with this information?

A few kids said they’d arrest the named person, a few said they’d start looking for evidence, maybe search that person’s home. But what surprised me was that most of the kids said the ghost’s testimony was essentially worthless, because they could be lying.

A divisive question was about people who claim to be clairvoyants, and “pass messages” from dead loved ones to people – people who pay the clairvoyant money to contact them. If the client believes that the clairvoyant is contacting their dead loved ones, and so gains comfort from this, is it ethical for the clairvoyant to pretend to be able to do this? And charge money for it?

Most of the kids had a tough time thinking about this one. Most eventually concluded that helping the client was a good thing, even if it was done through deception. But if the clairvoyant charged money for this, then they were taking advantage. Essentially it was okay to do it for free, but not to charge money for it. Although a good fraction of the kids thought it was outright bad to lie to people about this, even if it made them feel better.

New content today:

Ethics of human rights

It’s Tuesday, which means a new topic in my online ethics classes. This week we started on human rights. I spent this morning writing the lesson. I’m using a summarised version of Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas as the introductory story to set up the discussion. (You kind of need to know the story to understand the following, so if you don’t know it, either go spoil yourself at the linked Wikipedia article, or ignore the next paragraph.)

After summarising the story, I asked: Is the city of Omelas fair to everyone? Most of the kids this evening gave the predictable, expected answer (“No”), after which I ask them to explain why they think so. But one kid said: “Well, it depends how they pick the kid. If someone just walks down the street and picks a kid they see, then that’s not fair. But if it’s done by spinning a wheel or something, then that’s fair.” I pursued this further by asking if it was fair in the sense that everyone is treated the same? The kid said, “Well… you could make it fair if the kid was released after a month or so, and they used a different kid. So everyone would have a turn being the one who has to suffer.”

The weather here has taken a very wintry turn. Yesterday evening we had a storm front come through with 110 km/h winds, causing some minor damage across the city. Today has been very windy and bone-chillingly cold. Tomorrow is expected to be even colder and with stronger winds. Across parts of south-east Australia we’ve had snow down to altitudes as low as 600 metres, which is unusual. The good news is that there hasn’t been much rain.

In other news, our electric kettle seems to have broken. That’ll be annoying until we can get a new one. We’ll have to boil water to make tea on the stove, like savages…

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It’s good teaching kids

This morning I started a new topic with my face-to-face ethics class at the local school. We’re doing a few weeks on the topic of human rights, although much of the material actually concerns the question of whether animals such as chimpanzees should have at least some of the same rights as humans. We started today talking about past use of chimps in medical and other experiments.

I continue to be impressed by how good this class of kids is. I haven’t had any behaviour problems with them more serious than them fiddling wth pens or rulers or something while listening. Today’s discussion got fairly lively, but not out of control, as the kids were eager to share their views, and built on what others were saying. It was overall a really good session with them.

And tonight I had three more online classes with the language topic, which is really fun too. One of the fun questions is asking them about emojis: Is it okay to use emojis when texting a friend? Would it be okay if an author used emojis in a novel? Almost all of the kids say the first is fine, and even has advantages because you can express emotions that are difficult to show otherwise in text. But on the other hand, almost all of them said that putting emojis in a novel would be terrible and shouldn’t be done. Their reasons were mostly that a novel is meant to be “serious” and emojis aren’t appropriate.

Although interestingly there were one or two kids who were at either extreme as well. One said that emojis shouldn’t be used ever—not even in text messages—because there’s potential for misunderstanding. And a couple said that emojis in novels would be fine, but they did balk when I pressed further and asked if emojis should appear in newspapers, or government reports, or scientific research papers.

New content today:

Thinking critically about language

Today I wrote my lesson for this week’s ethics classes. It’s more of a critical thinking class, rather than ethics, about language. A sample:

In our world there are many different languages, around 6000-7000, depending on how you count them. Some languages like Spanish and Italian are closely related, and speakers of one are able to understand a bit of the other language. Some like English and Japanese are totally different, and can’t be understood at all by a speaker of the other unless a person learns them.

• What sort of problems are caused by different languages?
• What advantages are there to having many different languages?
• Is it good that there are many languages, or would the world be better if there was just one language?

…

Words change meaning over time. Not too long ago, the word “literally” meant something that actually happened. But now it’s common to hear people say things like, “I literally died laughing”. They don’t mean they really died – in fact they mean the opposite, that they didn’t really die. Some people get upset that people are using the word to mean a completely different thing.

• Is it okay that people start to use words to mean new things that they didn’t mean before?
• Is there a “right” way and a “wrong” way to use language, or does it not matter as long as people can understand you?

I ran the first three classes tonight and it’s a really fun topic, with a lot of really interesting and varied comments from the kids.

At lunch today I took Scully out for a walk. We stopped at a Vietnamese place where I got a pancake stuffed with bean spouts, pork, and prawns, served with mounds of fresh salad. It was really good, and possibly even healthy.

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More busy, but stuff achieved

I think this is just generally a busy week. I’m squeezing in some of my usual activities, and today managed to bake bread, go for a 2.5k run, make some comics, cook vegetable soup for dinner, do some planning for my upcoming trip to Europe, walk Scully a bit, run three online ethics classes, and do my face-to-face Primary Ethics class at the local school.

The face-to-face class this morning was the final one in the topic on Challenging Authority, and it concentrated on the story of Rosa Parks, which some of the children were familiar with. (I should point out that American history is not really taught in Australian schools – they get Australian history instead, naturally. So I didn’t really expect any of the kids to have heard of Rosa Parks.) It was a very interesting discussion, and most of the kids were clearly very engaged with the topic. I continue to be impressed (and amazed) at how well behaved my class is this year. In my 6 years of teaching this, I’d say this is probably the best behaved class I’ve ever had.

The apple pie I made the other is mostly eaten, and is very nice both cold, and also reheated.

Oh, if you weren’t aware, there’s a federal election coming up here in Australia on Saturday. We’re being bombarded with campaign advertising and it’s starting to get annoying, but it’ll all be over soon.

New content today:

Super incredibly busy day

So busy I don’t really have time to post much. I spent a lot of time looking for hotels and train trips and making bookings, for our trip to Europe at the end of June. That meant a squeeze on my time for everything else I wanted to get done today, which also included writing my new ethics class for this week, and teaching the first three classes. We’re doing “Buying & Selling part 2” this week – a follow-up to a class I did last year, which had so much material that a second class could be done with all new material. I in fact wrote close to two lesson’s worth of new stuff, so I’ve split some out into a part 3 which I can do later in a few weeks time.

And there was a bunch of necessary housecleaning and dog walking and stuff. And I’m tired and need to relax this evening…

New content today: