LIFEBOAT ACTIVITY PROFESSIONAL

She co-authored the textbook Philosophy in Education: Questioning and Dialogue in Schools (2016) and co-edited the collection of essays Philosophy and Education: Introducing Philosophy to Young People (2012). Jana is the author of Seen and Not Heard (2021) and The Philosophical Child (2012). Jana Mohr Lone is the director and founder of the University of Washington Center for Philosophy for Children, an academic research center dedicated to research and practice in philosophy for children and philosophy of childhood, and she is an Affiliate Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington. I suppose with a great, sensitive teacher, the exercise can provoke good discussions, but the children should not come out of it believing that there is a right, 'ethical' choice here. Is it 'ethical' to chose the homeless person as the one who should die? What I mean by futility is that I believe that in such a situation, should it ever, God forbid, happen in real life, the decision will most likely not be based on rational deliberations, as 'life is far from the improbable thought experiment which neutralizes the fear of death to a calmly ponderable idea', as T.W.

The moment you pitch lives against each other in that way, you go down a very slippery path.

LIFEBOAT ACTIVITY PROFESSIONAL

I think what bothers me here is that the way that it is set up, with two lines about each person's age, family and professional situation, it implies that this information is what determines the 'right' answer - who should be sacrificed and who should be saved. I strongly believe that these thought experiments should have no other point than to prove their own futility. The fact that in the setup, the homeless person is also the oldest, and has no family, seems to push the outcome in a given direction which, again, profoundly bothers me. It seems to me that such exercises should be handled with extreme caution, or avoided entirely, lest a 'hierarchy' of lives based on one's contribution to the economy and one's life choices or absence of choice (the homeless person didn't have a family, but maybe she was the beloved friend of some lonely people who were highly dependent on her?) is subreptitiously reinforced. The lines of the children as they impersonate the people in the boat are touching, and one could say that they come up with the best possible solution, but isn't the problem that there is no good solution? Shouldn't the focus of this exercise, if it is really carried out, be that it is nearly impossible to to put a value on somebody's life, let alone to rank it against others? Of course, I wasn't there and didn't hear the conversations, but the fact that the homeless person was 'sacrificed' (and wanted to sacrifice herself) triggers all sorts of unconfortable questions in my head. I just read this post, and I admit that I'm extremely disturbed by the exercise.

Lifeboat activity