Category Archives: Ethics

A Back Door into Fairness

05 Tuesday Nov 2013

Posted by in Ethics, Philosophy of love, Relational Ethics

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“The man who just came in the back door, why don’t you come around to the front of the streetcar like everyone else,” a transit driver recently said over the vehicle’s announcement system.

The driver repeated this statement several times, each time with a growing sense of irritation. I glanced up to see that a man on crutches and wearing nothing more than flip-flops and socks on a chilly November day had come on the back.

“I have a transfer” the man told the driver, and given that he was on crutches, it would have been much easier to go through the vehicle to show the driver rather than to hobble back down the stairs, go around the vehicle outside, and then get back on again. It’s worth mentioning, moreover, that generally speaking, transit drivers in Toronto are inconsistent about whether or not people can get on by the back doors. Some insist and invite people with passes and transfers to use the back door, others yell at people for this. So it’s not even necessarily the case that the man should have known better.

And yet, the transit driver insisted.

“Driver, he’s on crutches!” I called out from the back of a packed vehicle, having, I suppose, lost all sense of decorum in my old age. Just in case there was any room to doubt that I was a crazy lady screaming to herself on public transit, I repeated myself even more loudly a second time. Meanwhile, the poor man had obeyed the driver, and gingerly made his way down the steps, around the vehicle up and back up the steps. Yes, he had a transfer after all.

While the driver’s obstinate jackassery might be of some interest, what caught my attention was his emphasis on fairness. “Come through the front door like everyone else,” he said over and over. ‘This, right here is the problem with an inflexible principalist forms of ethics!’ I thought to myself. The thing is, no one is “just like everyone else.” When one is so concerned about treating everyone in an identical fashion that they lose sight of this fact, the end result doesn’t come out looking very fair at all. A one-size-fits all conception of justice that fails to recognize particularity, so as to better accommodate persons’ individualized needs is both sterile and potentially harmful. For no one in that man’s position should have been humiliated that way, and forced as he was to hobble around that streetcar as he did.

Interestingly, however, at the time I merely stared out the window embarrassed, my face flushed and wondering if I was nuts for speaking up, and calling out for compassion for another like that so publicly. Fortunately, a lady leaned in towards me to say incredulously “the driver saw the crutches,” which helped to reassure me somewhat that I wasn’t just being a cantankerous old broad. In spite of her dismissing the entire episode as what she described as a “power trip” her words also gave me hope that more generally speaking, there are some out there who realise that treating others well does not mean treating them all the same.

Jerry Springer hosts Hippolytus: some pedagogical reflections

14 Saturday Apr 2012

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Education, Ethics, Philosophy, Teaching

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There are certain parallels between Jerry Springer and Greek tragedy.

Unless my students have laughed out loud at least once, I typically consider my tutorials an abject failure. It’s not that I’m the funny guy or anything, rather, I try to induce laughter by design. That is, I usually try to devise something that is interactive while also encouraging students to take small social risks. Such risks, combined with an attendant air of giddiness and excitement, is such that students eventually make each other laugh. One of my favorites for creating this type of mood is my newly minted Jerry Springer activity, and, believe it or not, it’s got some demonstrated pedagogical value to it as well. Janice Rehner’s “Practical Strategies for Critical Thinking” inspired this activity which takes around 1.5 hours from set-up to finish. I use it to encourage students to look at a complex issue from various points of view and thereby enriching their perspective. Most recently I applied it to Euripides’ play Hippolytus, but, with enough imagination, it can be adapted for use with most moral issues.

In the play Hippolytus Aphrodite instigates a complicated plot to punish the young virginal man who gives the play its name. The goddess of love is miffed because Hippolytus not only fails to give her her due, but actively shuns her in favour of that uptight virgin-loving tomboy Artemis. A large number of characters play a role in the tragedy that unfolds, and all will have various degrees of culpability for the eventual death of Hippolytus and his stepmother Phaedra. (spoiler alert!). Aphrodite made the poor woman fall in love with her unresponsive stepson, such that Phaedra kills herself to avoid shaming her family.

Anyway, you get the picture, it’s a complicated plot but with just enough characters to make oh say, 5 or 6 groups, while assigning one character to each group. The first thing I do when I get to class however, is play a clip from Springer to confuse the students and set the mood. I love confusing my students for short periods as I believe that confusion is an essential state for learning, plus it’s just fun to watch the expressions on their faces.

After assigning a character to each group I explain that we’ll be recreating the Jerry Springer Show using the cast of Hippolytus. “Really get into character!” I tell them, “be Aphrodite!” Each character will go onto the show, pick out the character/s they blame most for what happened, and give these wrong-doers the ‘what-for.’ In other words students work together to draft up statements that they read when they confront the character/s they blame the most. What becomes evident through the course of the show, is that the nature of the tragedy will differ from each character’s perspective. For instance, Phaedra and her loving nurse are going to be much more upset about what happens to Phaedra and won’t be apt to care all that much that Hippolytus comes to such a violent end. Moreover, different characters will each have their own unique set of bones to pick with other characters.

After each character makes his or her statement groups reconvene and work to come up with responses to the allegations made against them. By now students will have warmed up to the activity and we start to see them acting the part a bit more and here is where you start to laughter breaking out. I don’t actually make them get up and act things out or anything (but, I wouldn’t stop them if they chose to do so!).

As I noted earlier, this activity has demonstrated pedagogical value. The reason I chose Hippolytus for this was that students had to write a paper answering the question “who is to blame for the tragedy in Hippolytus.” The trick to this paper is not only to identifying the main culprit/s, but also adequately describing the nature of the tragedy (a lot of students seem to forget that Phaedra dies in this story). According to one TA, typically in the past he ends up getting a pile of generic papers blaming the most obvious candidate: Aphrodite. Interestingly, when I got my students’ papers, only a couple picked out Aphrodite as the prime suspect. Admittedly, it became a problem because there were some who failed to even mention her role. But at least they were encouraged to examine the issue from different angles which I would say is a great start on the road to critical thinking.