Lesson Plans - we should post as many as possible here as a reference

Examples of Some Possible Trolley Problems

Standard Trolley: Forked track, switch, 1 person v 5 people

Consequence Ignorance: Same. But [thinks that he has made the train kill the 5/was just messing around].

Footbridge: Straight track, [person/person strapped to a rock/yourself] v 5 People.

Means Ignorance: Press a button which you are told will stop the train by dropping a non-specified object. The object is a [man/rock].

Diversion: Switch diverts train on to alternative route temporarily. On the diversion there is a [rock/a man/a-rock-with-a-man] that would stop the train.

Looped Track: Diversion on to longer loop which gives time to free 5, kills 1.

Consequences, unbreakable rules, whether we can use people as a means, side-effects …brilliant! Keeping it fairly simple.

Kids will undoubtedly want to talk about “What if it was [Mum/Hitler”. This is okay and legitimate, but we shouldn’t let the whole conversation be around this.

Overall project is to get the kids to think about what factors in their reasoning about ethical issues, and perhaps most importantly we should get them to ask whether they SHOULD reason about trolley problems in any particular way.

Plan

We will introduce a few problems.
We will judge whether it is better to split the class or not.
We will use the interesting problems to move intuitions around a bit/get discussion going.
Little bit of a, “what you have been doing is philosophy,” schpeel.
Little bit of a, “would you like to do this a bit more,” interrogation.

Super!