Teacher's Guide - Class Planning Guide

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The Contract
Part 1 - [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] | Part 2 - [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] | Part 3 - [12[13] [14] [15]

The pedagogical aim of this chapter is to make the students consider seriously the idea that you can get clearer about moral issues by thinking and arguing. Positions much weaker than a full moral rationalism will allow thought to grip morality, of course. But moral rationalism is easily understood and relates clearly to the rationalistic epistemology of the previous chapter. An obstacle here is a use of a naïve moral relativism that students will use more as a protection against disturbing thoughts than out of real conviction. I think the best attitude to it is gentle ironical subversion - you don't really think that, do you? - rather than frontal assault. Plato is valuable here because his ideas are challengingly alien while every now and then hitting a note that seems just intuitively right.

Chapter 4 - Comments on Sections

4.1 This should be a quick and not very challenging read that students can easily get through before class. It is followed up by two actitivity-based sections, 4.2. and 4.3. Either would be adequate, though I have listed the longer 4.3 as essential because it touches more central questions. (But if you are doing only one, it makes a big difference which one you find more interesting.)

4.2 The crucial point in doing this activity is to make sure that the differences between the claims (1) to (4) are vivid. The Rama and Sitta questions are meant to do this, but you may need to dwell on the issue, and you may prefer other ways of doing it. There are two main connections with moral rationalism. First, that the most natural candidate for an a priori moral principle needs to be carefully formulated: there are lots of choices. (The same would happen with arithmetic or geometry or set theory.) Second, that when you think about even the simplest moral principle in an abstract way you move into confusion, from which you can emerge in a very different place.

There is also a point about philosophical method here. If you don't focus hard on what an assertion literally says, you run it together with similar claims which can have quite different consequences. A "Chinese whispers" activity can bring this out: one person whispers a simple but syntactically indirect sentence into the ear of another - "the only necessary people are good people," for example - who whispers it into the ear of another, and so on for four or five more. Then each says what she heard: they tend to be logical as well as phonetic variants of the original.

4.3 This is a big activity and will take a whole class session. It would be best if the students had read it in advance to make the material somewhat familiar. Working through the activity is straightforward though. You shouldn't hurry; everything that needs to be explained or discussed along the way should be, and it is better to take two classes to get through it than to force it. The important moment comes at "Political Arithmetic" when the justice-inducing force of the various factors is assessed. I expect that imbalance of power and proportion in the bottom group will come out as decreasing justice and voluntariness and social mobility will come out as increasing justice. Resentment of inequality is a less predictable factor. I would guess that reactions to it are very sensitive to the background of the students. In any case, students are less likely to agree about it than the others. Consensuses and disagreements should be noted, and the possibilities for thinking out moral/political issues noted.

Disagreements are likely about the relevance of resentment and of social mobility. Does it make a society less unjust if few notice or mind (consider the position of women in a traditional patriarchy)? Does it make a society less unjust if by hard work and a bit of luck more able people can get status and goods that their initial positions denied them (but what about the less energetic or less talented)? Discuss these for their own sake, only making the methodological point about moral rationalism as a kind of a footnote.

Sophisticated students will want to distinguish between injustice and other ways a society can be flawed. Keep this distinction in mind as a possible diagnosis for disagreements that are not being clearly articulated.

The directions in the text presuppose that you have a large class which is divided into smaller groups. It is clear what to do and what to omit if the class is functioning as one group.

4.4 This section and the next are about Plato's Republic, a topic that you could skip. But I would advise doing them, in order to show how one famous philosopher did hope to do ethics by pure reason. They thus link closely to 4.3, on the topic of justice. The design of institutions is an obvious entry point for ideas about reason in ethics. 4.4 is a purely textual section; it is meant to be read for a class in which 4.5 is worked through.

4.5 This will take a whole class period. (Or more. Again, let it take what it needs.) The students will have to read through the passages from Plato in class, even if they have looked through them in advance. The activity directed at claims (1) to (6) is one that you can approach very directly with any group. It might be best to begin with eliminating the claims classified as C: not conclusions of the passage. (4) and (6) should appear as non-conclusions: (4) because Glaucon's argument, that in his thought experiment the just person would behave unjustly, presupposes that there is a difference between just and unjust, and (6) because Glaucon thinks that in normal conditions there is a motive for acting justly (but it is a self-interested motive). Sorting out the remaining four claims into (A) and (B) is harder. As I read the passage, the A-claims, the main conclusions, are (2) and (5), and the B-claims, the more incidental ones, are (1) and (3). For (1) and (3) appear as conclusions of subarguments leading to (2) and (5). Some students may read the passage differently, and you should ask them what structure they think the argument as a whole has. (The question should make sense to them from chapter 2.)
The suggestion in the text of putting the classification in a table and comparing results is best done very quickly, just to see if there is a lot of disagreement between individuals. If there is, you will have to go carefully through the points made just now.

If the class is going to take two sessions to work through this section, a natural place to break is between this activity and the following one, based on a different passage.

The second activity of this section also centers on a passage from the Republic. This one argues for a much less intuitively natural conclusion, though one that Plato himself is suggesting rather than rejecting. The activity does not involve structuring the argument in the passage, but rather considering three arguments that roughly fit it, and comparing them. You will need enough time for the class to read and digest all three (or you could do just the first two). Of the objections (a) to (e), I would say that (b) and (d) are relevant to (ii), (c) is relevant to (i), and (e) is relevant to (iii). (a) is a dummy, relevant to none of them, stuck in to make sure everyone is awake.

The fact that, though the arguments have the same conclusion, they are vulnerable to different objections should be pointed out as generally important. (There can be crappy arguments for true conclusions.)
To my mind the third argument, the most elaborate, is the nearest to being convincing. But you should be able to get some respect for all of them, and for Plato's general line here, by presenting them as ways of developing the thought that you can't have a good society unless the people in it are good.

4.6 This description of the pros and cons of moral relativism is deliberately neutral. In fact it tries to elicit some sympathy for the view, to help the students articulate their own sympathies. Some of the issues then raised, explicitly and in the back of the students' minds, are then worked through in 4.7

4.7 It should not be difficult to make this activity work. It would help to have a straw poll in advance, in which students identify themselves as being generally for or generally against moral relativism. (No fence-sitting allowed.) Then work through the arguments one by one, making sure they are understood, and recording how convincing students find them. (There is no right and wrong about this.) Then force the pro-relativism students to identify the anti-relativism arguments they find most challenging, and vice versa. If, as is most likely, they hold on to their positions in spite of admitting the force of contrary arguments, they will be searching for holes in the arguments. Then you're away.

4.8 Another activity on moral relativism, this one designed to elicit intuitions against it. Turnbull's actual position is quite subtle. While his description of the Ik is often used to make the point that one can describe a culture objectively and also say that it is morally awful, he explores the possibility that these judgments are superficial: they are the kinds of things that people can say when they are not starving. The activity I describe could be a way of getting a structured discussion of these issues going, but you might also have the students read all eight passages from Turnbull and then just let them take the discussion where they want to.

4.9 The relation between law and morality is not essential here. But it does give a good lever on issues about moral relativism since to a large extent what is legal clearly is relative to time and place. So if relativism is not true we should expect some things to be legal but wrong, and the questions about the moral force of different laws are meant to bring this out. I would suggest going quite quickly through the reactions to the For and Against arguments and then focusing on the possible laws 1 to 6. It is quite likely that when you have stated the questions about them the discussion will take on a life of its own. That's fine, of course.

4.10 A nonessential topic that will interest many students. The quotation is from The Second Sex. Notice how although existentialism seems at an opposite extreme from moral rationalism, the de Beauvoir quote seems to express a very definite moral attitude. Is this an inconsistency?

4.11 The debates in and provoked by this chapter are likely to be inconclusive. This final section offers a diagnosis of what lies behind the disagreements, and some suggestions about how a position might combine the insights of both rationalism and relativism. Students could read this section on their own, with no classroom rehearsal. But if you want to discuss it in class and want a structured activity, then 4.8, if not already done, would serve. The connection to make is that 4.11 suggests that we should reject both extremes, and that the descriptions in 4.8 invite us to reject relativism while Turnbull's reflections invite us to reject rationalism.

Chapter 4 - Test
(This test is based on the objectives stated at the beginning of the chapter.)

For each question circle the best answer

(1) Why is moral rationalism often based on a principle of impartiality? (a) because it is fair (b) because it looks like a true principle that we can know by use of reason (c) because Jesus, Confucius, and several modern philosophers have all defended the principle.
(2) What factors can increase the justice of a society? (a) equality of opportunity; (b) equality of happiness; (c) equality of unhappiness.
(3) How does Plato think that he can prove what an ideal society would be like? (a) by making mathematical calculations; (b) by describing an ideal person; (c) by imagining societies and then thinking hard about their good and bad qualities.
(4) Which of these are (beginnings of) arguments against moral relativism? (a) what is legal in one country is illegal in another; (b) we can judge whether the principles people in a culture live by are fair or unfair; (c) we should tolerate other cultures.
5) How is existentialism different from moral relativism? (a) existentialism is concerned with values individuals adopt while moral relativism is concerned with values cultures adopt; (b) existentialism says that life is meaningless while moral relativism says that life has the meaning your culture gives it; (c) existentialism says that people make their own values and moral relativism says that there are only values relative to a culture.
6) Which of the following should we expect of a moral philosophy? (a) a list of right and wrong actions; (b) a way of understanding the values of all people; (c) a description of what disagreements over right and wrong are disagreements about.