I decided to go to the ethics seminar today instead of swimming and was surprised to know that the meeting wasn’t even that long. The women conducting the seminar introduced herself as Emily and she was eager to jump into the topic of ethics. She was surprised to see that everyone who was attending was female and remarked how it coincided with her current studies which was gender issues. Some guys entered later on and sat near the back and she went on to do the first excerise.
The room was split into two sections, one side, the left was the agree section and the right side was the disagree section. She tend posed various scenarios of ethical dilemmas and asked us to pick a side on the subject. Once we made a choice we then move to the side we choose and explain why we made that choice.
It was interesting when she posed the scenario of “if a kid who is attending college on an academic scholarship, as in he needs to maintain a good grade to get the money, received a D from you and you had a choice to make it a C or let the kid get the d which would you pick” one guy said that he would curve the grade for the kid because if it was the guy in the student’s shoes then he wouldn’t want that to happen to him.
We moved on to talk about plagiarism, stealing and another fun scenario: the classic if there was only one life raft left who would you save problem. For the last one, people each took on the characters that are being saved and we debate on why we should or shouldn’t save such and such a person. A lot of the characters voted themselves off and there was two people who played the part of 13 yr old twins and someone said to kill off one twin and saved the other because no one would notice that one would be missing anyone. Another person counter argue that if only one twin is saved, then that twin would grow up to be the evil twin.
I have no idea how that works.
But that’s the whole ethics seminar.