THIS SECONDARY LEVEL RESOURCE works well as a combined warm-up/stimulus for a P4C session, and could also be used to introduce a series of sessions tending towards ethical issues, or to stimulate interest in academic philosophy.
There are 26 sheets, each featuring a different action with a moral dimension, and a single page listing all the actions by theme with suggested questions. Groups of pupils arrange their sheets on the floor from ‘most evil’ at one end of the room to ‘most good’ at the other. If possible, have two or more groups each operating with their own complete set of sheets so that differences between the orders can be compared. I suggest you give all the sheets to the group as a whole, rather than distributing one to each, as this leads to a more considered ranking.
When a group cannot agree about the right place for a particular action, ask them to place it slightly out of line from the main sequence so those disagreements can be explored. When all the sheets have been ranked, have pupils spread along their line so they can see all the sheets.
Pick a themed set of actions from the ‘guidance sheet’ and ask pupils to hold those up. You can elicit the reasons for their ordering of the actions, and for differences of opinion within and between groups. You can use the suggested questions, or get them to come up with their own, which can provide possibilities for inquiries.
This activity would also make a good stimulus for written work, particularly for more able pupils, with each pupil framing their own question to explore in an essay.
The activity as a whole also opens up general questions about the nature of morality.
- How do you go about deciding what’s right and wrong? Who gets to decide?
- How does an argument about right and wrong differ to one about, for example, whether one band is better than another?
- What are the links between religious beliefs and right and wrong?
- If you do a wrong thing for the right reason, is it still wrong?
- If you do a right thing for the wrong reason, is it still right?
- Could what is right and wrong change over time?
- Could you be wrong about what is right?
- Could everyone be wrong about what is right?
- Could you make something right just by saying it was?
- Could God make something right just by saying it was?
A potential drawback with this activity is that it can promote a lazy relativism – moving from differences in opinion to the claim that opinion is all there is to morality. It is worth reserving a few of the more obvious examples of evil from history to challenge the idea that there is nothing more to it than that.
