Hotel Rwanda As part of the “Moral Philosophy and Genocide” unit I am doing with eighth grade students, last week we watched the film Hotel Rwanda and then discussed it. We talked about the reasons the international community did not intervene in Rwanda, and what obligations the Western countries had to Rwanda during this period. … Hotel Rwanda
What’s the right thing to do? Harvard professor Michael Sandel has been teaching a moral philosophy course at Harvard for almost 30 years, with 1,000 students at a time often taking his popular class. This class is now online and is also airing on many PBS stations for 12 weeks this fall. Taped in Harvard’s … Justice at Harvard
Can one person make a difference? The last class for the Moral Philosophy and the Holocaust unit involves watching the film Not in Our Town, which describes a series of hate crimes that took place in Billings, Montana, in the 1990s, and the town’s reaction to these events. The people in the town really came … Moral Philosophy and the Holocaust: Blog Series Part VII
Why did some people become rescuers during the Holocaust? What makes some people, despite the risks, act to prevent moral wrongs? Is being a bystander morally wrong? In this class we see the film The Courage to Care, involving profiles of individuals during the Third Reich who helped protect Jews in France, Holland and Poland. … Moral Philosophy and the Holocaust: Blog Series Part VI
In this class we view the film Heil Hitler: Confessions of a Hitler Youth. The film is an interview with Alfons Heck, who describes his childhood experiences as a member of the Hitler Youth and his rise to prominence as a leader in the organization, and then his shame and revulsion as he realized after … Moral Philosophy and the Holocaust: Blog Series Part V
Why do people obey authority even when they sense that what they’re doing is wrong? Central to the conditions that allowed the Holocaust to occur was people’s tendencies to conform to the situations in which they find themselves. In this class we watch a clip from the film Obedience, which documents the Milgram experiments. In … Moral Philosophy and the Holocaust: Blog Series Part IV
When Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968, Jane Elliott, a third grade teacher in Iowa, decided to implement an exercise in her classroom to help her students understand racism and discrimination. She divided the class into students with brown eyes and students with blue eyes, and spent one day discriminating against the brown-eyed students … Moral Philosophy and the Holocaust: Blog Series Part III
This morning I taught the second class of the “Moral Philosophy and the Holocaust” unit to two eighth grade classes. This class is an introduction to moral philosophy, a way to give the students some background before we launch into the issues raised by the Holocaust. We began by talking about Plato’s Ring of Gyges … Moral Philosophy and the Holocaust — Blog Series Part II
Is science relevant to moral philosophy? In the marvelously clear and accessible Experiments in Ethics, Kwame Anthony Appiah explores the relationship between morality and the empirical research of science. Many philosophers have held that science in general, and moral psychology in particular, hold little relevance for moral philosophy (stemming in part from Hume’s distinction between … Does what we are matter when thinking about what we ought to do?
This week I watched Forgiving Dr. Mengele, an interesting and provocative film about the life of Eva Mozes Kor. Eva and her sister Miriam were among the many sets of twins who were victims of Josef Mengele’s horrific twin experiments in the Auschwitz concentration camp. They arrived at Auschwitz when they were nine years old, … Forgiveness: “Forgiving Dr. Mengele”
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