I’d like to thank Matt Deaton for introducing me to Ethics Bowl at this year’s American Philosophical Association (APA) Eastern Division conference.
Given my own mission to help students (of any age) develop their critical-thinking skills (through books like Critical Thinking from MIT Press and my LogicCheck site that uses the news of the day to teach critical-thinking techniques) I’m drawn to situations where facts alone cannot provide answers on what to do.
In situations when we have to decide what to do in the future, we can’t fact-check things that haven’t happened yet, but we can argue over which choice to make. We can also never know with certainty what is going on inside other people’s heads, which requires us to argue over motives and motivations, rather than claim to know them without doubt.
Similarly, only the most trivial ethical dilemmas can be resolved by appealing to facts of the matter. For the kind of complex dilemmas we face in the real world, such as those students grapple with when they participate in Ethics Bowl, we need to argue things out. And arguing well is what you learn by studying critical thinking.
With that in mind, I was inspired to start a series over at LogicCheck that applies different critical-thinking principles to specific cases in this year’s Ethics Bowl national case set. The first looks at how the ability to peer through persuasive language (commonly referred to as rhetoric) to see through wording that might pre-suppose an answer to a problem. A second piece shows how hidden premises, statements implied but not stated in arguments, often contain the most important points we are need to discuss.
I hope to continue this series by looking at other cases in light of the critical-thinker’s toolkit that involves skills such as controlling for bias and media and information literacy. In each of these postings, I will endeavor to introduce students to productive ways of thinking about ethical issues and avoid telling them what to think about them.
So thanks again to Matt for letting me post here at his Ethics Bowl site. Thanks as well to everyone involved with this fantastic program, and to all the students and teachers participating in it.
Happy deliberating!
~Jonathan Haber~