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Learning & Teaching

A Way of Thinking About Ethics

Philip Badger on a classroom philosophy experiment and the ideas it provoked.

The ideas in this article have their origin in a difficulty I was having in teaching a course in Ethics to my students. I wanted to put into action the idea that philosophy is something in which you actively participate and something which can help you gain a greater understanding of your own ideas. At the same time, I wanted to introduce my class to some of the major perspectives in moral philosophy in a way which would help them appreciate their various strengths and points of conflict. It occurred to me that the best way of doing this was to build on a thought experiment suggested by the American philosopher, John Rawls.

Rawls, famously, suggested what he called ‘the original position’ – an imagined situation in which disembodied souls consider the requirements of a just society while waiting, in a state of ignorance about their eventual identities and characteristics, to be born into the world.

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