Ethical Capability / Levels 9 and 10 / Decision Making and Actions
Content description
Discuss issues raised by thinking about consequences and duties, in approaches to decision-making and action, and arguments for and against these approaches
Elaborations
defining and comparing ethical terms such as deontology and consequentialism, identifying the main contestabilities and applying findings to discuss the costs and benefits of a proposal such as diverting money from a planned pedestrian crossing to a hospital, or from the foreign aid budget to domestic farmers, or from programs that respond to health problems to those that claim to prevent health problems
using hypothetical ethical dilemmas to compare consequential and duty-based approaches to decision-making and their contestabilities, for example the trolley problem, where a switch can be flipped to divert a runaway carriage that would crash into five railway workers, but would instead kill one person standing on the other line (from Philippa Foot), or whether to stay and look after a family member or go and fight evil forces (from Sartre), or a politician lying in an attempt to protect citizens from harm (from Machiavelli - the problem of Dirty Hands)
examining issues in fiction that show problems with consequence and duties-based approaches to decision-making, such as conflicts between rights or duties or potentially causing the suffering of the few for the sake of the majority, for example, in “The Hunger Games” or “Les Miserables”, for example, when Jean Valjean faces the decision of whether to save the person mistakenly identified as him
Code
VCECD022
Curriculum resources and support
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