How Should Bob Stop the Train from Hitting that Child and Dog?

Let’s start with a little thought experiment from Peter Singer’s “Singer Solution to World Poverty.”

Bob is close to retirement. He has invested most of his savings in a very rare and valuable old car, a Bugatti, which he has not been able to insure. The Bugatti is his pride and joy. In addition to the pleasure he gets from driving and caring for his car, Bob knows that its rising market value means that he will always be able to sell it and live comfortably after retirement. One day when Bob is out for a drive, he parks the Bugatti near the end of a railway siding and goes for a walk up the track. As he does so, he sees that a runaway train, with no one aboard, is running down the railway track. Looking farther down the track, he sees the small figure of a child very likely to be killed by the runaway train. He can't stop the train and the child is too far away to warn of the danger, but he can throw a switch that will divert the train down the siding where his Bugatti is parked. Then nobody will be killed —but the train will destroy his Bugatti. Thinking of his joy in owning the car and the financial security it represents, Bob decides not to throw the switch. The child is killed. For many years to come, Bob enjoys owning his Bugatti and the financial security it represents (picture courtesy of Eastern Horizon).

Bob's conduct, most of us will immediately respond, was gravely wrong. Unger agrees. But then he reminds us that we, too, have opportunities to save the lives of children.

Most of us will respond this way. My students often hem and haw on the matter but when confronted with the actual value of children’s lives versus the value of a Bugatti, they acquiesce and agree that Bob should put the Bugatti in front of the train. We can and should sacrifice for the health of others. I can be happy without a Bugatti.

Now complicate the story a lot. Imagine there were two people who came and talked to Bob. One begins carefully and calmly explaining that there is a train coming well before he can see or even hear it. The train will certainly kill the child but it can be stopped if he goes down the rail and throws some switches that will slow the train down and divert it. There is another man dressed to the nines who shows up and says there is nothing to worry about. The kid will be fine. Everything is fine.

What is an educated person?

I've been teaching at Penn State for going on 9 years. This summer will mark the end of my teaching here and the last time I'll have the opportunity to teach Philosophy of Education here. It would be great if you would join me. We'll have class outside every day unless it rains...or it's really way too hot.

EDTHP 440: Philosophy of Education
Summer 2012, First Session

What is a happy life? What is the purpose of society? What is nature and what is our place in it?

Register for this course and explore these questions to develop your philosophy of education and your philosophy of living. When you register for this course you will have the opportunity to be both teacher and student, be free to question and answer, and explore the work of our local culture and local natural environment. By course’s end, you will have written and presented your personal philosophy of education.

Following in the thousands of years of tradition of people who learned by listening and speaking, the majority of student evaluation is based on the cultivated ability to carefully and clearly speak your ideas and feelings so that you mean what you say and say what you mean.

Reading list:

• Ursula LeGuin, The Wizard of Earthsea
  
• J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
• Wendell Berry, What Are People For?
• John Dewey, Moral Principles in Education and Experience and Education
• Thomas Princen, Treading Softly
  
• David Orr, Hope is an Imperative

Additional readings come from Peter Singer, Derrick Jensen, Madhu Prakash, Vandana Shiva, Parker Palmer, Yes! Magazine, Alan Watts, Christopher Uhl and Dana Stuchul, and others.

Students from across the university, including graduate students, are invited to this class.
Registration #871396

For more information contact Peter Buckland via email: pdb118@psu.edu

What does it mean to be who and what we are on Earth?

Belief and behavior might constitute the greatest challenges we face as we confront the myriad problems of modern life. They certainly make a transition to a sustainable world difficult.

Every day "life" seems to get faster and faster.

We can feel trapped in an ever-tighter iron cage of our own technology while we call for more of it that does whatever it does faster than the one that we called for the year before. People want a beautiful landscape to look at and walk in and yet the electricity that we require for our way of life makes us destroy mountain tops in Appalachia to dig for coal. Most of us believe in the right to clean drinking water but to power our buses or our computers we turn millions of gallons of water into toxic brine to hydrofracture the Marcellus Shale to extract natural gas.

The author David Orr describes the tie between our prosperity and its unsustainability a social trap, a "tragedy of the commons" writ large.

Climate change. Global habitat loss. Species extinction.

All of these things come about because we believe things. What do we believe? What should we believe? What can we believe that might raise our ecological consciousness? What would happen if we lived as if life - perhaps that should be LIFE - really mattered?

Our guests today will talk to us about these issues today. Dana Stuchul (Assistant Professor of Education - Penn State), Christopher Uhl (Professor of Biology - Penn State), and Tsultrim Datso (Buddhist contemplative) all invite current and future teachers and all of us into different ways of thinking about our own educations and others' educations in ways that bring our beliefs about our place in the social, spiritual, and natural world to the fore. The three of them work to bring mindfulness into formal education. What we believe matters. How can we believe, act, and be more sustainable?

Perhaps we can get something of an answer chapter 10, "Empowerment: Transforming Self, Transforming Society," of Uhl's book, Developing Ecological Consciousness: Path to a Sustainable World:

In the early stages of the industrial revolution, people knew they were living in a time of great change. The situation is similar today. We live in a time of transition and tumult - a time when we feel a great hunger for meaning and purpose.

The sustainability revolution has come forth out of this turmoil. This revolution challenges society to redefine its bottom line - which, of course, is what makes "sustainability" such a necessary, as well as radical, concept. The shift away from a culture based on exploitation, profit, militarism, and separation to one based on sustainability - that is, one grounded in stewardship, interdependence, social justice, and peace - will not come easily.

In order for this new paradigm to take root in society, three conditions must be satisfied. First, we must have a compelling vision of the new, life-sustaining world that lies ahead. Second, citizens must believe that the radical changes required to create this life-sustaining society, are possible. Finally, major social transformations, such as those implicit in a sustainability revolution, depend on an actice and educated citizenry, skilled in the creative use of power. The practices that accompany these three foundations explore the role of vision, activism, and insight in personal empowerment and transformation.

Today, we will explore how this might begin and where it might lead. My bet is, given the demeanor of these people, that the journey will be infused with joy and that one of the great goals is to create a convivial society, a society the philosopher Ivan Illich remarked would maximize "individual freedom realized in personal interdependence.”

Join us this afternoon from 4-5 pm on The Lion, 90.7.