An ongoing discussion board about the scenario:
“Suppose a man has planted a bomb in New York City, and it will explode in twenty-four hours unless the police are able to find it. Should it be legal for the police to use torture to extract information from the suspected bomber?”
Episode 1 of Michael Sandel’s acclaimed course, Justice, titled, The Moral Side of Murder. From the episode description:
“If you had to choose between (1) killing one person to save the lives of five others and (2) doing nothing, even though you knew that five people would die right before your eyes if you did nothing—what would you do? What would be the right thing to do? That’s the hypothetical scenario Professor Michael Sandel uses to launch his course on moral reasoning.”
From the author, Michael Sandel (who created the online course Justice), What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets
“A renowned political philosopher rethinks the role that markets and money should play in our society. Should we pay children to read books or to get good grades? Should we put a price on human life to decide how much pollution to allow? Is it ethical to pay people to test risky new drugs or to donate their organs? What about hiring mercenaries to fight our wars, outsourcing inmates to for-profit prisons, auctioning admission to elite universities, or selling citizenship to immigrants willing to pay?” -Amazon Description
Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do by Michael Sandel is the book version of the popular online Harvard Moral Philosophy class.
Here is a link to the primary source book that he draws his course from, titled, Justice: A Reader
In 2010, after being struck by an 18-wheel truck while riding her bike Emilie Gossiaux, a young painter and sculptor, was blinded. After the accident, Emilie found her way back to the studio using a device that helps her “see” by using sensors on her tongue.
Short video:
http://www.radiolab.org/story/painting-tongues/
Chapters from the podcast about the case:
A short, interesting video, of a blind man discussing what it’s like to have people who can see describe colors to him.
A well-made video that gets into the issue of whether we can ever know that two different people experience color the same way. This video comes from a great youtube channel, VSauce, which you should definitely check out.
Interesting and varied list of philosophy games and interactive activities.
One that I would recommend is Peter Singer and the Drowning Child.
https://www.philosophyexperiments.com/
An interesting interview about the morality of using torture as a tactic. What’s great about this is that it’s not just an essay but an interview with Moral Philosophy professor, Jeff McMahan.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/26/can-torture-ever-be-moral/
How can we use math to help us understand something in the real world? Here’s an interesting case of taking something hard to understand, the value of drafting football players, and using math to help quantify and interpret trends and outcomes that would otherwise be close to impossible to understand without math. Without some quantitative way, a lot of times, football people use intuition, sense perception, and memory to help them make decisions.
This is part of the larger trend of using data to understand information that used to be thought of as beyond the realm of mathematical analysis.
http://www.footballperspective.com/creating-a-nfl-draft-value-chart-part-i/
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