Week 12 Discussion — Duty, Character, or the Count? — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Hook

Your friend's manager calls and asks whether your friend was really sick, and one small lie would save your friend's job. A runaway trolley can be stopped by pushing one stranger off a bridge to save five people further down the track. In both cases the numbers seem to point one way, and something else, a duty or a sense of who you are, seems to pull the other.

Your discussion question — choose Option A or Option B; they carry the same weight and the same rubric, and you say which you picked.

Option A: Think about the manager's phone call, or a time of your own when a kind lie would have protected someone. Is the lie permitted? Take a position using Kant's formula of universal law or formula of humanity, or Aristotle's virtue ethics, run your case through it, and say whether an honest refusal to answer changes anything.

Option B: Compare Philippa Foot's driver case, where the driver can steer a runaway tram onto a side track, with the footbridge variation, where only pushing a stranger stops it. The count is the same in both: 1 dead instead of 5. Does the count settle what is right? Take a position as a utilitarian, a Kantian, or a virtue ethicist, and say why your verdict on the two cases is the same or different.

There is no single right answer. Careful thinkers still disagree about whether a kind lie can be right, and about whether the count of lives settles the trolley case. Pick the option you actually care about, and tell us your reasoning.

Expectations

Activity format: one initial post followed by two substantive peer replies. Plan on about 45 minutes across the two deadlines; your instructor sets both due dates in Canvas.

Your initial post — by the first due date (early in the module week):

• Say which option you chose.
• For Option A, say whether the kind lie is permitted, run the case through the formula of universal law, the formula of humanity, or virtue ethics, and say whether an honest refusal changes anything; for Option B, say whether the count settles the trolley case, which theory you take, and why your verdict on the driver's case and the footbridge variation is the same or different.
• Use at least two of this week's terms (maxim, categorical imperative, formula of universal law, formula of humanity, merely as a means, virtue, the mean, eudaimonia, the trolley problem) correctly.
• State the view you reject in its strongest form, give your reason, and say what would change your mind.
• Length: roughly 150–250 words if written. You may instead record your post as audio or video (about two minutes) and attach a transcript; both forms are scored by the same rubric.
• Keep any example you give away from hot-button topics and real current controversies, and never name a real person in a case.

Your replies — by the second due date (the end of the module week):

• Reply substantively to at least two classmates.
• A substantive reply does more than agree: state the strongest version of the poster's view in your own words, ask whether their case really fits the theory they tie it to, or offer a variation, labelled as one, that pulls the other way. "Nice point!" on its own does not count.

What a strong post looks like:

I chose Option B. I think the count does not settle the case, and I read it the Kantian way. In the driver's case, the 1 person on the side track is not used at all: the plan would work as well if no one were there. On the footbridge, the stranger's body is the plan, so the stranger is used merely as a means, which the formula of humanity forbids. The strongest objection is the utilitarian one: the 5 people who die are no less dead whichever way the 1 dies, so caring about how seems to put clean hands ahead of lives. I grant that the 5 deaths matter in both cases. But a world where anyone may be used as a tool whenever the numbers favor it is a world where no one is safe to be a person. What would change my mind is a version where the stranger agrees to be used.

Notice how it takes a position, states the other side at its strongest, ties the reason to the formula of humanity as the course defines it, and says what would change the writer's mind. That is the bar.

Participation rubric

This discussion is worth 10 points. The three criteria below look at your initial post and your peer replies.

Post early if you can — the best threads happen when people have time to reply before the second due date.

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