Matters of Value

Another fascinating day in the classroom. I'm sure this will soon get old and especially when we are teaching 7 or 8 such classes a week. But for now it is new and fascinating if exhausting. The lesson today was to get them to realize the difference between what I call "matters of taste" such as 'what's your favorite food' or 'what sports team do you like' and what I call "matters of value"involving issues such as religion, politics and ethics. I listed a number of "value propositions" on the board and broke them into groups of two and had them discuss the propositions and present reasons for their positions. The point was to get them to see the whole process of argument and how one goes about providing reasons for one's positions. The overall scope of the course, I explained, was to get them to begin to understand how one can go about engaging in discussion on matters of value, which is what most people want to talk about. If you want to get to know someone, find out what they think on matters of value.

Each group could choose its own proposition to talk about, and in the end only four of the ten propositions were discussed: (1) whether one needs to be married to be happy; (2) whether women should stay home or go to work (3) whether suicide should be illegal; (4) whether marijuana should be legal. The interesting thing was that they split pretty much down the middle on all of these issues, which came as a complete surprise to me because my fear was that there would be a uniformity of opinion. But there was more diversity of opinion in this classroom then in my one in Utah. Go figure.