Train Your Focus on Moral Reasoning and Ethical Dilemmas
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🎯 168 ethical questions focussing on morality, moral reasoning, and issues of right and wrong.
🎯 Suitable for secondary (mainly KS4 and KS5).
🎯 Designed so you can choose questions at random, or search through for ones you like.
🎯 Easily develop ethical debates in your lessons with little or no planning.
🎯 Engage learners in some of the biggest, most important debates in the history of ethics and moral philosophy.
The Ethicist is all about ethical questions and moral philosophy.
It gets learners thinking deeply about their own ethical positions, as well as the nature of ethics and ethical decision-making more broadly.
When I designed it, my goal was to give learners in my lessons an opportunity to dig down into the nature of moral reasoning and to think critically about why they thought like they did.
I had a lot of fun using it with different classes.
GCSE, A Level, and my form.
Sometimes the debates it provokes can get a bit heated.
But that’s part and parcel of ethical discussions.
And helping learners to recognise competing, sometimes irreconcilable, perspectives is important.
As Easy as 1-2-3
The Ethicist contains 168 ethical questions, one per page/slide.
The contents page has 168 buttons, each linked to a question.
Here’s how to use it with your class:
- 🎯 Display the contents page on the board.
- 🎯 Invite a learner to choose a button.
- 🎯 Either discuss the question that is revealed, or go back to the contents page and choose again.
Simple!
The resource is FREE to download and FREE to use.
It is published by Gershon Learning Limited under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Creative Commons license.
That means you can download it, freely share it and redistribute it with attribution and a link to this site, but you cannot use it for commercial purposes or create any derivatives of it.
Download The Ethicist Today
Here’s the PDF version for you to download FREE:
What’s Inside?
Here’s a sneak peek of some of the questions waiting for you inside The Ethicist:
- 🤔 What is a moral question?
- 🤔 Are ethical judgements the same as knowledge judgements?
- 🤔 Are there more moral states than right and wrong?
- 🤔 If people know what is right, will they then do what is good?
- 🤔 What does happiness mean?
- 🤔 Is there a greatest good?
- 🤔 What sort of consequences count as good consequences?
- 🤔 How ought we to live?
- 🤔 Does morality apply only within a society?
- 🤔 Are there any objective values?
- 🤔 Are we obliged to reciprocate?
- 🤔 What constitutes a harm and what constitutes a benefit?
- 🤔 Does sympathy underpin moral behaviour?
- 🤔 Is pleasure the absence of suffering?
- 🤔 Should we eat animals?
You’ll find 168 questions in total inside The Ethicist, focussing on concepts like morality, right and wrong, virtue, duty and motivation.
The questions vary in complexity.
I’ve designed them so there’s as much value in critiquing and evaluating the questions themselves as there is in seeking to answer them.
Each one gives you and your learners a starting point for a stimulating, ethical discussion.
Using The Ethicist in Your Planning
The Ethicist is non-directive and curriculum agnostic.
You can use the resource any way you like.
Here are three ideas to get you started.
✅ Use The Ethicist as a tool for developing ethical discussions in form time or registration.
This could be a weekly activity or you could extend discussions across two or three sessions.
Either invite learners to select ethical questions at random (using the contents page) or go through and identify questions yourself that you feel are most relevant and engaging.
✅ During philosophy or religious studies lessons, use The Ethicist as a tool to get learners practising applying different viewpoints.
Either select an ethical question yourself or have one of your learners make a choice.
Share this with the class and present one ore more viewpoints you want them to think about, in the context of the question.
For example: ‘How might a Hindu respond to this question? What about a Christian?’ or ‘How might Kant answer this question? What about Rousseau?’
✅ Create a challenge tool for your learners by picking out a dozen of the questions within The Ethicist, and sharing these in a new document.
Explain that you want learners to pick one of the questions to think about.
Any time they finish the main task before their peers, they should go back to this question and continue developing their thoughts.
Have a second page in the document with space for learners to make notes.
This will help them keep track of their thinking over time, as they repeatedly come back to the same question.
P.S. You can access all my resources in one place on the free resources hub page.
