Laughing about lifeboats

With a group of choirgirls and a BBC film crew, Liverpool Cathedral,, March 2016

In 2016, not long after my first child was born, while I was deranged with sleeplessness and still breastfeeding every few hours, I found myself in Liverpool Cathedral on the set of a BBC2 television programme The World According to Kids in which philosophical educators had been commissioned to devise and facilitate exercises for children to engage them in philosophical conversations. In the months before filming, I had suggested various everyday ethical issues that we could explore in-role or through texts including the ethics of spending money and cheating on tests, but the production team wanted more. Running out of time, I retreated to a series of classic ethical scenarios from which my mention of Garrett Hardin’s lifeboat metaphor caught their eye. In his example, Hardin envisages the world as consisting of several different lifeboats. Some are well stocked, well-maintained and carry a safe number of passengers while others are ill-equipped, chaotic, disease-ridden and so overcrowded that passengers constantly fall overboard. ‘What should the wealthy passengers in the lifeboats do?’ asks Hardin in this metaphor which, although profoundly over-simplified and western-centric, is at least rooted in some kind of geo-political context (1974). With just a few days to go, the production team hastily redrafted the scenario in an attempt to make it more comprehensible for the children and the television viewers. The new version said nothing about how or why this motley crew—which included a prisoner, a mother, and a doctor—had arrived at the point at which they sought a place on a single lifeboat with insufficient seats. But it was felt that the range of candidates for spaces on the boat would divide opinion amongst the group of girls from Liverpool’s cathedral choir and thereby produce a lively debate. Having settled on these unlikely contenders for drowning, the production team created an elaborate set for the discussion. I understood that the set would help make better TV but having done lots of work where philosophy meets drama, I also hoped that it would have some pedagogical benefit too. While I had grown more suspicious of the use of pared-down ethical scenarios in ethics, I was hopeful that discussing the dilemma while enacting key decisions would flesh things out again, engaging the emotions and the imagination and making the scenario feel more realistic and less of an academic exercise. But it did not work out like that at all. That afternoon, standing in an inflatable dingy surrounded by bright lights while children squabbled over large cardboard cut-outs of a dog, a vicar and a smiling pop star, the absurdity of the exercise hit me. The children were sometimes deadly serious, otherwise convulsed by giggles, as one girl lifted the cardboard old lady out of the boat before explaining sheepishly that she was ‘really old and would probably die soon anyway’. Evidently, the scenario was ethically tone deaf. Rather than providing amplification, the lights and props only dampened things further. Among this intelligent and sensitive group of young women, no further inquiries were made about who these two-dimensional characters might be beneath their crude, stereotypical designations of celebrity, clergy or criminal. None of the children speculated about why they may have ended up in a boat alone at sea, as if this part of the story was superfluous. Nor did they question their own strange god-like status in deciding the fate of the others while apparently at no risk of drowning themselves. In the end, the dog was saved because it was cute, and the singer drowned because she was vain. Despite my frequent invitations to expand on the reasons behind their judgements or to reflect on their feelings, where they could not decide, a show of hands without an explanation sufficed—all to a chorus of laughter. The situation spectacularly failed to engage the emotions and the imagination and as result, this was more like a humorous maths problem than a moral problem. It was obvious from the pace, tone, and substance that this activity was in no way orientated towards the business of understanding what matters and what it means to live well. I was left wondering what the point of it had been and I half-recalled Nicomachean Ethics in which Aristotle strives to keep in view the aims of ethical inquiry saying: ‘Our present discussion does not aim, as others do, at study; for the purpose of our examination is not to know what virtue is but to become good, since otherwise the inquiry would have no benefit to us’. It seemed we had achieved neither of these things. Perhaps it was the overtly religious setting we were filming in, but I also feared trivialising a situation that might harm, or even corrupt, the children I was working with, by implying that ethical deliberation is a little more than a game. It was not until later that I encountered what Elizabeth Anscombe has to say about the dangers of ‘Oxford’ moral philosophy corrupting the youth. In her sarcastic critique of the tendency of her academic contemporaries to be unconcerned by facts and to favour moral examples that are either utterly ‘banal’ or absolutely ‘fantastic’, she suggests that such an approach is entirely incapable of corruption. The approach of Oxford philosophers—typically the examination of extreme moral dilemmas—does nothing to challenge students’ existing values, influence their actions or rethink the way they approach ethical life and learning. Corrupting the youth was famously the charge against Socrates, but Anscombe treats it as marker of the persuasive power of good philosophy and it has since been used to extol the virtues of other kinds of philosophical work with young people (Worley, 2021). The problem with the Oxford approach to moral education, Anscombe thinks, is that it is not corrupting enough (Anscombe, 1957)! If they philosophize this way, students are unlikely to discover that their conceptions of ethics are false, perhaps dangerously so.

When we finally deflated the lifeboat at the end of a long day—though the producer seemed pleased that there had been a few amusing exchanges that would make the final cut—it seemed obvious to me as an educator, that the conversation had produced some lacklustre philosophical inquiry among the children and there had been no ethical benefit at all. While the dialogue may have been too insubstantial to corrupt any of the ethical perspectives present in the room, insofar as the exercise trivialised suffering, it certainly dulled their ethical sensitives, as evidenced by the laughter. Even if this insensitivity was fleeting, I felt that to encourage it—when sensitivity is so central to ethics education—is to inflict harm, however minor.

One might wonder what else I could have expected from this episode, why think that educational endeavours like this can do much more than engage, even amuse? By this time, my thesis was taking shape, and I had in view, what I regarded as the main ingredients for meaningful ethical inquiry, some of which I recognised as being present in this scenario: narrative representation of people and their predicaments explored using critical dialogue and reflection. By then, I was also persuaded by the view that ethics is everywhere and that opportunities for ethics education abound. I had thought that there was everything to play for and yet, we were still about as far away from an ethically educative experience as I could imagine, and to my shame, this was going to end up on the telly. This is an extract from my 2025 PhD Beyond the moral of the story: The significance of narrative in ethics education.