Values Clarification
The teaching here about choosing which people to essentially murder is sometimes doverailed into a whole system of thought called, “values clarification”.
Lisa Contini has discussed this system of pedagogy in Homiletic and Pastoral Review (can be seen
here)
catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=3512
Here is a brief quote (with parenthetical additions) mine.
God bless.
Cathoholic
A systematic examination of values clarification techniques and their negative impact on moral formation and the development of conscience.
Larger Work
Homiletic & Pastoral Review
Pages
20-29
Publisher & Date
Ignatius Press, 2515 McAllister St., San Francisco, CA 94118, November 2000
QUOTE:
Values Clarification Destroys Conscience
by Lisa Marie Contini
Despite the passage of twenty-some years and the enormous void of forgotten moments, memory has mysteriously preserved a seemingly odd high school lesson in what I thought was critical thinking. My English teacher distributed a single mimeographed page to each student. The heading briefly explained a challenging scenario. It went something like this:
One hour ago, Flight 13, miles off course, crashed in an extremely remote, completely unpopulated area. The aircraft’s emergency locator transmitter was destroyed. There are 17 survivors and it is highly unlikely that they will be discovered for at least several weeks. There is only enough food and liquids available for nine people for three weeks. Their location is a wasteland: no vegetation, no wild game, no lakes or streams. The survivors are solely dependent on the food stores in the wreckage. You are one of the survivors. You are to determine which nine people should be allowed to eat. The group has agreed to abide by your decision.
Underneath this paragraph and along the left margin was a list describing the remaining 16 survivors in brief. There was a 91-year-old woman, a three-year-old child and her mother, a basketball player, a 49-year-old priest with arthritic knees, a medical student and his kleptomaniac wife (inseparable), a prostitute, a scientist, a fashion model, a young lawyer on anti-depressants, a Hollywood starlet, a homosexual, and so on. Given about ten minutes to work individually, my classmates and I were to determine which eight unfortunate souls would have to starve to death. My teacher made it very clear that there were no right or wrong answers; the exercise was to make us think, or so I thought.
Moments later, a heated but cordial debate ensued. Who would live and who would die? Which lives were the most valuable? Which survivors could most contribute to the ongoing survival of the nine? Who were expendable? Some of the questions were extremely thought provoking. Would eight able-bodied people sentenced to starve to death passively endure their fate or would they have to be restrained? What would be done with their corpses? If rescue required more than three weeks, would the nine chosen to live consume the flesh of their deceased fellow travelers?
Yet no one asked the most pertinent question of all: Isn’t it morally wrong to force eight people to starve to death?
Years later I realized that the plane crash exercise was not about critical thinking. Rather, it was a typical values clarification classroom strategy. The lesson was designed to indoctrinate students with a very specific message: that some people have a fundamental right to choose life or death for others. Simply by participating in the exercise until its conclusion, students affirm the lesson’s personal choice agenda, and submit unsuspectingly to morally dangerous indoctrination. . . . . .
catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=3512
