Page - 106 - in Reflective Cosmopolitanism - Educating towards inclusive communities through Philosophical Enquiry

106 REfLECTIvE COsMOPOLITANIsM Activity: What are the criteria in order to act fairly? 23 We all agree that people should be treated fairly, but what is justice? We all agree that we should abide by the rules of “fair play,” but what is “fair play”? This is a chance to work on the criteria required to carry out a fair distribution. We have worked on the ideas of merit and need, but we also usually relate the notion of justice to equity or impartiality. Considering relevant individual differences, we should all be treated equally and we should all be respected. • Take a bag of sweets to class and place it in the middle of the room. Ask the stu- dents: “How do we distribute them in a just way?” • Conduct the activity while questioning the different criteria the students come up with by asking follow up questions. You can use the exercises above to consider situations that will challenge the equal sharing issue. 1. Is sharing equally always just? (Someone does not like or cannot eat sweets, someone already has a bag of sweets, etc.) 2. Tell them that when another class suggested using the same method, you had to step out of class for a minute, and just at that moment all the students jumped over the sweets, and the stronger ones took more sweets than the oth- ers. You got angry but decided to stick to the initial plan of equal distribution, and asked them to give back one sweet each. 3. What if there are people who don’t like sweets, should we still use the equal sharing criteria? 4. If there are people who like them a lot, should we still use the equal sharing criteria? 5. If there is someone who cannot eat sweets, should we still use the equal shar- ing criteria? • You could ask your students to write down a list of criteria for, or rules of, distri- bution, and then present the list in class. The important thing is not just reaching an agreement, but also being able to present the reasons for those criteria. When discussing this, it is important that students think about the consequences of applying the different rules and how it would affect not only themselves but the rest of the class too. Episode 6: Forming the team. The girls want to take part Leading Idea 1: Differentiating and discriminating From the cosmopolitan point of view that we are working with, diversity is understood as the existence of different settings that favor identifying people with the awareness that they belong to a certain culture, time, social and local setting, family or peer group etc. This involves the identification of a “natural” situation based on the data and facts that 23 Based on the manual Ethical Inquiry, chapter 4, episode 14. Matthew Lipman and Ann Margaret Sharp, Ethical Inquiry. Instructional Manual to Accompany LISA. University Press of America-IAPC. Boston, 1985.