Refrigerator Beer

By Stresson Stoddard
Joseph and Dan are juniors who met each other their first weekend of freshmen year at
Plattsburgh State. Since then the two have been inseparable. However, they are quite opposite.
Dan is on a sports team, drinks a lot, is very outgoing, death defying, and an individual who
believes in living in the moment and not caught up in the future. On the other hand, Joseph is a
religious, conservative, family and school oriented person. In short, Dan is the life of the party,
the person who consumes alcohol excessively and always has alcohol in his dorm. Joe is the
opposite, but the two have grown to become great friends.
In the fall semester of junior year the two decided to live together in a suite but in separate
rooms. The weekend before Columbus break, Dan decided to stock his room with alcohol. He
bought two bottles of vodka, a 30 rack of beer and proceeded to concoct various alcoholic treats
for him and his friends. Unable to stash all his treats in his room, he proceeded to Joseph's room
to store the 30 rack in Joseph's fridge with several bottles still open. Joseph was not around. Dan
knew Josephs code, so he punched in the code to his room and placed his 30 rack in the
refrigerator without telling Joseph.
The next day Joseph decided to play a game of Mario. Joseph's roommate, Timmy, who is an
exchange student here, was also playing with him. While playing the game Joseph left his room
door open. Minutes later his RA came into the room and asked him to store a surprise cake he
had bought for the RD in his refrigerator. Joseph did not want to stop playing the game, so he
told his RA to go ahead. The RA opened the door and was surprised at the alcohol, Joseph
himself was shocked. Subsequently, Josephs RA informed him he would be written up, as well
as his roommate. They both denied they knew about it.
Timmy began to cry, because his scholarship had a clause that stated if he was to be in any form
of trouble, he would lose his scholarship and any other chance of getting another from his
country. Joseph was angered as well but did not blame Dan because Dan would lose his spot on
the team and the scholarship which he desperately needed to finance his education. The three
friends were in panic because of what was at stake. What is the morally right thing to do for each
person in this case?

Soccer Bullies
Anonymous
Ever since I entered High School, I played soccer for the varsity team, the Lakeshore Leopards.
My High School was very small so there werent many people to choose from when trying out
for the team. In fact, because of this, the team had never won a sectional game. Since 9th grade I
had been dreaming of winning a sectional game for the first time, as had the rest of my
teammates. The opportunity came our senior year in the fall of 05 when we won our first
sectional game; five to one. The wins kept coming until we made it all the way to the double c

state semifinals with the next game at home. All that week we practiced until twilight or until it
became too cold to practice anymore.
Now the reader must understand that we liked to fool around before practice as most high school
kids do. Some of our favorite activities before practice included racing in our cars to the field,
doing doughnuts on the gravel parking lot or skidding out on the gravel. On the day of the
second to last practice before the big game, we were all in good spirits. We all raced each other
to the field, narrowly avoiding accidents like usual. When we arrived at the field each of us did
our own version of a skidding stop and a few did their own doughnuts on the gravel in
celebration. We were all having a good time, laughing and fooling around when we noticed the
new kid, Spencer, watching us from across the field. At the time we absolutely despised this kid
because he always told on us for fooling around in the parking lot before practice. I think he told
on us about five or six times and had gotten several teammates detention for their actions.
When we saw him watching us we immediately assumed he was going to tell the coach after
practice. I guess we just didnt want him to spoil our good spirits that day; several kids on my
team started to talk about getting him back. Soon most of the team was gathered around talking
about how to get Spencer back for ratting us out. The discussion continued on for several
minutes until we saw Spencer crossing the field. We all stopped talking as he came closer
because we figured he had heard us talking about him. He didnt stop to talk to us but continued
on to pass us and enter the port-a-john across the parking lot.
As soon as this happened Ryan, one of the best players on the team, had an idea to tip the port-ajohn over while Spencer was in there. A few of my fellow friends and teammates loved the idea
and enthusiastically volunteered to help. The others, including myself, didnt like the idea too
much, mostly because we thought it would get us into a lot of trouble. We decided not to
participate but we also didnt stop him from doing it. We just watched. Sure enough Ryan and
two others (both of whom were starting players) jumped into his pickup truck. Ryan backed the
car out while the other two stood in the back truck bed. He backed his truck into the rear of the
port-a-john while the other two pushed the on the top of it and tipped it over onto its door side,
preventing Spencer from getting out. By the time he kicked the side wall out and crawled out of
the mess, everyone had run back to their cars and was acting like nothing happened. Spencer was
covered in urine and feces, throwing up everywhere. Nobody admitted anything. The coach
arrived saw what happened to Spencer and immediately asked what had happened. Everyone
said they didnt see anything until it was tipped over. Basically no one got into any serious
trouble. We had to run all practice but thats it.
That night I stayed up thinking about what had happened. I felt guilty that I didnt stop it from
happening and considered telling my coach the next day. But then I thought about what would
happen to Ryan and the others if I told on them. I knew they wouldnt be allowed to play for the
rest of the season and probably would even get suspended from school. If they couldnt play in
the semifinal game, we would surely lose. It was our senior year and I was thinking about their
college future. All three would be playing division-one soccer for their college teams the next
year. I decided not to tell on them because I wanted to win and didnt want them to get into
trouble but that decision has been nagging at me ever since.

Should I have told my coach what really happened?

FYI: We went on to win the semifinals and went to the finals.

Special Needs
By Emma Puglisi
This past summer Susan had a job at the local mall as an employee at Bounce-Around. The
Bounce-Around has different bounce equipment ranging from different bounce houses, a slide, a
bounce obstacle course and a little kid section full of different inflatables. Her job included
working the front desk, making sure that people paid as they entered, also informing the patrons
of the rules of Bounce-Around, hosting birthday parties, watching the children while they are on
the inflatables and cleaning the inflatables.
One rainy Saturday when Bounce-Around was particularly crowded, a mother and her mentally
disabled son came to Bounce-Around. Bounce-Around does not discriminate and all children are
allowed on the inflatables as long as they meet the height requirements. However, adults are not
allowed on the bounces because they are not covered by Bounce-Arounds insurance. The
mother was informed about the rules verbally by Susan as well as by the posted lists of rules.
This woman disregarded the rules and chose to follow her son onto the bounces. This is
dangerous and against the rules because there is the possibility that an adult could slip and fall,
and if either she or another child got hurt due to her actions the insurance would not cover it.
This woman believed that her son needed special attention and constant supervision. Keep in
mind that while it is the employees responsibility to watch the children while they are on the
inflatables, they cannot afford to give one child special attention. The employees are also not
allowed on the inflatables while there are children on them unless there is an emergency.
When it came to Susans attention that the woman was on the inflatable, Susan told the mother
that she would have to get off, however, her child could stay. The woman responded by yelling at
Susan, telling her that her child had every right to be on the inflatable as any other child. Susan
agreed and reminded the woman that she had not told the child to get off but only the mother
herself. The woman then responded by saying that she had to stay with her son in order to help
him. At this point Susan left the woman to get the manager. The manager reiterated everything
that Susan had just said. At this point the woman was very worked up, yelling at both Susan and
the manager. The manager told the woman that it was for the safety of the other children that she
was not allowed on the inflatables. This was not a satisfactory response. The woman accused
both Susan and the manager of discriminating against her child. She went on to involve her
lawyer and make legal threats to Bounce-Around.
Should children with special circumstances or needs be afforded special rules or a modification
of the rules even if doing so increases the liability of the benefactor?

Like Father, Like Son

Anonymous
Jacob is a teenage student and a senior at Green Hill High School. After going to smoke a joint
with friends in the woods as usual, he walked towards his home. With his parents always still at
work by the time he returns to his house, Jacob is typically given about an hour to get rid of the
evidence and straighten up before they walk through the door. Last week, however, his father
unexpectedly arrived home early and found Jacob with a lighter and a dime bag sitting there on
the coffee table. Jacobs father, Arnold, was shocked. He told his son how disappointed he was in
him and provided what he thought was an appropriate punishment. He gave him the strict orders
to return home directly from school from then on. One day, Jacob arrived at his door to find his
mom on her way out. Since his father was coming home within the half hour, Jacobs mother
trusted him enough to be home alone for the short period of time. Unable to find a ruler in his
room that he needed to use for one of his school assignments, Jacob ventured into his parents
room. Opening one of his fathers drawers, Jacob came upon not only a bowl, but also a fair
amount of marijuana. While Jacob stood there in disbelief and anguish, he decided to take the
items out of his fathers drawer and keep them for himself.
The next week Arnold came home early and caught Jacob smoking again. Just as Arnold was
about to punish his son once more, he recognized the bowl sitting on the coffee table. Jacob sat
there staring at his father. Should Arnold punish his son Jacob for smoking weed, when he does it
himself? Is it morally right for him to punish Jacob if he believes that he is looking out for his
sons best interest?

Philosophy
302: Ethics Case Study
Your group is requested to do four things:
Carefully read the situations in paragraphs A through E below.
Rate the actions described in A through E from best to worst according to your
personal ethics.
Rate the actions described from best to worst according to your group as a
whole.
Justify why you rated the actions the way you did.

Situations: (Adapted from John Hospers, Human Conduct (New York: Harcourt Brace,
1972), 24.

[A] Because of graft and corruption among high officials in the city government,
city taxes have to be raised 35 per cent.

[B] The ambulance brings to the hospital a man bleeding to death. The hospital,
being a free city hospital, does not admit him. We dont have room, the man at
the receiving desk says falsely. Take him to the other city hospital. At the other
city hospital he is also refused, on exactly the same grounds. So he is returned to
the first hospital, but by that time he is dead.

[C] A group of Black soldiers in the South going home on leave is riding in a bus.
An intoxicated white soldier on the bus becomes sick and vomits. The bus driver
accuses one of the Blacks of doing it and has the bus evacuated while the Black
soldiers clean it up. While they are working the driver calls the local sheriff and has
the Black soldiers locked up for disorderly conduct. The judge sentences them to
thirty days on the chain gang. They are not permitted to get in contact with Army
headquarters or with their families who are expecting them home for Christmas the
next day. (Cf., New Republic, Vol. III, No. 1569, pp. 871-872).

[D] Preachers, rabbis, priests . . . use religion to cloak and to support impersonal,
wholesale murder and the preparation for it. They condone the intent to murder
millions of people by clean-cut young men flying and aiming intricate machineries
toward Euro-Asia, zeroing in on cities full of human beings young men who, two
years before, were begging their fathers for the use of the family car for a Saturdaynight date. (C. W. Mills, The Causes of World War Three (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1958,) 126. (The issue is about religious leaders influencing political
issues, not about the ethics of war.)

[E] The communist youth turns in his parents to the Secret Police for suspected
activity hostile to the aims of the Party.

Rating and Justification:

Situat
ion
Best

Justification

Wors
t

Case studies: beyond thought experiments and experimental philosophy

Im no expert in philosophical methodology, but Id like to lay out some thoughts here about
three methods: thought experiments, experimental philosophy, and case studies. So this is less a
definitive statement to be defended than an invitation to discussion: less an article than a blog
post, in other words.
X-phil has made a big splash with its critique of armchair philosophy and its use of thought
experiments, the whole bestiary of brains-in-a-vat, zombies, Swampman, et al.. Why rest with
philosophers intuitions about the matters of life, and especially, why rest with their intuitions
about other peoples intuitions, the X-phils ask. As far as I can tell, the X-phil critique claims the
armchair approach is wrapped up in very questionable assumptions about normalcy and
normativity, i.e., that any one given philosophers intuitions map onto that of the rational man,
that is, the way most people do think, or the way they should think. Why not, the X-phil
proponents say, instead design experiments that test how people do in fact think, and thereby
settle the empirical question, and then, once we settle the normative question, we can test the
discrepancy and come up with suggestions to improve rational performance, a pedagogical
enterprise that is itself subject to empirical testing. But then, comes the retort from critics of Xphil, youve got to be very careful in designing your experiments. For all the talk of intuition
pumps in thought experiments, youve got to be careful of experimental artifacts in X-phil
results, the critics say. We know, we know, the X-phils answer, thats why we work with social
science experts in designing our experiments.
The debate goes on, as we know, and doesnt seem to show signs of settling down any time soon.
I want suggest a third method for philosophers, beyond thought experiments and experimental
philosophy: the case study, or as Deleuze calls it, the method of dramatization.

The problem with even the best designed X-phil use of the trolley problem, James Williams
claims in his chapter on Deleuze and Gilbert Harman in The Transversal Thought of Gilles
Deleuze: Encounters and Influences (Clinamen , 2005; available online here), is that the trolley
problem yields pre-set, individuated, responses (pull the lever or not) and the experiments looks
at the distribution of choices between individuated results (and also often at brain states and so
on correlated with those choices).
But the trolley problem is not a problem in the Deleuzean sense, which for Williams looks like
vast inter-linked networks of conflicting ideal pressures and actual responses to these
pressures. A problem in Deleuzes metaphysics is closer to the sense of a problem in macroeconomics such as Should we raise interest rates now? with its wide range of ethical, technical,
social and political pressures and variables, than to a problem that might allow for a
definitive answer. The economic problem is practical and experimental. It rests upon a variable
context such that no final formula is likely to be resistant to new developments or even adequate
in light of all currently available information.
For Deleuze, problems cannot be solved once and for all; they can only be dealt with practically
and temporarily. They cannot be solved, but they can be resolved for the time being, for our
actions now in resolving it change the conditions for future cases of the problem. And they can
only be resolved in concrete situations by singular actions. This isnt the place for a full-blown
inquiry into Deleuzes metaphysics, but the take-away point I think is that problems are
differential fields, so that there are no pre-set, individuated, responses, but open-ended situations,
and that no experiment can duplicate the complex pressures and real consequences of true
problems. But we can write case studies of the real-life resolutions of problems, as Ive tried to
do with the case studies in Political Affect, case studies which respect and describe the multiple
dimensions and interconnected pressures of problems in the Deleuzean sense.
Thats not to say we should only do case studies. But it is to say that the multiple and
interconnected pressures and consequences of open-ended and evolving situations or problems
in the Deleuzean sense can be studied better in detailed case studies than in experiments done in
the armchair or even in the lab. There can be synergy here: an apprenticeship in case studies can
help us identify key dimensions of situations that can be isolated from their real-world context
and tested experimentally, and that very experimental knowledge helps us critique old case
studies and produce new ones. For a case study itself involves the choice of what to include: a
map that produces a 1-to-1 duplication of the territory, as in the Borges story, is no map at all.
In other words, both case studies and experimental design reduce the dimensions of a situation to
gain control and clarity. The difference is that case studies strive to describe the interaction of as
many dimensions as possible while still producing a coherent case, while experiments strive to
isolate a few key dimensions and measure that reduced interaction (often the classic relation of

dependent and independent variables, but not even multi-factorial analysis is going to deal with
as many dimensions as a good case study). But we have to remember that the very clarity of
experimental results comes from our choice of critical dimensions and our disregarding of the
others. So Id say that good experimentation needs a self-consciousness and openness to revision
of our choice of critical dimensions, and that these virtues can be cultivated in a periodically
renewed immersion in case studies.
Let me close with a challenging question I need to think more about: is it that X-phil
methodology looks for linear relations between dependent and independent variables, whereas
case studies try to describe the nonlinear feedback loops of our (Deleuzean, problematic)
reality, which are resistant to the construction of dependent / independent variable experiments?
So that its not really the quantity of dimensions that distinguishes experiments and case studies
as their treatment of them?