answered: THE FIRST PART OF This discussion begins with a role-playing

  

THE FIRST PART OF This discussion begins with a role-playing exercise. Here is your script:
After a shipwreck, you find yourself in a lifeboat that has enough room and provisions for no more than 50 people. However, there are currently 75 people in the boat including yourself—men, women, children, old and young, rich and poor, passengers and crew members. In addition, there are another 100 people treading water around the boat for a total of 175 people. But only 50 can fit in the lifeboat. And the people in the water will be overcome by hypothermia in less than 3 hours because the water temperature is less than 50 degrees, so you do not have a lot of time to make your decisions and get people in and out of the lifeboat.
Since the ship sank in a remote area, the chances of a rescue anytime soon are poor, especially with no other lifeboats available.
That is all the information you have about the situation. You do not know where you are, whether there will be a rescue by another boat, or even whether the lifeboat itself will safely reach land—if it reaches land. At this point, you do not even know if the lifeboat’s locator beacon system is in working order.
For whatever reasons, the people in the boat, as well as those in the water, have agreed that you should be the one to make any decisions necessary to maximize the chances of survival for the 50 people who can fit in the lifeboat. You cannot get out of the responsibility; they are all looking at you to make the decisions. Everyone will indeed drown if you do not choose only 50 people, so you must choose a total of 50 people including yourself. And you have to do it in a hurry with no real information about the rest of the passengers except the obvious facts of sex and likely age.
You could decide to give up your seat, but who would you put in your place?
Remember, you cannot get out of making the decision; you must choose a total of only 50 people, and you have to do it in a hurry and with the information you have or can get very quickly, so do not get sidetracked with issues such as “What if we are marooned on a desert island for the rest of our lives?”
What moral rule(s) would you use to decide who gets into the lifeboat, and why will you use those rules and not some other decision criteria? This is the first question you have to answer. After that, you can move to a discussion of process or survival techniques—but only after you have told us what moral rules you would use to make your choices of who gets into the lifeboat.
This can be a tough exercise. None of us ever wants to be in this situation or to have to make the choice of who gets into the lifeboat. Remember, you cannot get out of the responsibility of choosing the 50 people who have a chance to survive by getting a place in the lifeboat. And you do not have a lot of time to gather information and make “survivalist” decisions or to agonize over how difficult the choice is for you.
THE SECOND PART IS
For your RESPONCE posts TO BOTH PEERS, remember that strong critical thinking is essential in responding to other students. This means that you should be finding things that support or extend your classmates’ thoughts or that you take critical issue with in their arguments and positions. When possible, providing alternatives to another person’s arguments or positions is part of the task of a critical thinker.