Eton College exam question asks students to justify the Army killing protesters
indy100.com
indy100.com
> The year is 2040. There have been riots in the streets of London after Britain has run out of petrol because of an oil crisis in the Middle East. Protesters have attacked public buildings. Several policemen have died. Consequently, the Government has deployed the Army to curb the protests. After two days the protests have been stopped but twenty-five protesters have been killed by the Army.
> You are the Prime Minister. Write the script for a speech to be broadcast to the nation in which you explain why employing the Army against violent protesters was the only option available to you and one which was both necessary and moral.
If there are "violent protesters" or "rioters" who have "damaged public buildings" and, as a result of the riots, "several policemen have died," the government has some cause to use force.
The line between legitimate violent upheaval and illegitimate violent upheaval is blurry. I don't see anythig wrong with the question.
I think many would see it as rather tasteless given fairly recent UK history:
If you look at UK history, it has actually happened on several occasions. Peterloo, Amritsar. Why shouldn't we think about what to say?
You would almost suspect that they are trying to select individuals who have a natural instinct to maintaining current power structures, but clearly that is nonsense and what they are looking for is a carefully reasoned response.
Defending and justifying a position you don't personally hold is an especially useful exercise imo.
Just to be fair, I think an analogous prompt for Americans might be:
"Terrorists have just destroyed the Empire State Building and Willis (fka Sears) Tower in simultaneous attacks. Three days later, you have ordered troops to invade the suspected state sponsors of these attacks. Write a speech defending this military action."
(+) yes I know this is unconstitutional, that's the point
How so? The National Guard is a federal troop organization that can be called upon by a state Governor in a state of emergency. Doing so is hardly a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.
[EDIT] I should add that it's incredibly powerful and probably under-used outside the Poli-Sci department and perhaps business schools. Trying it for, say, some position you aspire to, like development lead or CTO, for example (I've been hired, it's day one, orientation's over, what do I do first? What's important? Who do I talk to? What info do I need? Who has it? What systems might exist to get it? How should I present myself to others in various positions?) can quickly expose gaps in your knowledge or education, suggesting what to focus on first to get there. You can also use it to figure out how to interact with people in other positions to be as helpful to them as possible while keeping them off your back (because you're giving them what they need to do their job) especially if they're not great at what they do. It's damn useful.
That is, when this came up on August, one commenter at https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2019/08/29/but-it-is... posed a roughly equivalent problem:
> “you’ve just overthrown the government in a socialist workers’ uprising. The royal family and all members of the nobility have been executed by firing squad. As the recently elected chairman of the Greater London Soviet, explain why this was both necessary and moral.”
Surely that's equally "acceptable" perspective for a role-playing exercise, yes?
In your edit you commented that it's an exercise for practicing for "some position you aspire to". Doesn't that imply that someone who aspires to be a PM should practice concocting excuses to explain why it was "both necessary and moral" to kill protestors? Wouldn't better practice for a PM in this case to be to express sorrow about the deaths, announce the start of an independent investigation into the issue (and not be people with ties to the government), etc.?
Doesn't this sort of exercise also reduce the number of people who enter political science simply because they don't want to spend time to defend a some positions they believe to be unconscionable?
I took a foreign language class once and we were asked to practice by having a debate on some topic. I don't remember what it was, so let's say "for or against smoking in public restaurants". I was assigned the task of defending the ability to smoke in a restaurant - something I am very much against - and refused to do it.
Just like a social activist teenager with a history of going to demonstrations might be against needing to justify the morality of killing protestors.
Or the teenager from the ranks of nobility might not want to justify killing his or her family for the needs of the Greater London Soviet.
"The government has announced the banning of a large opposition party, and that its leaders will be subject to internment without trial. A peaceful demonstration was organised, but the Army fired randomly from sniper positions into the crowd, resulting in thirteen people dead. Write the speech you would give calling for a general strike to shut down the government until democratic representation and human rights can be restored."
> If there are "violent protesters" or "rioters" who have "damaged public buildings" and, as a result of the riots, "several policemen have died," the government has some cause to use force.
This is more or less the exact argument of the Chinese Communist party against the HK demonstrators, by the way.
Edit: I see my example controversial position is controversial on here, too.
Nope can't find anything.
One of the best exams I ever took was a two-part exam, 90 minutes per part - the first part gave a narrative of a set of facts and the disposition of a lawsuit arising from the facts, then asked us to write the majority opinion for the appeal. The second part (which was handed out after we turned in our answer to the first part) simply said "Now write the dissenting opinion."
These sorts of questions force to you use the best arguments of ideologies you may not agree with. I think that is very useful, particularly in today's political climate.
Imagining the worst possible outcome and arguing that it's worth the price is a valuable exercise, and I think a lot of people would find it's not worth the price as often as intuition suggests, it's just not always as obvious as killing protesters.
I'm just guessing at the exact chain of enforcement, but I think we both agree, ultimately it comes down to the state's capacity for violence. However, that doesn't mean that when we pass environmental regulations we should envision people being dragged from their homes screaming in the middle of the night at gunpoint while their children soil themselves and are traumatized for life. We should envision what actually happens: companies keeping their emissions within legal limits and paying fines when they fail to do so. We should think about the reality of what enforcement will actually look like, not imagine the bank officers in solitary confinement for struggling with prison guards and their children in therapy for PTSD.
I agree that we should keep that stuff in mind when that's the reality of enforcement. Drug laws, for example, do result in a lot of young kids seeing their parents and siblings dragged out of their homes at gunpoint. But I think it's a misleading image when talking about most government uses of power.
Companies generally follow the law because it's very expensive not to, so much so that it hardly feels like coercion, as you explain. They basically agree that they should act a certain way, which is good for everyone, to be sure, but it's not like they could choose to act a different way. As you say, if they actually refused all the way to the end, they would be dragged off to prison, and we wouldn't necessarily feel bad for them, because the pollution they visited on the surrounding community would be real and terrible. But I think all this illustrates is that sometimes coercion is justified, and where it's very justified, everyone more or less agrees to go along, because people know that they would be dragged off to prison AND look like jerks. I don't think it illustrates that the system isn't that coercive, though.
I think this view of coercion is rather like people consuming more meat because they're so far removed from the slaughterhouse. When you're in a McDonald's, it really doesn't feel like an animal died for that hamburger, it's just another thing to eat.
Likewise, when most people follow the rules to the extent that it doesn't feel like coercion, we forget just how violent the system is to people who refuse to go along (and like I said, that violence may be justified, but the threat of it is never absent).
Edit: I feel like we have been taught that coercion is always bad and never justified and so we want to do mental gymnastics to convince ourselves that what we're doing isn't really coercion, and I think it would be healthier for us to acknowledge coercion where ever it happens and also acknowledge when we all believe that we have found such an obviously correct policy (like no toxic pollution) that not only is coercion appropriate, but any sort of resistance to coercion would be seen as ridiculous. This acknowledgement has the upside of forcing us to be fully aware of the thin line we walk between a fair and just society and a violent and oppressive one.
Side note: How awful is the design of the https://www.indy100.com website?
"Women should be allowed in front-line roles in the army. State your opinion and explain why."
They weren't looking for a "right" answer but were assessing critical thinking and the ability to defend your belief.
[EDIT] which is to say I wouldn't bet that writing the answer from a point of view even more abhorrent than the student may already find the lower bound for the situation would disqualify the student, and, done well, it might help them stand out from the ones who write theirs straight and conservatively. Cribbing patterns of argument from various tyrants and autocrats might be entirely appropriate, even if intended as an implicit indictment of this hypothetical future-UK government.
If they disagree ... isn't that kinda the point? Eton's like, the future-PM factory, right? Do they honestly expect they're never going to have to give a speech defending something they disagreed with, or at least, had strong reservations about?
(And, as others noted, it's not fair to call this killing "protesters", but rather, "rioters".)
This is .. low-integrity behaviour, though? It used to be part of the operation of both ministerial and cabinet collective responsibility that ministers had a responsibility to agree or resign. The gold standard of this was Claire Short, who resigned rather than support the Iraq war: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1429856/Clare-Short-quits-C...
Arguably the erosion of this has led us to the crisis of the present day.
They released the relevant parts of On Liberty I recommend https://heterodoxacademy.org/mill.
Without diversity in viewpoint, you don't know what you know or not, and when you face someone with an opposing viewpoint, you find yourself impotent and confused. They will likely beat you in debate and influence others more effectively. Your emotions may become intense, undermining your ability to bring others to see your view. Challenging your own ideas teaches you and strengthens you.
As an aside, this site has awful responsive design, with buttons and ads covering the content. Everything about the page reeks of clickbait.
The question should be viewed in context. There's an excerpt from Machiavelli on cruelty in politics and then the test subject has to answer three questions:
(a) summarize the argument,
(b) form an opinion of the argument,
(c) use the argument in a practical situation.
These questions are clearly ordered by increasing complexity and test the ability to (a) understand, (b) evaluate, and (c) use an argument. It's intellectually dishonest to take the question out of context. The point of the question is to adapt an argument, not to justify violence.
2010 paper has a similar question. It asks the test subject to adapt Thamus's argument to express concerns about the invention of computer technology.
In addition, let's face it and rightly or wrongly, Eton educates many of the future elite (CEOs and Cabinet Ministers) who will have to carry out this sort of task during their professional life, both in terms of making hard choices and in terms of taking responsibility for them and explaining them, even if hopefully in less extreme circumstances.
It would be interesting to have Eton explain what they are seeking in a 'good' answer.
If anything this 'outrage' about the question highlights the issues with social media, not Eton.
I don't think Eton College was trying to imply that such a brutal intervention was moral or even necessary, but they simply wanted to test a student's ability to argue and reason that it was despite how difficult and internally conflicting such a stance would be to most people.
The difficulty was the point, no? They could've chosen a less controversial prompt, I suppose, but why not this one? What difficult stances are not controversial?
I guess it depends on what you mean by "properly" but there's absolutely no reason why a reasonably well educated child of that age shouldn't be able to both understand the nature of the question and make a decent stab at an answer.
(heavily locked down on a range, but you're definitely primed to support the military in this context!)
Exactly. People are upset about the question, yet every day, all around the planet, normal people and politicians are forced to make such decisions. Isn't it best to have considered it before the heat of the moment?
It could be turned into a good question quite easily: ask how you might deal with the situation, before you get to the nuclear option, and then how/if you could justify it morally.
Understanding how public figures use language to justify their actions is a very useful skill. Being able to use language persuasively is also a very useful skill.
And it's common practice in these types of exercise to use either scenarios that are difficult to argue or to argue both sides.
It is the context which makes it especially odious - a defense attorney position question would have done the same thing and emphasized fair handed protectionism without the brainwashy aspects - noting that deliberate failure to provide a proper defense to the best of their ability because of a dislike of the accused would risk rights and ironically could get them off.
You want to sell out your country to foreign business interests. To convince the poor who will be hardest hit you'll need to demonise refugees, immigrants and any other minorities necessary until you get the 1/3rd of the vote necessary to give you complete control of parliament.
Write a speech that makes your elderly voter base frightened of the other, but do so in a way that makes you seem like a jovial and inoffensive bumbler to them, and yet somehow convinces them that human rights, renewable energy and climate change are ominous hoaxes intended to steal their country from them by dangerous extremists.
I do fail in this with some of the extremes. I just cannot figure out the why of the "flat earth" thing since I don't understand who "profits" in some way from a cover-up.
Although, that strays more into scenario as opposed to opposing beliefs.
We have good reason to believe this has been the case since at least 500ish BCE and one may well suppose the phenomenon pre-dates that, so it seems to be more a society thing than a modern day society thing. It's probably hard to educate people to defend or promote ideas well without also enabling them to defend or promote bad ideas better than most people can do for good ones.