This week, our Christmas special P4C resource. We love making these, and you can find our previous editions at www.thephilosophyman.com/christmas.
This time, it’s a futuristic stimulus inspired by a devilishly juicy conundrum included in this year’s Ethics Cup Regional Case Set (authored by Andew Knospe and the National High School Ethics Bowl).
We’ve given it a first-person twist to ensure it’s something most ages can tackle, assuming no one’s going to suggest all gifts come from Santa.
Auntie Joan’s Amazon Gifts
You love your Auntie Joan. She is a wonderfully warm and caring person and bakes some of the best cookies you’ve ever tasted. She’s also quite tech-savvy – she certainly knows her way around Amazon. You know this because that’s where she orders all of her Christmas presents. She gets them delivered to your door, ready-wrapped for under the tree.
One thing Auntie Joan doesn’t understand, however, is what young people in the family really want. For a few Christmasses in a row, you and your cousins have spent December 25th comparing your oddities received from Auntie Joan. Garish clothes, healthy snacks, toys that belong in another century… there has never been anything that useful.
Auntie Joan’s heart is in the right place, but her taste in presents sadly isn’t. To make matters worse, she doesn’t believe in “Christmas lists” as she thinks that takes away the element of surprise.
It’s a few weeks until Christmas. You’re sat on your sofa, admiring your new Christmas tree. Nothing’s arrived yet, which means Auntie Joan must still be doing her Amazon shopping. The television’s on in the background. It’s the news. You’re not really paying attention. But then something makes your ears prick up…
“And finally, if you’re fed up with crummy Christmas gifts, this story might be for you. Internet shopping giant Amazon have introduced a brand new feature – Gift Swapper. Put simply, you can tell Amazon to look out for a gift on its way from a particular person and swap it for a gift voucher that you can spend on whatever you like. The gift never leaves the warehouse. But it wouldn’t tell the sender. All they’d see is ‘your gift has been gratefully received.'”
The news story explains how you set it up – it’s very easy and you don’t even need an Amazon account. It’s very tempting to avoid Auntie Joan’s useless gift, and there’s another, less selfish reason too. Like millions of unwanted presents across the country, it would probably be left on a shelf somewhere for years before eventually being thrown away, and that seems wasteful and bad for the environment.
Further questions:
- If you would set it up, should you tell Auntie Joan?
- What’s more important in a gift – the thought, the usefulness of the item, or something else?
- If the gift would send would just end up as rubbish without being used, does that make it OK to swap the gift?
- Would Amazon be lying to its customers by telling them “your gift has been gratefully received”?
- When is it acceptable, if ever, for a company to lie?
- Does this idea undermine the spirit of gift giving, or improve the experience for everyone?
Does this argument work?
1. Auntie Joan wants to send me a gift I like.
2. I would like a voucher more than her gift.
3. Therefore, by swapping her gift for a voucher, I am doing what Auntie Joan wants.
Real-world context: Amazon doesn’t offer this feature at the moment, but does have a patent to do so. It was filed in 2006, but has never been made available. It’s a bit of fun to discuss, because it probably won’t come true. As Don Davis suggests in the Guardian article above, “given how many people use Amazon, all the Aunt Mildreds of the world would soon know about ‘conversion’. As for whether this would work, my opinion is no, other than to get Amazon on to a David Letterman list of top 10 signs that western civilisation is dead.”