4.2 Gray matters for the hughes aircraft case  (Page 12/14)

Questions on dramatic reflections

Directions:

As was said above, John Dewey suggested the idea that underlies these dramatic rehearsals or What-if dramas. As Dewey puts it "[d]eliberation is actually an imaginative rehearsal of various courses of conduct. We give way, in our mind, to some impulse; we try, in our mind, some plan. Following its career through various steps, we find ourselves in imagination in the presence of the consequences that would follow: and as we then like and approve, or dislike and disapprove, these consequences, we find the original impulse or plan good or bad. Deliberation [becomes]dramatic and active…." (Dewey, 1960, p. 135) Think of your "dramatic rehearsal" as an experiment carried out in your imagination. The hypothesis is the alternative course of action decided upon by your group that forms the basis of your "What-if" rehearsal. Imagine that you carry out your alternative in the real world. What are its consequences? How are these distributed? How would each of the stakeholders in your case view the action? How does this fit in with your conception of a moral or professional career? Your imagination is the laboratory in which you test the action your group devises as a hypothesis.

This quote will also help you understand the concept of dramatic rehearsal. It comes from John Gardner, a famous novelist, and Mark Johnson, a theorist in moral imagination. John Gardner has argued that fiction is a laboratory in which we can explore in imagination the probable implications of people’s character and choices. He describes what he calls “moral fiction” as a “philosophical method” in which art “controls the argument and gives it its rigor, forces the writer to intense yet dispassionate and unprejudiced watchfulness, drives him—in ways abstract logic cannot match—to unexpected discoveries and, frequently, a change of mind.” (Johnson, p. 197; Gardner, p. 108).

There are different versions of what form dramatic form takes. In general there is plot, character, agon (struggle or confronting obstacles), resolution, and closure. A drama is a narrative, an unfolding of related events in time. One event arises to give way to another and so forth. Dramas can be driven by the ends of the characters and the unfolding can be the realization or frustration of these activities. Dramatic rehearsals take isolated actions and restore them to this context of dramatic form.