IEB teams should be aware of a prestigious ethics essay competition for which they would likely be very competitive. Established in 1989, the Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics Essay Contest is only open to college students enrolled at 4-year institutions, and the deadline is coming up fast on January 20th. But if you, your team members, or someone you know might qualify and be interested, please spread the word.
AI usage is grounds for disqualification, so ensure folks are leveraging those organic human brains. Essays should be between 2,500 and 3,500 words, full guidelines are here, and here’s this year’s prompt:
2026 Essay Theme: Silence, Conscience, and Responsibility
Is silence an act of compassion or complicity?
When does silence protect dignity and when does it betray it?
When silence becomes complicit, what is your moral responsibility?
Do we owe the world our voice or does the world sometimes need our silence to heal?
Reflect on a time, in your life or in the world, when silence itself became an ethical choice.
What did that moment teach you about conscience, courage, and responsibility?
Engage us. Enlighten us. Explore the ethics of any question that moves you, whether drawn from the tension between silence and speech, or from any other moral challenge, close to home or across the world. We are eager to learn from you.
Free hint to Ethics Bowlers: consider engaging Rochester Institute of Technology Professor Lawrence Torcello’s 2014 article, “On The Virtues of Inhospitality,” which is all about silence and responsibility, available for download here, overview video here. Good luck!
Yesterday APPE announced the teams advancing to the IEB national championship in St. Louis March 7th and 8th, as well as the cases. The cases and schedule are here and the teams below.
All will be competitive, but based on past performance, reputation, and/or coaching, teams to watch include 2025 IEB champs Macalester, Whitworth, Stanford, UC Santa Barbara, Florida, UMBC, Utah State and Utah Valley, DePauw, Snow, and West Point.
Congrats to all who made it – see you in St. Louis!
“The Bowl” is a new upbeat documentary by Ethereal Films and lead filmmaker Eli Yetter-Bowman that the Ethics Bowl community will be able to use as a recruitment tool for years to come. It’s already received screening requests from 40+ institutions including Stanford and Harvard. And this wasn’t something thrown together by an outsider—Eli has volunteered as an Ethics Bowl judge for the past decade, fully gets Ethics Bowl’s mission and value, and beautifully conveys its draw in the film. According to the filmmakers’ website, spreading the good news about Ethics Bowl is the whole idea.
“We want to drastically expand awareness and participation of the program to schools across the US. It already exists as an amazing resource to support young people but the program lacks mass communication/representation to attract more schools. Further, we believe this type of program offers value for people of all kinds so a secondary goal is to encourage this type of thinking across society in general.”
While full release will come through PBS sometime in 2026, I was granted an advance viewing opportunity and loved it. The Bowl follows a HSEB team from North Carolina to the National Championships at UNC, inviting viewers to share in their excitement, anxieties, thrills, and disappointments. A talented and thoughtful group of young women, coached by an understanding and understated teacher, the team navigates preparation stress, post-round regrets, and the added weirdness of being filmed.
I interviewed Yetter-Bowman and will share our exchange in an upcoming post. But for now, check out the trailer and consider helping spread the word with your coaches, judges, moderators, teams, friends, colleagues, and network. And if your school, nonprofit or business might be interested in an institutional license, simply fill out the form on the film’s project page. School libraries often have budgets for this sort of thing and may take care of the rest if you ask yours nicely.
Fellow Pellissippi State Community College philosophy professor Court Lewis and I had a great time talking about Ethics Bowl’s potential for promoting domestic and international peace at the annual conference of the Concerned Philosophers for Peace over the weekend. Hosted by Texas State University in San Marcos and attended by scholars from all over the world including Poland, Albania, Australia, Canada, and India, with two speakers Zooming in live from Ecuador and Mali (Africa), roughly a third of the audience was already involved with Ethics Bowl (no surprise, right?), and the rest were inspired by Ethics Bowl’s focus on collaboration, mutual respect, principled solutions, and proactive engagement with a reasonable critic.
As we know, while traditional debate artificially divides participants into hostile factions, orders them to think and argue a particular close-minded way, and forbids them from agreeing, Ethic Bowl empowers teams to take ownership of their views, to cooperatively balance their moral intuitions against the best ethical arguments, to remain open to the possibility that they might have more to learn, and to view the other team as equals and thought partners rather than enemies. Ethics Bowl’s reasonable, elevated, conciliatory style paired with accelerating growth around the world, makes it a natural and powerful ally of anyone seeking principled peace.
Many thanks to CPP leadership and conference organizers for welcoming the discussion. And be on the lookout for a longer post at the Blog of the American Philosophical Association soon.
After five years, Ethics Bowl to the Rescue! Saving Democracy by Transforming Debate, is finally live (went live yesterday, September 15th, which happens to be International Democracy Day). Whew! That feels nice to say. Finally. The paperback is on Amazon, and it’ll release in hardcover and on Kindle by mid-October.
A huge thank you to the DOZENS of volunteers who submitted interview question answers, and my five devoted and generous beta readers: Michael Andersen, Lisa Deaton, Pat Hart, Richard Lesicko, J. Overton, and Court Lewis. It’s so much better thanks to your careful reads and improvement suggestions.
Also thanks to artist Niezam for the awesome SuperSocrates character illustration and cover. He’s currently working on the graphic novel for the latest movie versions of Dune – so glad to see your talents being appreciated, new and bigger doors opening. Not that this book cover wasn’t as huge of a deal as Dune 🙂
Ok, time to order a batch of author copies and confirm addresses. If you’re in the book and I have your address already, one will be coming your way around the end of the month. If you submitted interview question answers (which means I almost certainly found a way to include you in the book) and I haven’t asked for your address, feel free to go ahead and send it to me. And even if you’re not in the book, if you’re up for writing an honest review, just email me at matt (at) mattdeaton.com and I’ll hook you up as well.
Cheers! It feels great to finally be able to share the awesomeness of Ethics Bowl with the world. Ethics Bowl isn’t a quick fix. But it will most certainly help, and at a time the world seemingly needs thoughtfulness, civility, and mutual respect more than ever.
One week from tomorrow, there’s a free online Ethics Bowl workshop for new and experienced coaches, team members and organizers at the collegiate and high school levels. Often, events like this are either college or high school. I’m so glad to see the cross-tier collaboration.
Attendees can follow one of three discussion tracks: Ethics Bowl in the Classroom, Producing the Ethics Bowl or Engaging the World. If you’re busy during the day Friday and Saturday morning, no sweat. Friday the 25th is simply a pre-workshop “ABCs of Ethics Bowl” session from 4-5. Then Saturday the 26th the fun will run from 11:30-6:30 Eastern.
Hosted by our friends at the Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl, sponsored by the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, I’m signed up and very much looking forward. Only problem: can’t decide whether to follow the In the Classroom or Engaging the World track… Hope to see you there!
Organizer extraordinaire, Jeanine DeLay, recently shared news of yet another successful Michigan High School Ethics Bowl, hosted by A2Ethics and the University of Michigan Philosophy Department. Here’s an abridged report from Jeanine, followed by celebratory pictures.
[MHSEB #12 was] a philosofest of energy, thoughtfulness and ardent discussion with 22 teams from 14 schools, including 2 new schools: Hamtramck HS (Cosmic Conscience) and Detroit Country Day School (“Kant Even” and “Golden Rulers”). Among other memorable team names: Washtenaw International High School’s “We Mill Locke You”; “The Golden Mean Machines” from the Academy of the Sacred Heart; Ann Arbor Skyline’s “Plato’s Cavemen.”
We had a Red Carpet entrance for each team accompanied by their team songs. Since this was the “Year of the Volunteers,” we took several photos of judges, philosopher coaches from A2Ethics’ 12 years strong campus community partnership with University of Michigan Philosophy, teacher advisor/coaches and volunteers.
The special word of the year was definitely…honor. We were honored to have seven former Michigan Bowlers serve as moderators in 2025. And we were also thrilled to debut our not-for-real and just-for-fun moderator fashion collection to honor their contributions. We were honored to host nine first-time judges – all undergraduate philosophy students and their resourceful professors (Julia Smith and Griffin Klemick) from Hope College. The gift to Bowlers were honor cords to be worn at their graduation and academic honors ceremonies held at their schools. The colors were Maize and Blue for the University of Michigan and “Honolulu Blue” which is A2Ethics’ color…and the Detroit Lions’ color too. 🙂 Indeed, another year, another honor.
2025 UM graduate student Bowl coordinators: AG McGee, Kiara Gilbert and Lindy OrtizFrom every Ethics Bowler’s favorite illustrator, the talented Dusty UptonThe Hope College 2025 Bowl judges (photo credit Melanie Reyes)Credit illustrator Dusty UptonProfessor Jim Spence, Philosophy and Religion, Adrian College, judge for all 12 Michigan BowlsMC and Hallmark Event Planner, Jeanine DeLay (photo credit Melanie Reyes)
Congrats, Michiganders! Leading the way with style and fun, per usual. And thanks so much for my own MHSEB honor cord! Proudly displayed in my home office – much appreciation and admiration from EthicsBowl.org headquarters in Tennessee :-)
Reason & Rationality program coordinator, dean of academics and co-founder, Peter Bach-y-Rita, recently reached out to share a selective summer program pitched as “Critical Thinking through Convivial Conversation.” I had to look it up, but convivial means friendly, lively, and enjoyable. Sounds like a great way for Ethics Bowlers to spend a few weeks this summer, right? Here’s a blurb from Peter:
“Reason & Rationality Summer Program at Princeton and Swarthmore empowers high school students to think rigorously about complex questions, distinguish factual belief from ideology, and engage in civil, convivial exchange. The two-week summer immersive program is led by instructors from Princeton, Harvard, Oxford, MIT, and other top universities, with an intimate 1:5 instructor to student ratio. Students boost their critical thinking ability as they discuss and debate 20 Big Ideas in philosophy, politics and economics in a setting that is simultaneously rigorous and joyful.”
It’s pricey, but partial scholarships are available. To learn more, check out the intro video and visit www.reasonandrationality.com.
Here’s a message from Archie Stapleton, co-founder of the Modus Ponens Institute and organizer of the TKEthics Olympiad, congratulating recent winners and announcing several cool spring events. Congrats to all who participated and kudos to MPI for growing in these exciting new directions!
Dear Ethletes and coaches from the TKEthics 2024 Fall Olympiad,
We want to start by congratulating all of you for participating in an incredible day of ethical discussion! We have heard really positive feedback from judges and spectators about the quality of your argumentation and engagement. You all demonstrated real commitment to ethical discourse, and tackled the problems of AI and technology in an incredibly nuanced and mature way. You can all be extremely proud.
Here are the results:
In the Open Division: The Gold Medal is awarded to Pythagoras (Eric Zhang, Michael Xu, Ethni Cajigas, Chase Chong, Stephanie Lee), The Silver Medal is awarded to Diogenes (Middle School team),(Eleanor Kleman, Mia Santos, Dahlia Rodgers, Reya Krishnan, Emilia Henry), The BronzeMedal is awarded to Parfit, (Qinrong (Anny) Qian, Anthony Gong, Eirena Wen, Zhiyuan (Jerry) Jiang). Following closely behind in fourth place was: Hobbes (Chengyin Du, Jingxuan (Jenelle) Zhang, Mutong Zhong, Huahui Chen), and in fifth was Locke (middle school team) (Ruilin Liang, James Loke, Darren Han, Haoxian (Ethan) Wang).
In the Middle School Division, excluding Diogenes who attained Silver in the open category: Gold Medal is awarded to Locke (Ruilin, James, Darren, Ethan), The Silver Medal is awarded to Socrates (Isaac Zhang, Nina He, Jeason Zhou, Steven Wu, Eason Wei), The Bronze Medalis awarded to Leibniz (Moxi Zhu, Laura Zhang, William Tao). Following closely behind in fourthplace was Hume (Jeffery Lian, Zachary J Liu, Kingston Wang, Mia Zhang, Vicky Fei).
Top International Team team: Aristotle (Olivia Yu, Yishan Gao (Noelle), Winston Ge).
Finally, we allow judges to submit an “honorable mention” for any team they were particularly impressed by in any given round! These teams received Honorable Mentions throughout the day: Plato (“Xing (Elsa) Gao, Ziyue (Abby) Zhou, Liqian (Eric) Yan, James Chen), Hegel (Derek Hu, Austin Lu, Liam Kim), Hobbes (listed above), Parfit (listed above) and Russel (Angela Yang, Jordan He, Alpha Dong, Angel Shaji, Mushel Khan).
Congratulations to all teams! Certificates will be sent out to each team within the next week.
We are also excited to announce that we will host an in person conference on the West Coast of the US for any team mentioned in the above announcements in August 2025, stay tuned!
If you missed out this time, don’t fret! Another opportunity is around the corner:
Our next tournament is the spring TKEthics Olympiad on Sunday, March 1st, and is now open for registration! This will also allow you to qualify for our in person conference.
After that is the Pan American Ethics Olympiad! This is the program with an Eastern Round on Saturday, April 26th at 9am EST, a Western Round on Saturday, May 3rd at 9am PST, and the
Pan Am Final on Saturday, May 17th, 2025 also at 9am PST. Register here. The winners of this event will be eligible for the International Ethics Olympiad Final held in July (10am East Coast Australia time), with hundreds of teams from all over the world.
Kind regards,
The MPI and TKEthics Olympiad Organizing Committee
We’re behind schedule on a new NHSEB case pool analysis or two. But first, friend Archie Stapleton, co-founder and director of the Modus Ponens Institute, recently shared the below call for qualified judges and student competitors for the upcoming 2024 Global Ethics Olympiad. Open to all students anywhere in the world grades 6-12, check it out and email panamethics@modusponensinstitute.com with questions.
We are excited to invite you to the Fall TKEthics Global Olympiad on November 30, 2024, hosted by the Modus Ponens Institute. This virtual event, running from 6 PM to 11:30 PM EST, brings together students from grades 6-12 to discuss real-world ethical challenges.
This year’s Olympiad features 8 cases, with half focusing on the ethical implications of technology and artificial intelligence. These timely topics will challenge students to explore pressing questions on the role of AI in society—from privacy concerns to the future of AI-human relationships. The Olympiad provides a platform for students to showcase their ethical reasoning and public speaking skills, engaging in respectful, solution-driven discussions.
We Need Qualified Judges We are seeking qualified judgeswith a background in philosophy, ethics, or related fields to help evaluate the students’ performances. If you have experience in ethical discourse and would like to contribute, we encourage you to apply. Judges will play a key role in maintaining the high intellectual standard of the competition, helping to assess the students’ arguments and their ability to engage in thoughtful dialogue.
Coaching for Students Students looking to compete can also receive expert coaching from our renowned trainers, Archie Stapleton and Zach Bloom, who have coached the winners of the 2021, 2022, and 2024 International Ethics Olympiads. Our coaching sessions are designed to enhance critical thinking, ethical reasoning, and presentation skills, ensuring that students are fully prepared for the competition.
Upcoming Tournaments The Fall Ethics Olympiad will be followed by a Spring Tournament in March 2025. Details for the Finals are yet to be announced, but we are planning for a possible in-person event inCalifornia, with prizes for the winning teams!
Join Us! If you’re a qualified judge interested in participating or a student eager to compete, register now through the link below. For more details, you can also check out the attached invitation, or contact us directly at panamethics@modusponensinstitute.com.
