Our friends at the Parr Center have been busy, recently launching the brand new all-online NHSEBAcademy. The best part? Live, Zoom-based bowling clinics. The first two are scheduled for later this week (register here). Depending on how interactive they are, this could be a game-changer. But wait, there’s more!
I believe that’s our friend Kyle Robertson at UC Santa Cruz featured on the organizer kit image. Looking good, Kyle!
The Library contains zip files packed with material tailored for teams, coaches, judges and organizers. You can download the current NHSEB rules and guidelines, case pool, score sheet and rubric (coaches and teams – don’t overlook those scoring criteria!), and even moderator scripts. Resources planned for future release include a guide to coaching a bowl during COVID (tip: buy a webcam), a manual for organizers interested in growing their bowl (I have an older version from my time as the original NHSEB Director of Outreach – email if you can’t wait for the new one), and “Ethics Bowl in Class: Resources for the Classroom and Beyond.”
The Theater includes an “Ethical Reasoning Toolkit” playlist beginning with a vid by Yale’s Kelley Schiffman. Prof Schiffman deftly distinguishes between descriptive and normative claims, and is followed by an exploration of the nature and moral implications of consent. While the consent vid uses the language of rights far too much (rights claims are too clunky for quality ethics bowl work), it’s redeemed by a cookie-eating illustration. Cookies cure all, and since we’re bashing rights claims, I hereby proclaim a universal human right to Toll House chocolate chip lovers cookies.
The second playlist, “Arguing About Morality,” begins with a vid similar to the descriptive vs. normative distinction from the first list, only this time delivered by John Corvino and focusing on facts vs. opinions. Corvino next overviews how arguments by analogy work, and how to analyze them. Arguments by analogy are common and persuasive – a team’s entire bowling strategy could be built on them (a possible strategy for my own team…).
The library and theater are certain to benefit teams, coaches, judges and volunteers. But the most welcome, innovative and value-adding feature is NHSEBAcademy Live.
NHSEBAcademy Live is a new series of specially-designed online events for NHSEB students, coaches, organizers, and volunteers. These programs will provide new ways to engage with Ethics Bowl content, mechanics, and skills. Our full schedule of events is below, and more will be added throughout the Fall and Winter in the lead up to NHSEB Regional Season.
NHSEBAcademy.org/live
First up is a new ethics bowl clinic scheduled for Thursday, Oct 22nd from 3-4:30 EST and Saturday, Oct 24th from 4:30-6 EST (the second will be a repeat of the first). The workshops promise to cover “presentation techniques, responsive commentaries, practice Q+A sessions, and more.” Registration is required and will enable access to the Zoom link. If you check it out, let us know how it went. We may digitally bump into one another at the Saturday session.
Thanks, UNC, for this innovation. Looking forward to all the Academy has to offer. Readers can check it out via the menu at NHSEB.unc.edu or by clicking here.
This guest post was generously written by Australian Ethics Olympiad Coach, Andrew Costantino. Andrew teaches Philosophy and Religious Education at Santa Sabina College, and was struck by a case written by Professor Tom Wartenburg at Holyoke College in Massachusettsconcerning the ethics of consuming meat.
Fancy a BLT?
In the 2019 Australian Middle Years Ethics Olympiad students were asked to consider a scene from the 1995 movie Babe. In this scene an anthropomorphised piglet is seen having a chat with a family of sheep dogs. The dogs, with an air of entitlement that stemmed from their privileged relationship to the farmer and superior intelligence, reassured the piglet that she would not be eaten as ‘the farmer only eats stupid animals’. The dogs then go on to name the piglet, Babe.
This is a disturbing scene, it would seem that it is an accepted norm that the smart eat while the dumb inevitably get eaten. One must ask, is the moral justification of our diet dependent on intelligence? Are there any other moral considerations?
This reasoning, if consistently applied, could be a ‘recipe’ for disaster. It may mean that the nightly news could replace Master Chef and an evening on social media could become a virtual buffet. On a more serious note, if we cannot accept that intelligence is a morally relevant distinguisher when determining what we ought to eat, are we ethically bound to adopt vegetarianism?
The appeal to empathy
One way in which some argue for vegetarianism or veganism is through an appeal to empathy. You may be familiar with vegan activist and animal rights campaigner Joey Carbstrong. He attempts to use moral reasoning and emotive imagery to convince people that the only truly ethical choice is to live a vegan lifestyle and he makes many well formulated points. In a recent post he uploaded a clip where he visited what was termed the world’s ‘most transparent slaughterhouse’. Part way through the interview he stated that he liked to ‘put himself in the animal’s position…’ and he knew that if he were the animal, he would prefer life to death. He also appeals to the value of the individual animal ‘in there’. Movies that anthropomorphise animals, like Babe, do the same thing, they imagine that the animal is ‘just like us’. The Babe ‘in there’ is ‘just like’ the Andrew ‘in here’. We are hardwired to be aware of other minds and thus to infer subjective experience onto other creatures. The problem is that we infer that this subjective experience is akin to our own.
I find this particular approach at least partially problematic. The problem is that when we put ourselves in the position of the animal or we engage with a film about a fictional talking pig we subsequently presume that pigs talk, that they have an inner dialogue, and thus have a self-reflexive identity. These activities imply a certain level of higher order self-concept, they imply an ability to depict things symbolically, to conceive of oneself as a temporal creature. It implies that the animal can articulate its desires, have long term goals and create traditions. It implies some critical faculty of abstract reasoning. A considerable amount of the moral value that we attribute to people stems from these distinctly human capabilities. Even when people may not have these capabilities we seem to value them, at least partially, because we know that these abilities are emerging or in regular circumstances should be there. When we tragically lose these capabilities through injury, disability, age or accident we often see this as a significant loss, the person is diminished. We can say that those suffering these misfortunes are ‘no longer themselves’, they are ‘vegetables’ or ‘no one is home’. Some go as far as to say these kinds of significant losses equate to a life that is not worth living.
I would argue that our value and membership in the moral community is at least partly tied up in this unique form of self concept and self expression. Daniel Dennett once said that if a lion could talk it could not tell us anything about what it’s like to be a lion, not because we couldn’t understand it but because once it started to talk it would not know what it was to be a lion. The human experience and human conception of identity is unique. Anthropomorphising all sentient creatures to an equal extent and seeing ourselves in the eyes of the other can be problematic and it can lead us to overstate and over simplify our case.
This does not mean that the subjective experience and suffering of sentient creatures is morally irrelevant. However, if we are to avoid rash generalisations we cannot conflate disparate things into a single category for the sake of convenience. One philosopher who is acutely aware of this is Martha Nussbaum. When considering animals in her broader theory of justice she argues that animal capability and flourishing must be considered in a way that is proportionate to their dignity, it ‘…regards each animal having a dignity all its own’. The protection of animal capabilities must be commensurate with the kind of things that that animal can ‘do’ and the kind of thing that it can ‘be’. The ‘doings’ and ‘beings’ of particular animals are distinct. In this view, one can adopt a situational ethic that develops rules appropriate to the nature of the animal in question and the situation in which the rule is being made while ensuring that at least a minimum amount of dignity can be safeguarded. In short, Babe doesn’t need a name and voice in order to be worthy of some level of moral consideration, however the ability to feel pain doesn’t automatically grant Babe moral equivalence. Furthermore, it would be equally naive if one did not recognise cognitive ability and self concept as contributing features in a suite of morally relevant considerations.
The problems of ideology
In relation to the question of vegetarianism, ideology can reign supreme on both sides of the debate.
Those who indiscriminately defend the consumption of animal products often defer to tradition in one form or another. In a recent discussion with students I (playing the devil’s advocate) suggested that we should eat koalas. They were appalled – “but it’s a koala!” they exclaimed. Here are some facts: koalas have disproportionately small brains, low levels of adaptability, they sleep most of the day, they live mostly solitary lives and have minimal perceived benefits to the ecosystems that they are a part of. It seems that killing a koala for food could possibly be a morally neutral, if not justifiable, action… and yet it just feels wrong. At this point one student will interject and say ‘Aww… but they’re cute!’ I quickly respond, ‘Surely cuteness is not morally relevant and even if it were, we eat lambs, calves and piglets all of the time. Do you not find them cute?’
There is an awkward silence.
Problematic ideological reasoning can similarly infiltrate those who maintain an ideological commitment to vegetarianism. People become vegetarians for a multitude of reasons. The reasons include the intuitive wrongness of killing, the concerns for ecological sustainability and preventing the needless suffering of sentient creatures. Most vegetarians justify their positions with reference to one or more of these greater effects or principles.
Let’s consider a short case study: Peter is a strict vegetarian. Peter is at a restaurant, he orders the mushroom burger, what he doesn’t realise is that the mushroom is fried in a sauce that contains anchovies. Upon finding out this fact he calls the waiter, the waiter swiftly disposes of the burger. Peter orders the halloumi salad instead. Peter is satisfied.
In this case Peter has wasted food for no net gain. The suffering and killing that occurred has still occurred and no one has benefited. Furthermore, the second meal has added to the ecological impact of his dining experience, food has been wasted and more food has been produced. Finally, replacing halloumi for anchovies may also be more generally problematic. Anchovies are small fish with relatively low cognitive ability, high reproductive capacity, short life spans and they are often consumed in short timeframes in their natural settings. Dairy on the other hand, involves proportionately higher levels of cruelty. Dairy cows have a significantly higher cognitive capacity and are kept perpetually pregnant or lactating, they have their calves routinely stripped from them, their male calves supply the veal industry and their female calves share the fate of their mothers. When they are no longer useful they are slaughtered. In this case ideological commitment to vegetarianism leads to a response that is contrary to all the morally relevant reasons as to why one may be a vegetarian in the first place.
It would seem that deference to tradition either through affiliation to a particular ideological group or the enculturated values of one’s own society inhibit one’s capacity to make ethically defensible choices.
Back to the BLT
Sometimes we have a tendency to habitually exclude animals from the things that we see as morally relevant. Once we stop and consider that animals too have inner lives, we may be led to see reflections of ourselves in them. We may very well share some common experiences, however the homosapien is a very distinct species and the human experience is a unique one. Animals are not mindless machines and they are not fully functional, responsible human beings – their place in our moral community is nuanced and complex.
Personally, I think that it is unjustifiable for a person of sufficient means and education to indiscriminately dismiss the preferences and experience of sentient creatures. Equally, I do not think that all creatures, or their experiences, are equal. Ideological commitment to particular rules inevitably sets the bar at an unrealistic height and can ultimately lead to the perfect getting in the way of the good. Furthermore, such rules can actually be, in themselves, inhibiting when attempting to reach more ideal standards in general terms. Avoiding deontological rules in favour of nuanced and situational analysis is hard and is riddled with problems of incommensurate goods and unforeseen consequences. Considering each meal, each moment can be exhausting.
Despite this, we can aim to develop a disposition that is considered, conscious of the proportional dignity and capabilities of sentient creatures and compassionate toward the pain of others. Such an ambition may enable us to imperfectly walk the line between apathy and dogmatism in a way that perfectly captures the complexities of the human condition.
Would I order the BLT?
Probably not, because such an action is seldom justifiable in my given context. Despite this, if you had already ordered it for me – perhaps while I was on my soapbox – I would eat it..
Andrew Costantino, Santa Sabina College, Sydney, Australia
Santa Sabina College Philosophy and Religious Education Teacher Andrew Costantino recently delivered an excellent Ethics Olympiad (Australia’s Ethics Bowl) case analysis presentation. The primary case: Is It OK to Punch a Nazi? The primary metaphor: baking and eating cookies!
cookie ingredients (chocolate chips, an egg, brown sugar, etc.) = case presumptions and facts
the recipe (mix, bake at 350 degrees for 12 mins) = construction of the argument
the eating experience (bland, burnt or perfecto) = the argument’s consequences and implications
Could there be a more delicious way to explain argument construction and analysis? Brilliant!
Costantino also considers and explains subject-centered approaches to ethics, providing substantial analysis from the perspective of Virtue Ethics, action-centered approaches, including Deontological Ethics such as Kantianism, and consequence-based theories, including Utilitarianism.
He does a nice job dividing Kant’s Categorical Imperative into the Humanity Principle and Universality Principle – much better labels than The First and Second Formulations (which I’m guilty of using). And is careful to explain how Utilitarianism should take into account long-term consequences (as suggested by Rule Utilitarianism), and can morph into preference-satisfaction Utilitarianism, as promoted by world-famous Australian moral philosopher, Peter Singer.
Whether you’re a coach, competitor, judge or fan, the vid’s almost certainly worth your time. Thanks to Andrew for putting it together, and thanks to Matthew Wills with Ethics Olympiad for recording and sharing it with the EthicsBowl.org community.
Math teachers often require students to show their work. Even if your answer is correct, they want to see how you got it to confirm that you understand why.
Showing your work in Logic class looks like this… (Logic is only slightly more fun than this suggests)
Showing your work is even more important with theoretical mathematics where the correct answer is unknown. (I imagine problems involving infinity and that “i” symbol I vaguely remember from Calculus…) The transparency enables mathematicians to progress through unknown territory together. Were one to exclaim, “Eureka, X = -12.4!” the rest would rightly reply, “Great. But please explain why. Please show your work.”
Philosophy is similar to theoretical mathematics in this way. The correct answer is often unknown or disputed. Philosophers need to articulate their assumptions, logical moves, caveats and reasoning. That way others can consider their premises’ plausibility, the logical catalysts’ strength etc. – to judge whether the proposed conclusion truly makes sense. And if not, it helps them see how they might repair the reasoning chain to arrive at a better-defended position.
Part of making a good ethics bowl presentation entails explaining how your team arrived at its position. That way the other team and judges can fairly evaluate your view. It’s not enough to simply share your position. You need to thoroughly and clearly divulge the reasoning that got you there.
This exposure can feel intimidating. “What if we’ve made a mistake? They’ll know!” But it’s the only way to demonstrate that your position is worth others’ rational assent. Even if the judges agree with your conclusion (that prison labor is wrong or euthanizing healthy pets is OK or whatever), they need to understand how your team got there. They need to be able to verify the quality of your argument.
So show your work. Not only in math class, and not only in philosophy papers. But at all stages of ethics bowl – your initial presentation, your commentary on the other team’s argument, and during the judges Q&A.
And feel free to show your work in informal political and moral discussions as well. Don’t simply endorse candidate X – explain why you prefer candidate x over candidate y. If your reasons are truly good, maybe you’ll win additional support. If they’re not, finding out and changing your mind before it’s too late is a good thing. And maybe (just maybe) you’ll start a trend. Imagine that – a world in which people clearly explained their positions and modified them (rather than simply reasserting them, only louder) when proven wrong.
With COVID-19 causing ethics bowl cancellations, school disruptions, and generally throwing a wrench into life as we know it, here’s a 10-minute tip vid on how to teach philosophy online. If you have your own ideas (especially ethics-bowl specific stuff), please share — would love to put together a post on how to coach/practice/continue ethics bowl online.
This virus will pass. In the meantime, stay strong! The world will continue to need ethics bowl as a beacon of civility and thoughtfulness (as this crisis is proving). You’re as much a part of that as anyone, so wash those hands 🙂
Sometimes ethics bowls are connected to ethics classes, which usually require ethics papers. Need help writing yours? Coaching others on theirs? Here are 8 simple keys:
Read the Instructions
Download Your Ideas
Make an Argument
Respond to an Objection
Satisfy the Rubric
Revise
Engage the Experts
Be Willing to Grow
Would an 11-minute explanation help? Well, it just so happens…
If you have team members who are intimidated by the public speaking aspects of ethics bowl, here are some quick tips in the form of my Three Commandments of Public Speaking.
Kicking off the DC Area HSEB in 2013
Commandment I: Know Thy Material
Knowing what you’re talking about as a speaker not only improves your content, but your confidence and delivery. Just imagine being asked to give an impromptu lecture on rocket booster o-rings. Right now. Unless you’re a rocket scientist who’s recently lectured on this topic, this would suck.
However, imagine being asked to give a talk two months from now on a topic with which you’re already familiar. Were you to take the time to carefully study it, craft a clear and organized message, and conduct additional background research, you’d a) have much more useful, accurate and informative ideas to share, and b) feel a heck of a lot better about sharing them.
With ethics bowl, knowing what you’re talking about means carefully reading and analyzing the cases, identifying the morally relevant details, drafting and refining a well-supported position, as well as anticipating and being able to respond to objections. It means understanding the nuances of any ethical theories that might be applied, as well as anticipating other takes on the issue, and how you might go about evaluating them. In a nutshell, it means having a breadth of understanding that will facilitate deep analysis on the fly.
Developing this level of mastery for a dozen or more cases can be tough. One strategy is to work up a summary table to help your team organize their thoughts. Click here for an article on doing that via a “case summary matrix.”
Commandment II: Be Thyself
The implicit pressure to adopt the style, mannerisms and tone of the judges (or what your team imagines the judges’ style, mannerisms and tone will be) can be strong, especially if they’re new to applied ethics and ethics bowl.
However, this is both likely to come across as transparently insincere (students are not judges, so why pretend to behave like them?), and to make your team feel a bit slimy.
Encourage them to find and become comfortable speaking in their unique voice, whatever that voice might be. Their “stage self” will be different (a little more polished, a little more formal, but still them) from their “hanging out with friends self,” or their “attending a concert self,” or even their “prepping with the team self.” But if the personalities that shine through are genuine, they’ll be more comfortable and confident, the judges will likely respect them more, and as a coach, their performance will be more likely to make you smile. (Warm smiles of pride are one of the primary perks of being an ethics bowl coach.)
Commandment III: Practice
Last, in order to develop your stage self, and in order to really know what you’re talking about, you have to practice. Your team won’t know exactly what questions will be asked, either by the moderator, the other team, or the judges, and so can’t rehearse responses. But they do know the cases, and they will have general positions sorted out beforehand, and can practice delivering an overview that establishes their mastery of the key details, as well as their general take, which they can customize and elaborate upon per the flow of the bowl.
Rehearsing a 60-second pitch that covers that much will significantly boost their confidence, and will allow them to begin speaking on a strong note. Starting strong will make a nice initial impression, affirming to themselves and everyone in the room that they’ve taken the event seriously.
To give them practice answering questions, simply conduct a mock bowl. How soon to do this during bowl preparation depends on your team’s familiarity with applied ethics, the cases and the bowl process. But there are few better ways to prepare for any event than running through the motions. That’s why actors do dress rehearsals, sports teams scrimmage, boxers spar, and militaries conduct war games. The more mock bowling, the better prepared and comfortable your team will be.
Stage Fright
Last, if you have team members who after carefully studying the material, embracing their stage selves, and rehearsing are still anxious about speaking, click here for a free chapter from my public speaking book on conquering nervousness. My “Urban Honey Badger” assertiveness drill is a little unorthodox. But it works!
For a video overview of my Three Commandments of Public Speaking, check out the below. And if you think your team could use my public speaking book, don’t buy it — just shoot me an email — happy to mail a free copy to any ethics bowl team that would do me the honor of using it. Cheers, Matt
In academic philosophy, an “argument” is a series of claims, called premises, intended to logically support another claim, called the conclusion. Sometimes rather than providing an actual argument, people will simply articulate an unfounded opinion, sometimes emphasizing how strongly they hold it (as if that somehow strengthens its plausibility or gives us objective reason to accept it).
For example:
“It is my strong belief that abortion is wrong except in cases to save the mother’s life. I have believed this since I was young, and it seems obviously true – something even a child could appreciate. How could a moral person support the killing of an innocent baby? They couldn’t, and anyone who does is clearly evil.”
Contrast that with a similar view backed by an actual argument (and absent the inflammatory language):
“Abortions for reasons other than to save the mother’s life are unethical because the Unborn Developing Human, while not yet fully possessing the capacities of personhood (ability to feel pleasure and pain, ability to engage in relationships, ability to engage in higher reason and use it to develop and execute a life plan) is alive (growing, responding to stimuli) and possesses a genetic code that will enable it to develop into a full person, as well as a fully functioning member of the moral community.”
While the above passages share the same conclusion – that abortions are wrong except when necessary to save the mother’s life – the first doesn’t provide any compelling, rational reasons to support that view. It asks rhetorical questions, explains how long the author has held this view, and calls people who disagree mean names. But it doesn’t offer reasons, logically arranged, to support a conclusion.
The second passage, on the other hand, makes the case that abortions other than to save the life of the mother are immoral because (“because” is a premise indicator) the Unborn Developing Human (or baby/fetus if you prefer) will become a full person, and a full member of the moral community if allowed to grow and develop. Therefore, while aborting a UDH wouldn’t terminate an actualized person, it would terminate a potential person, which this author implies is morally wrong.
They’d do well to further explore why this would be wrong, to concede that UDHs are not actual persons (yet), and to argue why killing a potential person would be so wrong as to override all reasons a pregnant woman might have interest in aborting, beginning with pregnancies that are the result of rape. But we consider this brief argument here simply to show what an actual argument looks like contrasted with an emotionally laden opinion.
To the extent that your team offers arguments rather than mere opinions, you’ll help advance our collective understanding of the issue, and do better in ethics bowl.
Depending on your bowl organizer’s tastes, your team may need to prepare to discuss up to fifteen cases. That’s a lot of material – a lot of philosophical twists and turns, too.
One way to make it more manageable for your team is to develop a case summary matrix.
Customizing is allowed, but the basic idea is for each case to have a concise snapshot of:
Basic details (who, what, when, where, why)
Moral considerations (the key ones, from different directions)
The team’s view (in a nutshell, how they evaluated the case – answered the key study questions)
Getting that much on paper will make case coverage more manageable. But for an even more robust and complete matrix consider adding:
A possible objection (how someone might critique your team’s view)
A reply to that objection
Bonus points (anything relevant not included already, which may or may not arise during the judges’ Q&A portion)
If you’re a more heavy-handed coach, you can develop this matrix for your team. Or if, like me, you prefer to encourage your team to develop their own views, you can simply draw a blank table of the matrix on the board, fill in one or two as examples, and ask particular students fill in the rest.
This is a good way to get a team on the same page when the bowl is looming. But could also be used early in the season, and then revised as your bowl prep sessions play out.
Here’s a partially completed example that you’re welcome to download and edit, which I used with my own ethics bowl team during the 2017-2018 season. Enjoy!
Some coaches take for granted that if their team understands Utilitarianism, Kantianism, Virtue Ethics, Feminist Care Ethics or some other ethical theory well enough to apply it, they should – the judges are sure to be impressed.
But there’s been backlash from bowl enthusiasts, judges among them, who worry sometimes ethics bowl becomes ethical theory bowl.
Teams get hung up on a favored theory and miss nuances a common-sense moral analysis would catch. Plus, no theory is immune from criticism, and many judges have their favorites. You train your team to apply consequentialism, then face a panel of deontologist judges! Not good.
This actually came up during a recent conversation with ethics bowl creator, Bob Ladenson.
Matt: Bob, you mentioned how witnessing so many ethics bowls has changed your views on moral philosophy.
Bob: Yes, I have much more openness and wiliness to consider views that are very different than my intellectual instincts tend to take me to.
An example is you know how in a match very often teams will approach an issue by examining it from the perspective of various ethical theories? At our summer ethics bowl workshop meetings this often receives strong criticism from philosophy professors who consider this a sort of shopping list, formulaic approach to ethics. And that’s the way I felt in the beginning – I thought it was kind of naïve what the students were doing.
But over the years I’ve come to appreciate what the students were doing, and often use that approach myself, and am much more open to looking at things from the perspective of a philosophy that might have fundamental issues.
Afterwards Bob shared a recent email exchange that helped clarify his view.
Bob: I regard major philosophical theories of ethics as immensely important conceptual resources for thinking about controversial, highly viewpoint dependent, hard to resolve ethical issues. I don’t think though that they’re needed in each and every such case…
Truth to tell, however, I still don’t have a clearly worked out position with which I’m satisfied. Temperamentally, like John Dewey, I’m partial to philosophical analyses that emphasize underlying commonalities in seemingly divergent viewpoints.
Thus… I stress that the attributes of open mindedness, readiness to engage in meaningful conversation about controversial ethical issues, and deliberative thoughtfulness, which all are indispensable for rigorous analytical thinking in applied ethics likewise qualify as virtues of ethical discourse.
Bob’s view seems to be that analyzing cases through the lens of ethical theory can be illuminating, but that this isn’t necessary. It’s far more important that your team approach the cases with the right attitude: “open mindedness, readiness to engage in meaningful conversation about controversial ethical issues, and deliberative thoughtfulness.”
I would tend to agree. But bottom line, will using ethical theory more likely help or harm your team come bowl day?
From my experience, using theory during bowl prep is almost always helpful, but whether your team should explicitly employ Utilitarianism or Feminist Care Ethics during the bowl itself depends on how they’re prepared to use them.
I’ve seen teams namedrop Kant without explaining how the Categorical Imperative works or clearly applying it to the case. This made them appear less competent than had they avoided Kantianism in the first place. I’ve also seen teams offer conflicting analyses of the same case from the perspective of multiple theories, with no suggestions on how to resolve the tension. Judges were visibly unimpressed.
Analyzing cases from the perspective of ethical theories during bowl prep can be a great way to clarify the morally relevant considerations, as well as what’s at stake and most important. This is because ethical theories are really just amplifications and logical defenses of moral considerations we already intuitively endorse.
Kantianism: rational consistency and respect for persons
Feminist Care Ethics: the importance of relational ties, and how we should usually prioritize the interests of loved ones
Virtue Ethics: the relevance of how our actions reveal and shape our character
People naturally apply these same reasons to moral questions, and so will your team. The benefit of employing ethical theory during bowl prep is that this can help clarify, order and validate your team’s moral intuitions, which can sharpen and strengthen the arguments they present at the bowl.
If your team’s really good, they can even namedrop old Kant. Just make sure they’re ready to illustrate that universalizability test during the judges Q&A, should one of them request it.
But don’t take my word for it. What’s been your experience with ethical theory and ethics bowl? Overall helpful or harmful?
