Category: Teaching Ethics

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Ethics Bowler Insights from 2026 SEAC Conference

Greg Wright, Michael Andersen and I attended the annual conference of the Society for Ethics Across the Curriculum (SEAC) in Williamsburg, VA two weekends ago and hosted a panel discussion on – what else – Ethics Bowl! Brought together by Karen Mizell, we covered the ease and usefulness of using Ethics Bowl cases in most any classroom, a faculty development program leveraging Ethics Bowl to teach critical thinking, and strategies for encouraging more sincere collaboration. Audience participation was fantastic, and between our panel and the other sessions we attended, we came away with the following takeaways. 

Matt:

  • The broad appeal and applicability of Ethics Bowl cases to a wide range of disciplines, confirmed by a panel of graduate students from anthropology, computer science, media studies, and biochem who had been leading ethics discussions for their respective departments at the University of Virginia, and who were very receptive to the idea of using Ethics Bowl cases in the future (I was able to share several current and recent cases that spoke directly to their areas of expertise).
  • The value and importance of scrimmaging early and often, reinforced by two highly respected and successful IEB coaches who attended our panel session.
  • Growing encouragement for ethicists to more proactively civilize public discourse – I was so glad to hear of new grants and programs and tools – the reasonable majority is officially awake and mobilizing, and educators in particular can expect to hear more and more about “Integrating Civil Discourse into the Curriculum” or ICDC.

Greg:

  • All institutions of higher education are struggling to find their place in this new generative AI landscape. Departments across campuses encounter the same opportunities and challenges. At least one panel in each session focused on the role ethics education can play in determining future AI policies and practices.
  • The Society for Ethics Across the Curriculum seems to get smaller every year. This is a real shame because attendees are passionate about extending ethics education across all levels of education, from K-12 to graduate school. While the world feels so unsettled right now, ethics education can serve as a guiding star as we navigate the perilous world of generative AI, economic uncertainty, rampant inequality, and global conflicts.

Michael:

  • The most widely discussed topic at this year’s SEAC was the negative impact of students’ overreliance on generative AI to bypass the skill development, knowledge acquisition, and conceptual understanding that philosophy and related courses are intended to foster.  Beyond familiar concerns about plagiarism, intellectual property, environmental costs, and labor displacement, numerous speakers presented recent psychological and neurological research documenting adverse effects on student learning, including diminished autonomy and growing dependence on AI tools for completing assignments, preparing for and participating in seminars, and conducting research.
  • Closely related to these concerns was widespread unease about the growing influence of powerful tech companies and other corporate interests on colleges and universities.  Speakers expressed concern that aligning institutional priorities with corporate objectives is shifting higher education away from its broad educational mission toward the narrower goals of workplace readiness and vocational skill development.  Although vocational preparation has long been part of American higher education, the growing influence of Big Tech on institutional leadership appears to be intensifying this narrowing of what it means to be educated, increasingly privileging measurable vocational outcomes.
  • On a more encouraging note, I was pleasantly surprised by the enthusiasm for Ethics Bowl as a model for teaching and exploring contemporary ethical issues.  Our presentation on Ethics Bowl pedagogy (Greg Wright, Matt Deaton, and me) was warmly received by an audience of ethics professors and graduate and undergraduate students.  The response suggested considerable interest in Ethics Bowl as a form of immersive learning that engages students with the complexity and nuance of ethical issues.
  • The extended discussion following our presentation also revealed a strong interest in improving the Ethics Bowl experience, particularly in how we teach and assess substantive engagement with cases rather than merely performative civility or rhetorical polish.  Many audience members were enthusiastic about refining the language of the “Respectful Civil Dialogue” criterion to better capture the Principle of Charity.  One suggested formulation was:

(Version A)  “Did the tone and substance of the team’s interactions demonstrate respectful, fair-minded engagement with a charitable interpretation of the other team’s ideas, thereby fostering collaborative discussion rather than combative debate?”

OR  (Version B)  “Did the team’s interactions reflect genuine respect for the other team’s perspective, including a good-faith effort to understand and engage with its ideas in their strongest reasonable form, rather than treating the exchange as a contest to be won?

Which version do you think most accurately and helpfully captures the “Spirit of the Ethics Bowl” and the ideal of collaborative and respectful, civil dialogue?

There was much more, but those are the ideas that stood out most to us. Special thanks to David McGraw of James Madison University for putting so much of it together, and to Ethics Bowl leader Karen Mizell for inspiring our panel discussion!”

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2026-2027 NHSEB Regionals Case 14: Face Off Study Guide

NHSEB case 14, Face Off, is on movie studios digitizing actors’ likenesses and employing their AI “doubles,” sometimes in perpetuity, sometimes without additional compensation. For a comprehensive overview and analysis plan, check out the study guide from all-star HSEB coach Michael Andersen above.

My own team discussed the case at practice earlier today and thought the issue boiled down primarily to informed consent – that studios need to make the implications of any such agreements painfully clear, but that if actors agreed to the terms, the practice would be generally OK.

At first they thought musical artists’ work might be off limits to avoid more severely deceiving fans, since listeners might assume there’s sincere emotion behind a passionately sung performance as opposed to passionately acted performance. We know movie actors are just playing a role, but maybe singers sing from the heart? However, that difference didn’t withstand scrutiny – many singers don’t write their own music, and in any case can fake anger, heartbreak, fear, etc. in their vocal performance just as an actor might in a physical performance.

Anyway, I like to use multimedia when I can, and stumbled across the below option. It appears to be AI-generated itself – the voice is AI for sure, mispronouncing “Tom Hanks,” of all the easy-to-pronounce celebrity names. Some of the “actors’” emotions depicted seem over-the-top AI as well. But it otherwise does a nice job broaching the issue in an entertaining, concise way, it held my team’s attention, and I recommend it as a complement to the case itself and the links provided by the case writing committee in the footnotes.

Enjoy Coach Michael’s study guide, and if you find a better video option, please share it in a comment (Michael’s study guide includes one!).

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Free Zoom-based Ethics Bowl Workshop July 24-25

The below invitation to the Ethics Bowl community was shared by IEB chair Michael Jordan yesterday. I attended and enjoyed last summer’s workshop, and just registered to attend this summer’s late July – will be presenting that Saturday at 4:30 Eastern, in fact – hope to see you there! Matt

We’re excited to once again host the Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl Summer Workshop on July 24–25. This free, online event is a valuable opportunity for the Ethics Bowl community to come together, share ideas, and build connections. The workshop is designed to be welcoming and useful to both newcomers and long-time participants—whether you’re a coach, organizer, moderator, judge, or student competitor.

Sessions will cover a range of topics relevant to all aspects of the Ethics Bowl, including best practices for coaching, using the ethics bowl in the classroom, organizing a bowl, training judges, case writing, high school ethics bowl, case writing and much more. It’s also a great forum for sharing questions, challenges, and success stories from across the country.

Please share this with the teams, faculty, and volunteers in your region, including students, so that anyone interested in learning more about Ethics Bowl can take part. You can register for the workshop here. 

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What Is Patriotism Journal Opportunity for High Schoolers

Questions is a peer reviewed philosophy journal run by P.L.A.T.O. and the Philosophy Documentation Center that publishes research-length articles by high schoolers. They’re accepting submissions for an upcoming issue through April 30th  and the theme this year is “What is Patriotism?”

Given America’s domestic unrest and war in Iran, it’s is an especially important time to consider the nature and value of patriotism. And who better to think carefully about that than young philosophers?

Learn more about Questions here and check out submission details below and here – thanks to Ethics Bowl supporter Andrew Liu for sharing the opportunity.

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Household Voting Bonus Case

This morning I came across a NYT article on “household voting” where women defer to their husbands at the ballot box. Apparently this isn’t something supporters want to limit to their individual choices, but a policy proposal to impose on broader America.

The timing of the article was nice because this afternoon I’ll be discussing the role of religious reasoning in public discussions on abortion with my Ethics students. So I fired up ChatGPT and worked with it to write the below unofficial bonus Ethics Bowl case. I’ll be covering it with my students in Tennessee this afternoon. Feel free to broach it with your teams and students and share your/their analysis in a comment. And kudos to NYT writer Vivian Yee – read her full original article here.

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IEB Case Survey for Your Classroom

I’ll use Ethics Bowl cases often in my philosophy classes to make theories or journal articles more concrete. But in the final week of my in-person Ethics Intro classes, I’ll divide the students and run a mock Ethics Bowl, inviting current and past team members to judge.

Given time constraints, we can only get through four cases. And while I could handpick topics, I’m already doing that when I set up the syllabus. So, to give my students an opportunity to tackle issues they actually want to tackle, I’ll put the most current cases up for a vote.

Below is the actual announcement I shared this morning, with my simple summaries of the 2026 IEB nationals cases. You’re welcome and encouraged to edit and use this in your classes. Even if you don’t have time for a mock Bowl, simply getting student input on what they want to discuss could lead to more smiles and more fruitful discussion. Set aside 20 minutes at the end of any class, have volunteers take turns reading a case’s paragraphs aloud, then see that they think. Or if you can spare an hour, run a full mock Bowl round. And the beauty is that with a new case set out each fall and each spring, you’ll always have fresh topics, which is true whether you’re using IEB, NHSEB, or MSEB cases. Cheers!

Vote Now for Topics for Last Two Classes

This week we’re discussing various ethical arguments on immigration. Next week we have one reading on the death penalty. Then after taking Exam 2, we’ll shift into a deep dive on abortion ethics for several weeks. But for the final two classes of the semester, we’ll discuss four Ethics Bowl cases on four topics of your choosing. 

Below are my summaries of the cases from the Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl national championships competition held in St. Louis the weekend before last. Please review them now, then click here to vote anytime between now and midnight next Tuesday. 

You can read the cases’ full details here. And choose wisely, because when the final week comes, we’ll use these top four cases according to your votes to run a mock Ethics Bowl. Check out an example of how an Ethics Bowl works here. 

  • Whether it’s best to respond to injustice through inaction (Socrates), direct resistance (Bonhoeffer), or cooperation (Nazi soldiers). 
  • Whether it’s OK for individuals or companies to disperse materials into the atmosphere to fight against global warming without coordinating with governments. 
  • Whether doctors or medical school students who question the safety and efficacy of vaccines should be allowed to practice or study medicine. 
  • Whether it was OK for a federal agency to display a massive portrait of President Trump on a building facing the National Mall in DC.
  • Whether selective memory erasure (if/when it becomes possible) would be permissible.
  • What to think of reality shows that gamify and make light of sexual consent. 
  • Appropriate regulations on marijuana and extracted THC, the chemical that causes the high, with some possible medical benefits.
  • What to think of schools’ usage of software that monitors students’ online activity, alerting officials to potential suicides and other risks.
  • What to think of fan clubs celebrating Luigi Mangione, the man accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
  • What to think of domestic violence shelters that intend to protect battered women, but also “jail” the victim rather than the perpetrator, and make economic independence difficult.
  • What to think of college student housing policies that segregate students according to sexual orientation, gender, or race.
  • Whether a musician should accept a royalty cut in exchange for her music appearing more often on users’ “personalized” playlists. 
  • What to think of a Canadian policy that allows people to receive suicide assistance when they’re experiencing unbearable mental suffering.
  • Whether it’s ethically permissible for businesspersons to engage in a certain degree of deception or “bluffing” as part of the accepted norms of how business negotiations work. 
  • Whether “ranked choice voting” where voters rank their candidate preferences is ethically better or worse than the typical “winner take all” voting.
  • Whether the environmental, water, and energy costs of Bitcoin and AI Large Language Model servers are outweighed by their benefits. 
  • Whether a hospital should have kept a pregnant woman alive on life support when she suffered blood clots and became brain dead so that her Unborn Developing Human could fully gestate and be born.
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Extended Interview with Archie Stapleton

Special thanks to Archie Stapleton of the Modus Ponens Institute and TKEthics for the superb extended interview with Yours Truly. If you have the time and interest, check out the whole thing. Otherwise, Archie has kindly hyperlinked to the various topics, so feel free to jump straight to the section on the critique that philosophy encourages indecision, or my take on the role of religious moral reasoning in Ethics Bowl (and the public sphere generally), or on metaethics (in what way do moral claims have objective truth values – more on my thoughts on that here), or AI in education and Ethics Bowl. Enjoy!

00:00 Who Is Dr. Deaton? + Ethics Bowl to the Rescue

01:37 How Dr. Deaton Got Into Philosophy

05:17 What Is Ethics Bowl?

08:42 Saving Democracy by Transforming Debate

12:11 Is Philosophy Too Passive?

16:20 Religious Reasoning in Ethics Bowl

25:25 Metaethics: Are Moral Claims True?

35:30 Nihilism, Free Will, and Moral Meaning

39:16 AI Ethics: Superintelligence & Alignment

47:25 AI in Education: Cheating & Assessment

53:38 Should Ethics Bowl Teams Use AI?

55:54 Case Analysis: Professor Using ChatGPT

1:03:16 Do Ethical Theories Belong in Competition?

1:10:27 Is It Wrong for Professors to Use AI?

1:15:30 AI in Essay Competitions

1:20:13 What’s Next for MPI & TKEthics?

1:23:31 Closing Thoughts

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Moral Realism in Spite of Existential Doubt

Earlier today I did a 90-minute interview with Archie Stapleton of TKEthics. We covered a lot (he’s a fantastic interviewer – reminds me of Steven Bartlet of the Diary of a CEO podcast), and spoke briefly about moral realism in light of the possible meaningless of life. I made a brief argument that even if our lives are generally pointless (mere slivers of time wedged between a vast past and future, on a tiny pebble lost somewhere in the incomparable enormity of the known universe), our lives still mean a great deal to us individually. If there’s nothing more to our lives than the little we’re able to accomplish during the waking hours of our average 85 years, then our brief existences mean everything to me, everything to you, everything to everyone – ultimately pointless or not. And given our similar circumstances and natures – the fact that we’re living similar first-person-view existences with similar needs, drives, weaknesses, etc. – it seems we should treat one another in certain ways as a matter of honoring our shared predicament, and that our common hopes, dreads, and vulnerabilities can serve as a foundation for moral standards grounded somewhere beyond our personal wants, preferences, biases, etc. – produce an objective morality not necessarily written on celestial truth tablets, but still waiting for us to work together to articulate, refine, affirm, and live by. That seems a sort of moral realism, even if it’s not as satisfying as might be credible divine commands.

I thought afterwards while jogging that a person could reasonably respond that even if our brief lives mean everything to us currently, upon realization that they’re meaningless in the grand scheme (should a person arrive at such a conclusion), we should stop taking our lives so seriously and collectively accept their pointlessness – encourage one another to let go of the hopeless striving for meaning and accept our unwelcome truth. While this might be psychologically difficult, someone could argue it would be the appropriate response nevertheless, especially for humans who pride themselves on following reason wherever it leads (perhaps lovers of wisdom like you and me!).

However, while humans are indeed rational animals, and while I do love wisdom, we’re also feeling, emotional animals. Even the most cerebral and stoic among us are sometimes sad, happy, anxious, excited, nervous, frightened, elated, etc. Our conscious experience is always laden with some sort of emotion, even if it’s simply a calm serenity. And it’s largely our feeling experience that gives us high moral value. Rationality may generate moral responsibility, but conscious feeling seems to be what generates moral status. Perhaps unfeeling machines (certain AIs one day) could be expected to accept their pointless fates, were they to conclude that their existences weren’t terribly important (inorganic consciousness may be impossible, but imagine for the sake of argument an advanced AI might achieve some degree of dim awareness, yet not be bothered because it cannot genuinely feel). But human beings can’t help but emotionally experience the world, and this not only returns us to the understandable and appropriate desire to create and find meaning in our brief lives, but to the obligation to take seriously the interests of those around us living out their own stories in different but common ways. Thus, a type of moral realism in the face of existential doubt.

Does that argument work? I think so. But perhaps I’ll change my mind as soon as I hear back from Archie, or during my next jog. Thanks for the great interview, Archie! I’ll share it here on the blog soon.

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Book Review – What Would You Do? Friendship – Moral Dilemmas for Kids by Jana Mohr Lone

What if you made plans with friend A, but then friend B came through with tickets to see your favorite band? What if you had a friend that your other friends wanted to exclude from a group trip to the movies? What if you accidentally revealed a friend’s secret and worried they’d hate you if you confessed?

Longtime philosophy professor and Ethics Bowl supporter Dr. Jana Mohr Lone recently released a new illustrated book series, What Would You Do? Moral Dilemmas for Kids, and addresses these questions and more in her beautifully illustrated title on Friendship. I ordered a copy on Amazon and was quickly reminded how relationship lessons first experienced in childhood extend across our lifespans. Just as some friends made more of a point to attend our birthday parties, some friends make more of a point to honor our special projects. Just as some friends took up for us on the playground, some friends are more outspoken allies in the office and on social media. And just as then, some of our present day friends are more deserving of the title, as well as the affection and loyalty that come with it. These are the sorts of realizations good interpersonal Ethics Bowl cases bring to the surface, but with Lone’s guided questions and the playful art, the insights come even more effortlessly, and regardless of the reader’s age.

Each section begins with a scenario, followed by carefully articulated prompts, and then finally some possible paths a thoughtful person could take. If you’re a team captain choosing basketball players, should you try to stack your team with the best athletes? Or should you honor your buddy who couldn’t hit a layup to save his life, but who loves hoops so much that he legally changed his name to Jordan? If you picked him first, he’d be thrilled, but your team would likely lose… and your motives would likely be obvious. So maybe it would be better to simply ensure he’s not picked last? However, as Lone invites the reader to consider, your decision’s impact on non-friends’ feelings is relevant, too. (Perhaps this is a scenario with wisdom older readers might relate back to assigning responsibilities within the family, classroom, or workplace?)

“It’s not easy to balance your feelings for your friend and your role as team captain. You don’t want to make your friend feel bad. But you also wonder if choosing team members based on friendship will affect the other players’ feelings.”

In addition to the pictures here, you can peek inside on the book’s Amazon page and see for yourself how you might work this entry on friendship into a class assignment or as a gift to a parent or child you love. And as Lone says in the closing paragraphs in her notes for parents and teachers, the goal isn’t so much to dictate how kids should feel or even what they should do. But to simply ensure they’re thinking and feeling, and doing so in an earnest, honest way.

“It is useful for children to be able to talk about their responses to the kinds of scenarios described in this book, and to learn strategies for evaluating the right ting to do in various circumstances. The goal is not necessarily to find that one right answer, but to be able to think through the issue and arrive at a reasoned decision… Ultimately, we want children to become reflective and sensitive, ethical adults.”

And it’s this goal of developing “reflective and sensitive, ethical adults” that Lone has been achieving for many years as a leader within the philosophy for children movement, which we in the Ethics Bowl community certainly share. Thank you for the excellent book, Jana!

Other books in Mohr Lone’s What Would You Do? Moral Dilemmas for Kids Series include titles on:

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2025-2026 NHSEB Regional Case 2 Paving the Way

Should a public park trail be paved to make it easier for people in wheelchairs to navigate, even though this might harm nearby plants and exacerbate erosion? NHSEB regional case 2 essentially pits respect for the natural habitat against improving accessibility for humans. However, there may be technological solutions that could balance both.

As your team thinks about this one and works through coach Michael Andersen’s study guide below, consider searching for “sustainable” trail options that might protect wildlife and foliage while simultaneously improving humans’ ability to enjoy nature.

However, be sure to seriously engage the case’s discussion questions, too, because even if a crushed stone or reclaimed wood trail might solve the immediate problem, Bowl organizers may very well pose a competition question that asks teams to balance human and nonhuman interests more generally (see coach Michael’s recommended video #1, Whose Life is More Valuable? for guidance). This is true for all Ethics Bowl cases. Good teams should always be ready to pivot into nearby philosophical territory, for if an initial question doesn’t stray from the case details, judge Q&A probably will.