I’ll often slide Ethics Bowl cases into my philosophy classes based on topic. The NHSEB’s case search function and IEB’s organized case archive make this pretty easy. But sometimes it’s fun to let students choose which cases and topics they’ll cover.
Below is a list of human-generated summaries of the 2025-2026 NHSEB and IEB cases. You could turn this into a paper ballot or load them into a BrightSpace/Canvas/Blackboard survey, allow each student to pick their top five, then work through the most popular as time allows. I loaded my poll into BrightSpace – happy to export and share on request.
They’re not in order – I moved them around a bit, listing NHSEB case 5: Grade Expectations first because I think that one will catch students’ attention. IEB case 4: Shutting Out Le Pen will probably also be hot given the connection to American politics, but we’ll see – might be a topic students (wisely?) choose to avoid.
I’m polling my community college Intro to Ethics students now and am eager to see which they select. If you do the same and would like to compare results, or if you have any trouble tying the descriptions back to the case titles (I realize most folks are doing NHSEB or IEB, not both), please reach out. Also feel free to list your own favorites in a comment.
- Whether it’s OK for teachers who ban student AI use to use AI to prepare lectures or assignments, or grade.
- Whether SNAP benefits recipients should be barred from purchasing soda or other junk foods.
- Whether to allow prisoners to trade organ donations or bone marrow for reduced sentences.
- Whether the U.S. should adopt France’s approach to presidential elections and allow candidates convicted of felonies to become president, or whether France should adopt the U.S.’s approach and allow candidates to become president regardless of their criminal records, so long as they haven’t been convinced of insurrection/government overthrow (France banned Le Pen from running for five years based on an embezzlement conviction, while the U.S. allowed Trump to become president despite a felony conviction for falsifying business records tied to election hush money – essentially whether democratic popularity should override criminal convictions or whether certain convictions should disqualify candidates from high office).
- Whether it’s OK for CGI to generate dwarfs in films or if dwarf acting roles should go to actual dwarves, whether it’s OK for Black Frenchmen to play traditionally White characters in The Beauty and the Beast, whether it was OK for Ariel to be African-American in the remake of The Little Mermaid, etc.
- Whether police officers and prisons should accommodate Muslims’ religious dietary requirements (no pork, fasting during Ramadan), similar to how Jews’ and vegans’ requirements are often accommodated.
- Whether it was OK for an activist artist to starve piglets to death in order to encourage scrutiny of the factory farming system.
- Whether the international community should provide aid to Afghanistan in order to help its citizens receive health care and food, or whether aid should be withheld in order to pressure the Taliban to improve conditions for women and girls.
- Whether the new “Golden Visa” program allowing foreign nationals to purchase U.S. residency and a path to citizenship for $1-5 million should be continued or ended.
- Whether it’s OK to sentence murderers who commit their crimes at age 20 or 19 to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
- Whether more states should allow people to choose to “compost” their bodies in lieu of cremation or traditional burial.
- Whether it’s OK to require tourists to conduct community service or pay extra fees in order to visit crowded sites to reduce (or at least receive compensation for) over-toured sites.
- Whether killers of women should receive harsher sentences or whether “femicide” should be discouraged by addressing root causes that make women vulnerable such as improving access to education and small business loans, or programs encouraging men to better value and respect women.
- Whether it was OK for a town in Michigan to ban all political and ideology flags on public property as a way to diffuse tensions between the conservative Muslim majority and the LGBTQ+ community.
- Whether paid surrogate mothering should be allowed across borders (wealthy couples hiring surrogates in poorer countries, for example).
- Whether it’s OK for a zoo to solicit aging pets to use as food for exotic animals.
- Whether it’s OK to allow AI-generated likenesses of murder victims to “testify” at their killers’ sentencing hearings.
- Whether prison visitors should be allowed to meet in person with their loved ones or only allowed to interact via webcam.
- Whether it’s OK to edit genes in heritable ways (so the changes don’t simply impact that person, but their offspring and the broader human gene pool).
- Whether a park trail should be paved so it’s more accessible to persons in wheelchairs or left unpaved in order to better protect the natural habitat.
- Whether a lady should tell her roommate that the man the roommate’s dating was previously married and has a child.
- Whether it’s OK for snack food manufacturers to modify their portions to better attract consumers on new GLP-1 weight loss drugs.
- Whether it’s OK for the Amish to pull their kids from school after the 8th grade.
- Whether it’s OK to use brain implants to improve one’s competitive video game playing abilities.
- Whether to limit or endorse AI as a personal therapist.
- Whether Home Owners Associations that impose fines on residents for using unapproved decorations or failing to care for their yard are OK.
Whether a political minority group in Sri Lanka should… I’m not sure. My team found IEB case 6: Tamil Autonomy especially technical and dense, and the moral upshot seemed to focus on whether a minority group should push for national independence. If you understand that case better than we do, please volunteer to write a guest case analysis! I’m sure other teams are struggling with it as well.
