Footage of murder victim Chris Pelkey played in court during sentencing of his killer
This past May, a judge in Arizona viewed AI-generated “testimony” from murder victim Chris Pelkey during the sentencing of his killer. If you watch the video above, you’ll see that the technology is pretty basic. It’s Mr. Pelkey’s likeness and apparent voice, which is confirmed with included footage recorded prior to his death. But the special effects aren’t seamless – it’s pretty obvious it’s a deepfake, which makes sense since Mr. Pelkey had been killed four years prior.
Interestingly, Mr. Pelkey’s likeness speaks of mercy and forgiveness. He says that he and his killer might have been friends in another life. And at the end, there’s footage of him fishing, suggesting a peaceful afterlife. Rather than his avatar’s script being generated by AI, it was written by his sister who had been thinking about what she’d say in her post-trial sentencing impact statement for at least two years. In crafting the script, she interviewed Mr. Pelkey’s elementary schoolteachers, his prom date, fellow Army servicemembers, friends, and other family.
My team discussed this case briefly, and one worry was that judges might put more stock in testimony of this nature than is deserved. We can’t know for sure what murder victims might have wanted. Judges realize this, but might be inappropriately swayed to grant more weight to speculation from an AI-generated video figure as opposed to a family member. In this case, Mr. Pelkey’s avatar suggested a possible desire for leniency. But there’s no reason to think that would always be the case were this to become common practice. And perhaps driven by the Mr. Pelkey’s avatar’s warmth and personability, the judge ultimately sentenced his killer to 10.5 years in prison, which was 1 year more than prosecutors requested.
Further, as broached by the case writers, usage of speculative testimony from a deceased victim opens the door to using the same from deceased, uncooperative, or hard-to-locate witnesses. A prosecutor or defense attorney could imagine what a witness might have said were they able to testify (and probably imagine testimony that would be most helpful for their case), and pass off hearsay as firsthand testimony using a similar AI-avatar technique. The jury could be reminded that such a deepfake witness wasn’t real. But they’d likely still be more emotionally swayed than warranted.
As you continue to think about the stakeholders, benefits, drawbacks and risks of allowing deepfakes in the courtroom, work through coach Michael Andersen’s excellent study guide below, which includes a link to a Court TV interview with Mr. Pelkey’s sister.
Discussion on the proposal featuring two former prisoners – clip from Coach Michael’s attached study guide
IEB case 1 and NHSEB case 12, “A Pound of Flesh” (yep, same case) is about the Massachusetts legislature’s proposal to knock time off of prisoners’ sentences in exchanged for organ and bone marrow donations. We could put “donations” in scare quotes because depending on their environment, incarcerated individuals may not be making sufficiently free choices. But that’s just one factor to consider – here are several more based on discussions with my IEB and NHEB teams, followed by an excellent study guide by coach Michael Andersen. If you’re open to sharing your thoughts on this case, please share in a comment.
The proposed law would cap sentence reductions at 1 year, presumably awarding more time off for more invasive/dangerous/long-term detrimental donations and/or more needed organs.
There’s a shortage of organs for certain minority groups, and this program could rectify that unfairness, making it less difficult for minorities in need to receive an organ.
Any reduction in criminals’ sentences could be perceived to dishonor their victims or victims’ loved ones.
Allowing inmates to donate organs could serve their rehabilitation and inspire additional character growth, igniting a habit of giving and expanding their concern for others.
Such donations could be likened to organ selling given prisoners’ less than ideal circumstances, but we typically endorse monetary compensation for blood and gamete donations, as well as for surrogate mothering, so this wouldn’t necessarily render the practice unacceptable (though there are differences – blood regenerates and wombs can gestate multiple times, whereas kidneys do not grow back).
Finally, something my teams didn’t consider, but The Young Turk commentators brought up in one of the clips shared in coach Michael ‘s study guide below, is that were this proposal to become law, there’s a risk that sentences might become longer or prison conditions worse in order to coerce more “donations.” Hopefully the prisons system would not do this. But given the unmet needs of many waiting for various transplants, it’s definitely a risk.
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.
Case 3 in the NHSEB case set winds up being largely about interpersonal ethics, but begins with a privacy policy frame. Coach Michael Andersen in Washington shared the below excellent study guide, which recommends the above excellent privacy-related video by Ethics Bowl researcher and advocate Michael Vazquez at UNC. My team discussed the case week before last, then revisited it briefly last week after watching the video – excellent context which helped sharpen their view. Thanks to both Michaels!
*10/22/2025 Update: two volunteers have stepped forward – thank you, Greg Bock and Tammy Cowart of UT-Tyler’s Center for Ethics!*
As an applied ethicist, the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics’s annual conference is the most intellectually satisfying gathering I’ve had the pleasure to attend. My first was in grad school around 2007 (it seems there were several in Cincinnati back then), and it’s always a pleasure to return, especially since the meeting coincides with IEB nationals. You’re among some of the most serious ethicists from across the country (and sometimes from around the world), as well as many of the most dedicated Ethics Bowl organizers, coaches, judges, and participants.
The 2026 APPE conference will be in St. Louis March 5-8. I plan to be there and use the opportunity to not only catch excellent paper presentations, attend a few IEB nationals rounds, and say hi to old friends, but to share my new book. What better audience for Ethics Bowl to the Rescue than professional ethicists and regional Ethics Bowl champs? And a great way for any author to share their work at an APPE meeting is to host an “Author Meets Critics” session.
If you live nearby, can acquire travel sponsorship, or were planning to attend anyway, I need a couple of thoughtful critics, and I’ll make your job super easy. Just email matt (at) mattdeaton.com to confirm your interest, I’ll send you a copy of the book and several ideas. For example:
The book’s title suggests something Ethics Bowl cannot deliver—a fast and certain “rescue” from our perilous situation.
Deaton repeatedly invokes Socrates throughout the book—on the cover, in the opening chapter, in the Bowls Behind Bars chapter, in the closing chapter—yet presents arguments that are not as rigorous as Socrates himself would have endorsed.
Ethics Bowl’s peaceful, conciliatory approach to difficult moral and political issues is apt to be taken advantage of by unscrupulous political extremists and therefore ought not be encouraged – Ethics Bowlers ought to be joining debaters rather than the other way around.
Recruiting ethicists, philosophers, and ethics-minded debaters to join the Ethics Bowl movement risks diverting energy more desperately needed on the front lines of the fight for democracy and justice.
Deaton’s aggressive denunciation of traditional debate is too heavy-handed and apt to alienate more debaters that it recruits.
In vigorously advocating for Ethics Bowl and at times attacking and demeaning traditional debate, Deaton adopts what he claims to be arguing to supplant – an attack-style debate-like approach.
While Deaton claims to be a serious ethicist and friend of high moral standards, he mentions several behaviors unbecoming of a moral exemplar, including:
Training martial arts, which are violent
Driving an F-150 across the country, contributing to greenhouse gas emissions
Recommending that Ethics Bowl teams and educators learn to use AI as a coach and thought partner, completely neglecting AI’s extreme power consumption and potential impact on the environment
I have responses to the above, but not all will be fully satisfactory, and I’m OK with that. The book wasn’t intended to be a bulletproof philosophical argument, but an Ethics Bowl recruiting tool, which means in many cases readability, personability, and entertainment overrode logical rigor.
Really, it’s ripe for critique. So if you’re up for joining my Author Meets Critics session at the 2026 APPE conference next March in St. Louis, let’s do it!
Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl case 12 is on “the intentional murder of women because of their gender” or femicide. My team broached this sad topic last week, and one promising approach to decreasing femicide discussed in the case is mitigating possible root causes. For example, “the South African government’s approach to femicide has emphasized financial independence, built on the assumption that resolving economic hardship can help assuage the conditions that lead to femicides,” presumably under the assumption that women completely dependent upon men might be more vulnerable to inescapable violent relationships.
For a small-scale, grassroots example of a strategy to decreasing domestic violence generally, an organization where I live in East Tennessee hosts an annual “Me and My Guy” daddy daughter dance as a way to encourage men to treat women with dignity and respect, and for young women to internalize the belief that they deserve respectful treatment. That way they’ll be more likely to demand it from otherwise abusive partners, or leave/avoid abusive relationships altogether. This modest annual event is something my daughter and I have done for several years, always look forward to and enjoy. I recommend it to all the local dads I know with daughters, and last year we were joined by my nephew and great-niece. And I think beyond bringing particular young ladies and their father figures closer together, the event has to be raising standards among participating girls’ friend groups, and well as attitudes among dads’ coworkers, friends, and families.
Another strategy countries are using to decrease femicide is enhanced legal punishments. My IEB team may change their mind, but their initial take was that such laws would be unlikely to enhance deterrence unless there’s a substantial gap between punishments for killing women versus killing anyone. At least in the U.S., a murder conviction can already bring life imprisonment or even execution in some states, so some sort of additional pain would need to be included for femicide-specific murder convictions to proactively shape the behavior of would-be perpetrators. However, maybe anti-femicide laws could reinforce the wrongness of targeting women—just as hate crimes laws reinforce the wrongness of targeting victims due to the religion, ethnicity, etc.—and over time shape cultural values such that fewer hate crimes or femicides would occur? In this way, perhaps anti-femicide laws are both a direct deterrent and a cultural-shift strategy? Perhaps. And maybe this is the real goal of such laws since many (if not most) would-be murderers aren’t making rational risk calculations, but acting out of rage or irrationally generally. A few other ideas our team broached on the enhanced punishments angle:
It’s unclear when femicide-specific punishment enhancements would/should trigger—anytime a woman is murdered, or anytime a woman is murdered solely/mainly/in part because she’s a woman?
It’s unclear how these laws would deal with cases where the perpetrator is herself a woman (same punishment?)
It’s unclear how these laws would deal with cases where the victim or perpetrator is nonbinary, which the case acknowledges in the closing sentence
What do you think? Do other questions, possible solutions or analogies IEB teams should be considering come to mind? If so, please leave a comment. Not a happy topic, but definitely worth discussing, and perhaps a problem the Ethics Bowl community can help address. In the meantime, kudos to the Monroe County Health Council—looking forward to the next dance in December.
An excerpt from Vazquez and Prinzing’s 2025 study, highlighting and SuperSocrateses added.
Chapter 9 of Ethics Bowl to the Rescue!is all about the connection between studying philosophy and scoring higher on standardized tests. Whether we personally care about state-mandated primary or secondary school tests, college or grad school entrance exam scores, is irrelevant, because administrators who decide whether to support existing Ethics Bowl programs or found new ones often do. For years, advocates have been able to cite a study by Scottish researchers Trickey and Topping that found that 10-to-12-year-olds who participated in one hour of weekly philosophical discussion improved their verbal, non-verbal, and quantitative scores on the Cognitive Abilities Test by an average of 7 points compared to a control group. This was cool and encouraging, but small and obscure. It was the pretty much the best we had to offer, so we’d offer it anyway. That is, it was the best we had to offer until this summer when researchers Michael Vazquez and Michael Prinzing released a much broader and more impressive meta-analysis of college-aged students. Here’s an excerpt from the book – enjoy, and thank you, Michaels!
If you’re encouraged by Topping and Trickey’s work, but discouraged that this is the best we can do, would a multi-year analysis covering over half a million undergrads from 800 U.S. colleges and universities help? Thanks to the extended labors of Michael Prinzing of Wake Forest and Michael Vazquez of UNC, your wish is my command.
Published by the Journal of the American Philosophical Association in 2025, barely in time to be included in this book, the Michaels sought to scrutinize the claim that studying philosophy boosts test scores. Using mathematical wizardry and a fancy stats program called “R,” they isolated test performance improvement by comparing college majors’ average law school (LSAT) and grad school (GRE) entrance exam scores relative to students’ pre-college SAT scores. That way, they’d reveal not whether students who gravitate to philosophy happen to be good at taking tests (they apparently are), but whether studying philosophy improves test-taking ability. In other words, they sought out to answer whether phil majors became comparatively better at standardized test-taking over the course of college, compared to students of comparable pre-college ability who studied other subjects. For good measure, they threw in student self-reports on scholarly virtues to see which college majors attracted and cultivated the most serious students. How did philosophy fare?
Our results indicated that students with better verbal reasoning abilities and more curiosity, intellectual rigor, and open-mindedness are more likely to major in philosophy. They also indicated that, after adjusting for baseline differences, philosophy majors outperform other students on these measures. In fact, on average, philosophy majors score higher than all other majors on the GRE Verbal and LSAT, as well as a self-report measure designed to assess good habits of mind.[1]
If you take a look at the study, which is openly available online (just google the title: “Studying Philosophy Does Make People Better Thinkers”), flip to page 11 to see philosophy majors at the tippy top of the adjusted average LSAT scores table—ahead of political science, history, chemistry, and all flavors of engineering. On the GRE Verbal table, philosophy beats every major again, including languages and literature, and even English. On the GRE Quantitative, philosophy is middle of the pack, but certainly not at the bottom, and primarily behind math-heavy majors including mathematics/statistics, physics, computer science, and accounting, though somehow business administration and management beat us (dang it…).
The study is brand new, and maybe some future criticism will reveal flaws. Plus, I’m predisposed to want it to be true, and you might be as well. But it sure seems credible, even if the methodology is way over my head (mixed-effects regressions for dichotomous outcomes with random intercepts—what?).[2]
Independent of whether we’re fluent in Statistician, thanks to Vazquez and Prinzing, when we pitch Ethics Bowl and philosophy to administrators, we now have a recent, broad, ultra-impressive study to cite. And the news gets even better. I reached out to the Michaels for their help with this section, and they shared that Ethics Bowl-specific test score improvement studies are on their research agenda. Shoot yeah. Thank you, Michaels!
[1] “Studying Philosophy Does Make People Better Thinkers,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association, published by Cambridge University Press, 2025, page 13.
[2] “Our analyses used mixed-effects regression models (logistic regressions for dichotomous outcomes) with random intercepts for institutions (i.e., the colleges and universities that students attended). We fit these models using the lme4 and lmerTest packages in R (Bates et al. 2020; Kuznetsova, Brockhoff, and Christensen R. H. B. 2017), computed estimated marginal means using the emmeans package (Lenth et al. 2018), and used multiple imputation to accommodate missing data with the mice package (Buuren and Groothuis-Oudshoorn 2011). The code used in these analyses is available online (https://osf.io/4S693),” ibid, page 7.
NHSEB Case 9 “Pulled to Protect” pits parents’ rights to raise their children how they think best against society’s responsibility to ensure all kids enjoy an adequately supportive childhood. As the case analogizes, we’d intervene if parents allowed a child to play with fire (imagine your neighbor’s 9-year-old mixing gasoline with fireworks – you’d call somebody!). But the question here is whether we should similarly intervene when parents fail to ensure their kids are adequately educated, which sometimes can be motivated by understandable reasons, such as the desire to preserve their way of life (example: the Amish).
I’ve actually been using an ethics journal article to cover a similar, overlapping issue in my college ethics classes since 2020. “Sport, Parental Autonomy, and Children’s Right to an Open Future” by Nicholas Dixon is ultimately about parents appropriately supporting their kids’ athletic interests (not living vicariously through them, exposing them to various options to see what resonates, and only pushing extended time and effort when they love a sport and are truly great at it). But he touches on the exact issue and Supreme Court case as this Ethics Bowl case, “Pulled to Protect.”
What’s more, coach Michael Andersen’s team just covered this case, he shared his awesome-as-always study guide (which includes multiple bonus resources), and it and my 9-minute lecture on the Dixon article are below. Enjoy!
Coach Michael Andersen recently updated the case analysis guide he shared here in 2023 with several improvements. Inspired by Dr. Sean Riley’s video, tips that stood out to me included step 2: “What kind of case is this?”, the invitation to radically emphasize with stakeholders, and the concentric circles visual. It also links to an updated case summary template.
Coach Michael considers these works in progress. But as far as I’m concerned, they’re more than good enough to begin using immediately, which is a good thing since both the IEB and NHSEB case sets recently went live. If you haven’t reviewed them already, the 2025-2026 IEB regionals case set is here and the NHSEB set here. Some super cool topics this season. More on the cases soon.
Enjoy, thanks coach Michael, and happy Ethics Bowl season kickoff!
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.
