Ethics Bowl

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Discourse on pressing ethical issues faces substantial headwinds in our current moment. Shared contexts for productively engaging ethical disagreement are vanishing. At the same time, advances in generative AI threaten to outsource our ethical decision making and critical thinking to LLMs. Ethics Bowl provides students living through this moment with a guided opportunity to cultivate their capacity to grapple with complex ethical problems–an opportunity that’s thoroughly interpersonal and impossible to offload onto AI. Fittingly, the pedagogy of Ethics Bowl takes its cue from ancient approaches to philosophy and character formation that center dialogue and interpersonal encounter. Ethics Bowl is an applied ethics course built around live, team-based competition. Designed for students with prior exposure to philosophy, Ethics Bowl is an opportunity for students to deepen their philosophical understanding and skills around a handful of pressing ethical issues. Using the format of intercollegiate ethics bowl, students work in teams to develop and articulate ethical frameworks for navigating real-world dilemma cases. As students build their positions and arguments for these cases, they expand their capacity to wisely apply the insights of ethical theory (e.g., Kantianism, Virtue Ethics, Catholic Social Teaching, etc.) to the complexities and ambiguities of the real world. During in-class scrimmages, teams must reply in real time to comments/criticisms about their framework raised by the opposing team and the panel of judges. Ethics Bowl is not narrowly adversarial, as opposing teams are allowed to agree with each other; teams gain points by thoughtfully advancing the ethical conversation and exploring salient implications of each team’s main argument. Extending interpretive charity to the other team is a core value in Ethics Bowl. To excel at scrimmages, students must be fully present, creative, and confident in their team’s preparation in order to nimbly respond to the challenges raised by the opposition and judges. To thrive within the team-based context of weekly preparation and drilling, students must demonstrate intellectual humility and honesty about each other’s strengths and weaknesses in building a cohesive team strategy. In addition to graded scrimmages, each student’s understanding and mastery of key ethical concepts (covered in the lectures and readings) is assessed through in-person, hand-written midterm and final exams. In these exams, students must accurately represent ideas from ethical theory and–in some questions–apply them to queries about real-world ethical dilemma cases. On these exams, students will also need to showcase logical thinking skills by, for instance, determining the validity of an argument or raising a counter-example to a general principle/if-then inference schema.