Why Ethics Bowl?
In a world where debate and Model UN exist, why would I want this?
In traditional debate formats, disagreement is a hurdle to be overcome for one side to prevail. In Ethics Bowl, sustaining and analyzing disagreement is the entire point.
Whether in presidential debates, student competitions, or on cable television, debaters are too often rewarded for their ability to
perform certainty, trivialize counterarguments, and dumb down complex, nuanced problems into one-liners.
...all so that one side can "win."
In a democracy, so much more is at stake than if one side can "win" a contest of rhetoric. While rhetorical talent is important for presenting political and social ideas to a public, we first need to understand these ideas—who or what they prioritize, what assumptions they make, who is unintentionally affected, and what the implications are for our moral community at large. Democratic disagreement depends on people having serious understanding of positions that they might ultimately reject.
The topics that Ethics Bowl covers are ones on which reasonable people can disagree—issues from parental rights in education and AI's role in mental healthcare to boundaries in personal relationships, the ethics involved in minimum wage laws, and the competing values in surveillance policies.
The distinctness of the Ethics Bowl competition format is that it rewards those who can synthesize a nuanced understanding of complex ideas into accessible, precise, and clear presentations. As an exercise of the democratic spirit, the best Ethics Bowl competition rounds are those where both teams walk out of the match having learned more about the topic than when they first walked in.