(Editor’s Note: This article was written by Ryan Nelson ’12 )
Would you butt into a stranger’s conversation at a bar if they were speaking insensitively about homosexuals? Would you support a law to grant birthright citizenship to children of illegal immigrants? Would you be upset if your psychology professor began arguing for medical testing on animals?
I find all of these questions interesting, but recognize that each answer relies on how the particular individual responding feels. And I think that these questions become truly exciting and deep when they change from “what would you do?” to “what should you do?”
Luckily, Austin Schwartz ’11, Michael Chamberlain ’12, Andrew Pike ’12, Taylor Lake ’13, Sarah Dhaouahira ’14, 51 Speaking Union Coordinator John Adams, and Professor Reid Blackman share my enthusiasm for exploring how to respond to questions like those. Together, with the support of the philosophy department, we formed 51’s first Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl team.
The Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl is a national competition. Teams present and argue answers to ethical dilemmas, with the aim of proving to the judges that their position — and more importantly, their reasons for taking that position — make their answer the most ethical.
After deciding to put together an Ethics Bowl team, we quickly realized the uphill challenge we faced.
No one on the team had any Ethics Bowl experience, and we only had a month and a half to prepare our answers to the 15 regional championship cases; already-established teams had more than twice that amount of time. But with Professor Blackman’s guidance, we dedicated ourselves to preparing for the Northeast Regional Championship, held at Dartmouth College in mid-November.
To prepare, we met weekly (at least ) to read the cases, isolate the ethically important questions, determine our stance, and discern arguments to support our case.
When we arrived at the tournament, where more than 20 universities were competing, we were admittedly nervous, but anxious to try out our arguments. To our surprise and excitement, after the preliminary rounds, we had accumulated the most points, and were invited to compete in the playoff rounds.
Even more anxiously than before, we proceeded to edge out a nail-biting win in the quarterfinals and moved on to the semifinals.
Unfortunately, we narrowly lost our semifinal round to Stevens Institute (who went on to win the tournament, beating Dartmouth in the finals). Although we would have liked to have gone further, the team was happy that we had made it so far in our first competition.
We soon found that we were not done competing. Following our elimination, the tournament director notified us that we were amongst the four teams qualifying for the national championship this coming March. The entire team was ecstatic!
Looking ahead, we have new ethical cases to discuss, and a new level of competition for which to prepare. Moving onto the national stage will be daunting, but when we ask “what should we do about it?” our answer is simple. We will enjoy discussing issues and preparing the best we can for our final competition of the season.