“The cases that the students are discussing present moral issues as they are in real life… complex, ambiguous, controversial, difficult, and ultimately quite messy. There are often no easy answers.”
Courtesy Dr. Stephen Michelman of the South Carolina High School Ethics Bowl at Wofford College, above and on the Resources page you’ll find a brand new judge training video featuring Parr Center Director of Outreach, UNC teaching assistant professor, longtime ethics bowl enthusiast, and all-around swell guy, Steven Swartzer.
Steve knows his stuff, is especially eloquent in this vid, and the overview he provides and questions he answers would be useful for anyone interested in ethics bowl. So check it out — invaluable info for an aspiring judge, coach, moderator or competitor.
Many thanks to Dr. Michelman and company for recording, producing and sharing this with the ethics bowl community.
And coaches, if you’re having a hard time getting your team on the same page, take heart. As Steve concedes, “We try to write cases that are designed to elicit disagreement.”
Oh, and another gem from the Q&A section (especially useful if you’re a new ethics coach with experience in debate), a judge asks how to score teams that change their position after commentary from the opposing team (or during the judges interaction period, for that matter). Steve’s response: “In debate, if you change your mind, I guess you lose… That’s not what happens here, necessarily. It’s actually sometimes a sign of mature moral thinking to say, ‘Oh, you know what? I think that that point was really excellent and I think that it does… seriously call into question at least some part of [our initial view]. So changing their mind is not necessarily a bad thing… Or, on the other side, are they moving too easily to accommodate something that might not be [a quality objection].”