We’ve witnessed the benefits of Ethics Bowl in others. We’ve experienced them firsthand. But anecdote is no substitute for cold, hard data, especially in the eyes of school administrators, budget officers and grant committees.
Few (if any) large-scale Ethics Bowl studies exist. But our friends at UNC’s Parr Center are fixing that, and they’re maximizing participation with the promise of guaranteed pizza!
If you’re a high school Ethics Bowl coach or participant, take one 10-minute survey next month, then another in February. You don’t even have to be on an Ethics Bowl team. You just have to be a student at a school that participates. That’s it. 20 minutes of painless surveying, and unless I’m mistaken, there’s no requirement that the pizza be healthy, organic, or locally-sourced!
The full details are available here. But the upshot comes in the final paragraph.
“If you are interested in participating or would like more information, please complete this short form or send an email to Study Coordinator Michael Vazquez. We are happy to correspond via email or to arrange a Zoom meeting to discuss any aspect of your participation in further detail. It is important that we have involvement from both students involved with NHSEB and students not involved with NHSEB. So, we would greatly appreciate your help recruiting fellow educators or coaches at your school to get involved with the study. Click here to download a flier that you can share with your colleagues.”
Parr, thank you for taking the initiative, and kudos for making this easy, painless and yummy. Hopefully some portion of the results will be shared with the broader Ethics Bowl community. And on behalf of hungry teenagers everywhere, thanks for the pizza!
“Ethics Bowl is the intellectual equivalent of a CrossFit exercise workout; that is, it strenuously tones the mind and soul together.” – Andrew Cullison, Ethics Bowl Organizer, Coach and former Competitor
While traditional workouts can make you better at specific activities (heavier bench press, faster 5k), CrossFit – a full-body workout approach combining weight and endurance training, slow and fast-twitch muscle exercise, prioritizing functional athleticism – can transform you into a true athlete.
In chapter 8 of The Ethics Bowl Way, “Beyond Argument: Learning Life Skills Through Ethics Bowl,” longtime Ethics Bowl enthusiast Andy Cullison argues that Ethics Bowl produces alum who are similarly well-rounded in ways that prepare us for a successful life.
I like it. Ethics Bowl does indeed build resilient, courageous leaders, gently cultivates public speaking skill and improves moral decision-making – benefits applicable not only to bowl day, but life.
Ethics Bowl can reveal and correct our moral blind spots, illuminating neglected interests and heightening our moral sense. As Andy points out, the explicit requirement to proactively consider thoughtful objections may be one of its most important benefits, for this teaches humility, humanizes the “other” side, and encourages reconciliation – beneficial for interpersonal relationships, business relationships and democratic citizenship. An encouraging example shared by Andy:
“One of the best Ethics Bowl teams we have seen had two cocaptains: one was a leader of the College Republicans, the other founded the College Democratic Socialist Club (because the College Democrats weren’t ‘liberal enough’). The captains became great friends. We like to think that the fact that they developed their ethical awareness together, as team members, fostered their personal friendship” (66).
When it comes to public speaking, Andy notes how our approach uniquely “scaffolds the nurturing of these skills in ways that other ‘speaking’ cocurricular activities do not” (67). He’s right. Traditional debates often expect each team member to speak as frequently (and forcefully…) as their peers. But with Ethics Bowl, less experienced members can shape their team’s position during prep and limit their bowl-day involvement to conferral periods. Case mastery is just as important as verbal eloquence, and team members who prefer to leave the speaking to others may do so without point penalty or personal shame.
But as Andy argues, Ethics Bowl also teaches resilience, a master life skill. Despite our emphasis on collaboration, Ethics Bowl remains a competition, which means far more teams go home without a trophy than with one. However, losing teams continue to return, and Andy argues that this is largely because of the undeniable intrinsic benefits combined with participants’ private confidence that they’ve grown, performed admirably and deserve to be proud regardless of how a group of fallible judges may have scored them.
“The paradox at the heart of Ethics Bowl is that most students realize that there are rewards of the event that outweigh the tangible rewards of winning. That’s why so many teams that perennially finish in the bottom half or even quarter of the rankings show up year after year. These students have learned to uncover the pleasure of engaging in activity that is hard, that challenges them, in which they are the final judges of what they’ve learned” (70).
Last, Ethics Bowl transforms and empowers participants into courageous leaders. While CrossFit can ready our bodies for physical challenges, Ethics Bowl readies us for life.
“Preparing a student for life is about preparing them to be courageous, ethical leaders. That’s why Ethics Bowl is about so much more than learning how to win arguments. Ethics bowl truly is preparation for life” (71).
Excellent argument, Andy! And wonderful book, editors and friends Roberta Israeloff and Karen Mizell. Stay tuned for more articles on The Ethics Bowl Way. And be sure to check it out at Amazon if you haven’t already.
The History Channel’s Kings of Pain is a glorified version of MTV’s Jackass. Rather than Steve-O launching bottle rockets from untold orifices, “wildlife biologists” allow spiders to inject them with venom, hornets to sting them, and snakes to bite them, all in the name of ratings. I mean science.
However, I won’t pretend to be too good to watch something like this. I’m a Johnny Knoxville fan all the way. And since Kings of Pain is ever-so-slightly more mature, I can enjoy it with my kids with slightly less guilt. (I’ll watch Jackass with my oldest, but with considerable guilt.)
And since we’re serious moral reasoners here, I was excited to see the “wildlife biologists” scoring their encounters according to criteria that would have made Jeremy Bentham proud.
Looky there: intensity, duration. Of course, one man’s 9.25 might be another man’s 8. But by averaging and contrasting the scores inspired by tarantulas and pythons, we can quantify how much pain to assign various encounters, thereby making that Utilitarian calculus thing practical after all. Imperfect, of course. But more precise than critics give the theory credit.
Now all we need is a comparable show devoted to quantifying experiences of intense pleasure! On HBO, perhaps?
As I mentioned in a previous post, I recently took my nephew skydiving, and in the process decided to give away my books. (Facing mortality at the speed of gravity inspires clarity!)
My philosophical ethics primer, used by college, high school and even jr. high students on at least three continents, has been available on the Resources page in PDF here at EthicsBowl.org for several years. And I released the audiobook at Audible last summer. But as of this morning, the audiobook edition is now free and available to all on good old YouTube.
Enjoy! I hope this helps students lacking the stamina or time to read (reading wasn’t my #1 hobby growing up, either), as well as educators and Ethics Bowl coaches brave enough to teach them. Re-introducing philosopher’s approach to morality, now rather than in 100 pages, 100 minutes.
Handy Timestamps (also in description at YouTube):
Search the Dobbs. v. Jackson Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade for “philosopher” and you’ll find references to Australian ethicist Peter Singer, ethicist Mary Anne Warren’s “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion” and the leading academic journal Philosophy & Public Affairs all supporting a section analyzing personhood.
As readers of Abortion Ethics in a Nutshell know, personhood is a moral concept capturing the capacities we associate with the most valuable creatures of all: adult humans – consciousness, the ability to feel pleasure and pain, the ability to engage in relationships, and higher order reasoning which facilitates moral agency, responsibility, and full membership in the moral community.
Unborn Developing Humans (aka fetuses, unborn children, etc.) possess none of these features of personhood at conception, but they do develop some over the course of gestation, and become more likely to develop into full persons the closer they are to birth. Accordingly, the “gradualist” position – that a UDH’s value increases as they develop, and therefore later term abortions are more difficult to justify – makes a lot of sense. (For more, listen to the “The Nature of the Conception” chapter here.)
I’ve not read the full decision yet, and so I’m not sure if the ruling acknowledges the appeal of gradualism. But I share the simple fact that they mention philosophers and ethicists by name and employ one of our key terms to help you appreciate how our work has implications at the highest levels.
Sometimes it can feel as if Ethics Bowl is an isolated game and that the world-changing action happens elsewhere. In some ways, it does. Losing Ethics Bowl team coaches aren’t jailed (thank goodness!) and Ethics Bowl judges’ proclamations aren’t legally binding (doubly thank goodness!). But the sort of analysis we refine and the progress that we drive through our collaborative pursuit of moral truth can and does find its way into the minds of decision-makers. Slowly but surely.
We won’t always agree with their decisions. And we rightly doubt their commitment to objective, truth-oriented analysis (including Jarvis-Thomson or Maggie Little in their analysis would have helped). But the broader philosophical, applied ethics and Ethics Bowl communities are leading by example, and our work is making a practical difference.
Here’s that section, in which the Justices challenge viability as a useful criterion for granting a UDH full legal protection.
“This arbitrary line [the time at which a UDH can survive outside of the womb] has not found much support among philosophers and ethicists who have attempted to justify a right to abortion. Some have argued that a [Unborn Developing Human] should not be entitled to legal protection until it acquires the characteristics that they regard as defining what it means to be a ‘person.’ Among the characteristics that have been offered as essential attributes of ‘personhood’ are sentience, self-awareness, the ability to reason, or some combination thereof. By this logic, it would be an open question whether even born individuals, including young children or those afflicted with certain developmental or medical conditions, merit protection as ‘persons.’ [They’re right, but biting the bullet and excluding some categories of humans from full personhood is the price we pay for being honest about the importance of personhood.] But even if one takes the view that ‘personhood’ begins when a certain attribute or combination of attributes is acquired, it is very hard to see why viability should mark the point where ‘personhood’ begins.”
Check out the full ruling yourself (it’s a landmark decision and you’re more than capable, so analyze it firsthand!), and if you’d like to author a post connecting it to Ethics Bowl, guest submissions welcome.
“Sweatshop Labor is Wrong Unless the Shoes are Cute.” Now there’s a provocative article title! In it, Paharia, Vohs and Deshpande argue that we’re more likely to make selfish judgments when we’re clear-headed. When our minds are fresh with computing power to spare, our ego inflates the force of reasons supporting what we desire. But when we’re mentally distracted, our subconscious has a tougher time rationalizing favored outcomes, and we’re more likely to endorse morally consistent and benevolent conclusions.
Know that the authors didn’t just speculate – they recruited more than a hundred people, asked half to memorize a 7-digit number, and then asked all to evaluate arguments justifying underpaying and overworking employees – specifically, to rank the ethical permissibility of going on a Caribbean resort vacation with questionable labor practices for their friends, but then also for themselves. The assumption – all participants would be motivated to excuse mistreating employees when imagining themselves enjoying the resort. But those trying to simultaneously remember “7264281” wouldn’t have the spare mental acuity to do so.
The result: participants who weren’t required to memorize the number were significantly more likely to excuse poor worker treatment when evaluating the trip for themselves, but evaluations of the vacation resort for their friends remained steady for both the cognitively burdened and unburdened group.
Notice how designing the experiment in this way (cognitively loaded vs. clear-minded participants, a Caribbean resort trip for someone else vs. you) sheds light on our egos’ tendency to rationalize when its our own imagined welfare at stake.
One upshot for ethics bowl is that the closer a case hits home, the more apt we probably are to evaluate it in a self-interested fashion. However, knowing this, we can re-evaluate our judgments, double-checking not only for perspective bias, but for our tendency to favor reasons, and possibly even ethical theories, that promote what we personally desire.
So the next time a case feels especially personal, take a step back, try remembering 7264281, and revisit it anew.
Last, should we expect a correlation between IQ and selfishness – the sharper and quicker witted more prone to rationalize? The same from the comparatively carefree? From seasoned meditators?
Maybe. But it seems that the wisest and most clear-minded among us tend to be the most morally mindful, or at least that’s been my experience befriending and working with applied ethicists, professional and amateur alike. Then again, this judgment itself could be another ego-driven rationalization… Time to remember 7264281 and try again.
Chapter Timestamp Links in the Description, Notes and Discussion Questions in the Comments – this sucker is ethics classroom ready
“Above all, I’m in awe of the book’s style and tone. It’s not easy to write philosophically about abortion – a subject that’s both, and equally, deep from a conceptual standpoint and emotionally wrenching in real-life… You found an effective way to write about abortion that’s accessible to undergraduates (and also, possibly to high school students). Your discussion not only is informed philosophically but also conveys to me a sense of supportive engagement of a kind one would experience if she/he had a good candid discussion, with a good friend, on a topic that’s both emotionally difficult and intellectually challenging. Bravo.” ~The Extremely Kind and Generous Creator of Ethics Bowl, Illinois Institute of Technology Philosophy Professor Emeritus, Dr. Bob Ladenson
Last April I posted an article calling for more ethics bowl cases on abortion. It’s a topic case committees have understandably avoided, but also one that the ethics bowl community could help address (if not us, who?). Little did I know the Supreme Court’s forthcoming Roe decision would leak and interest in the issue would explode.
Fast forward to the weekend before last, when I took my nephew Ethan skydiving for his high school graduation. Jumping out of a perfectly good airplane was HIS idea, not mine. But I did enjoy it (the 10-second freefall was pure bliss), and when you’re riding shotgun in a tiny plane about to plunge 10,000 feet, trusting that the tandem dude strapped to your back will monitor altitude and safely delivery your exhilarated body back to earth alive, this encourages reflection. Deep, meaningful reflection.
One good decision that came from that experience – to give away my books! My bills are paid and they’ll help more people if free, so why not? Plus, I’ve given away Ethics in a Nutshell via email and here at EthicsBowl.org on the Resources page for years, and it sells more than the others combined. So in the coming weeks I’ll be sharing the audiobook versions of all my books on YouTube, and will post the full PDFs on my website. Those that are relevant to ethics bowl (Ethics in a Nutshell on audiobook, The Best Public Speaking Book in PDF and audiobook), I’ll also mention here.
Mixing audiobooks MP3s, splicing together video animations, adding chapter headings and uploading files isn’t difficult, but it is tedious. But over the Memorial Day weekend I made time to share the full audiobook version of Abortion Ethics in a Nutshell: A Pro-Both Tour of the Moral Arguments on YouTube. It’s embedded above and available directly here.
There are other excellent abortion ethics books out there. However, none other than ethics bowl creator Bob Ladenson blessed mine with the overly-generous recommendation above, proudly shared with his permission. I’m not prone to bragging. But when the creator of ethics bowl endorses your book, you tell people. (Thank you, Bob!)
If you enjoy my summaries of the best abortion arguments philosophers have offered, and appreciate the pro-BOTH approach, tell a friend. If you’d like to use it in the classroom, be my guest – find notes and discussion questions in the first comment, and be on the lookout for the full PDF at MattDeaton.com soon (shoot me an email if you can’t wait). Also be ready for a surprise happy ending (one that more people from both sides of the traditional debate should be talking about) in chapters 11, 12 and 13… And enjoy British voice actor Carla Rose Smith’s velvety section intros, the perfect complement to my mild Southern drawl.
Argument by analogy is a powerful moral reasoning technique where our judgments about something clear are applied to something less clear, yet relevantly similar. Half asleep in bed this past Tuesday night, I was struck by a connection between lottery tickets and UDHs.
Imagine matching all five…
Oftentimes in the abortion debate, generally pro-choice authors emphasize how Unborn Developing Humans (or UDHs) are merely potential persons, rather than actual persons. They then quickly conclude that UDHs have very little value, and that abortions for most any reason are completely permissible. Sometimes they’ll invoke the language of rights, declaring, “Since UDHs aren’t persons, they have no right to life. And since UDH’s have no right to life, abortion is permissible — end of story.”
I’ve always found this puzzling. For one, honest ethicists arguing in good faith know full well sweeping rights claims are too coarse for the intricacies of real-life. But also because UDHs are the only thing that can grow into full persons, and often (if not usually) will become full persons if allowed.
That something with the potential to develop extremely high moral value (a person) already has very high moral value is intuitively compelling to me, but not everyone. However, he’s a basic analogy that helps clarify my thinking, and might inform and enrich yours.
The directions at Poweball.com read: “Select five numbers from 1 to 69 for the white balls; then select one number from 1 to 26 for the red Powerball.” Matching 1 or more of the first 5 numbers to the randomly drawn numbers entitles you to some money. But matching all five plus the Powerball wins the jackpot, which as of this writing sits at $181 million.
Imagine that you buy a ticket. Before the numbers are called, it’s probably worth less than the purchase price in light of the extremely low probability you’ll win (this is why many people call lotto paying your “idiot tax”). But imagine matching not only the first three numbers, not only the first four numbers, but all five white numbers. Whatever money you’d be entitled to for getting that far, you’d now have a 1 in 26 chance of winning $181 million. Whether you’re a greedy glutton or dream of philanthropy, that’s a LOT of money, and could fund a whole lot of ethics bowl expansion!
Would you say that since the ticket is merely a potential jackpot winner (with a 1 in 26 chance), rather than an actual jackpot winner, it’s therefore completely worthless?
Of course not. You’d guard it carefully, and with good reason. Even matching two numbers would get your attention. But three? Four? All five?
And so assuming conceived UDHs have a 1 in 26 chance (or greater) of growing into full persons (if genetically normal and in a healthy womb, they do), and assuming the value of a person exceeds or is somewhere in the ballpark of a Powerball jackpot, you should agree that UDHs can’t be casually dismissed as valueless clumps of cells.
Of course, this doesn’t imply abortions are never permissible — doesn’t mean that the high value of a UDH can’t be overridden. All it means is that the reasons needed to justify an abortion must be weighty enough to destroy something with already substantial value, and that anyone desiring to dismiss UDHs because they’re “merely” potential persons is probably a crummy Powerball player.
For most any issue, professional ethicists have thought about and published quality ideas. Rather than trying to solve an ethics bowl case from scratch, why not leverage existing wisdom? There’s no reason to defer to or agree with every argument out there. But your team’s analysis will almost certainly be enhanced, and judges will almost certainly be impressed, when they review and cite the arguments of contemporary philosophers. But where to begin?
Here’s Dr. Jim receiving some public praise for doing what he does best
Recently, former student, friend and medical resident, Jim Dolbow, invited me to comment on and co-publish a brief piece on patient modesty during emergency procedures. The main thrust: patients should either be told that they’ll be exposed during “code” treatments, or medical professionals should do more to cover their private areas during CPR, pulse checks and the like. Why? To honor patient consent and respect their dignity.
Less than two pages long, “If They Only Knew” was just released in the Journal of Patient Experience. An easy way to ease into the use of applied ethics journal articles, check it out here, and if you or your team would like to discuss, just let me know.
The American Philosophical Association recently showcased an ethics bowl syllabus redesigned and taught by Michael Vazquez of UNC’s Parr Center.
Using the ethics bowl format to teach democratic deliberation, the class pairs UNC undergrads as coaches for NHSEB teams across the country via the new NHSEBBridge program.
Especially impressive is Michael’s “toolkit” approach to teaching ethics. Check out the full post and syllabus, and leave Michael some positive feedback here.
