Ethics Bowl began in the U.S. on the college level, first in Bob Ladenson’s classroom, then at APPE sessions under the Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl. Several years later, folks like Fred Guy in Baltimore, Roberta Israeloff on Long Island and George Sherman in St. Petersburg found success extending them into high schools. And slowly, innovators like Deric Barber in Houston tried Ethics Bowl in middle schools as well.
In Australia, the high school version came first, followed by middle and elementary school. And this fall, our friends down under are holding their first collegiate-level Ethics Olympiad.
Gold, silver and bronze awards will be determined by three Zoom-based heats on October 4th. Each team needs a coach, up to two teams are allowed per institution, members may be undergraduate or grad students and must be enrolled in “a tertiary institution in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore or Hong Kong.”
Kudos, Matthew and team! I understand that several schools in India participated in a recent high school Ethics Olympiad. Awesome that you’re not only expanding geographically, but across age groups as well.
For more information click here or email admin [at] ethicsolympiad [dot] org.
Organizing an ethics competition is no easy feat. There are coaches, judges and moderators to recruit, venues to book, schedules to set, questions to finalize. People need training. Trophies need ordering. Everyone needs reminding. Doing it all online is easier in some ways, but tougher in others.
This is exactly what Matthew Wills has been pulling off on a consistent basis with Australia’s Ethics Olympiad, only he’s shouldering the additional burden of working with people in different countries, on different continents, across different time zones – sometimes radically different time zones.
Two Thursdays ago, I experienced an Olympiad firsthand as a judge. From the comfort of my home office in Tennessee, I had the pleasure of discussing dating after prison, defunding the police, and Netflix’s Tiger King with teams in Australia, Canada and Hong Kong. The participant diversity was striking, even among the Australian teams – one, an all-girls Catholic school; another, an agricultural school. All were well-prepared, the discussions highbrow, the scoresheets close – comparable to many of the best teams in the States.
While other events struggled to transition from on-site to online bowling, Ethics Olympiad has thrived. One secret to its success is that Matthew brilliantly reduced the number of judges/moderators needed for each heat from four people to one. How? By empowering a single person to simultaneously moderate and handle all judging.
I’ve been an organizer, a coach, a judge and a moderator. But I’ve never been more than one at a time, so this was intimidating. Even more concerning was the fact that the event would begin at 9 pm Tennessee time, and end just before 1 a.m. However, two accommodations that made late-night judging/moderating completely doable:
An app that handled the coin flip, the timing, displayed the cases and questions – all I had to do was share my screen and click. I’m of course familiar with Ethics Bowl/Olympiad procedures. But man, the app made everything super simple – with fifteen minutes’ practice, a complete rookie could have been fine.
Matthew worked with ethics professors beforehand to provide judges extra questions to explore during the Q&A portion of each match. I always prefer to engage the teams on the specifics of what they’ve argued, and didn’t need any help thinking of something to ask in rounds 1 and 2. But a backup question or two came in handy later in the evening as my other-side-of-the-globe-past-my-bedtime-brain began to fade.
These assists were welcome, but no real surprise. Matthew’s been coordinating online Ethics Bowls/Olympiads for teams in different time zones and on different continents for at least a decade – long before the pandemic forced the rest of us to go virtual. And that experience shows.
He even conceded at the opening of the event that his home internet had went down a mere hour before kickoff, and that he was joining – and running the entire show – using a cellphone hotspot. He shared afterwards how this had induced minor panic, which, as a former organizer, I can definitely appreciate. But from my seat, he was as cool as ever.
If you ever get the chance to join an Olympiad (in any capacity), definitely give it a try. Mathew even offers judge/moderators a modest stipend, something that likely improves their buy-in, preparedness and reliability. Most of us in the community would support even a poorly-run event. But it’s the little things that make an ethics competition especially enjoyable, and our friends down under are pioneering improvements I’m hoping others will give a try.
P.S. Parts of Australia recently went back on COVID lockdown, which meant several teams had to unexpectedly join individually from their homes. There was a chance that some would choose to deliberate openly – discussing how to answer the initial question, comment on and respond to commentary from the other team for all to hear, rather than in private. I thought this might be a cool experiment – to see if teams discussing their strategies and responses live, on-air, might make the atmosphere more… deliberative. (A NHSEB case committee member recently shared the worry that some Bowls are devolving into “glorified debate” – a concern I share.) Alas, in each of the rounds I moderated/judged, the teams found ways to deliberate privately, connecting via a separate live video chat during the conferral periods. But if any teams did discuss openly, or if any events have tested this separately, please shoot me an email – would love to know how it went. For the further we can distinguish ourselves from the posturing and strategizing of traditional debate, the more transformative Ethics Olympiad and Ethics Bowl can be. And the more successful we are in that regard, the stronger the benefits not only for participants, but democracy, which is why most of us are here. The atmosphere at the Olympiad was laudable for sure – Matthew does a good job setting expectations, leading by example, and recruiting the right folks.
This guest post was generously written by Australian Ethics Olympiad Coach, Andrew Costantino. Andrew teaches Philosophy and Religious Education at Santa Sabina College, and was struck by a case written by Professor Tom Wartenburg at Holyoke College in Massachusettsconcerning the ethics of consuming meat.
Fancy a BLT?
In the 2019 Australian Middle Years Ethics Olympiad students were asked to consider a scene from the 1995 movie Babe. In this scene an anthropomorphised piglet is seen having a chat with a family of sheep dogs. The dogs, with an air of entitlement that stemmed from their privileged relationship to the farmer and superior intelligence, reassured the piglet that she would not be eaten as ‘the farmer only eats stupid animals’. The dogs then go on to name the piglet, Babe.
This is a disturbing scene, it would seem that it is an accepted norm that the smart eat while the dumb inevitably get eaten. One must ask, is the moral justification of our diet dependent on intelligence? Are there any other moral considerations?
This reasoning, if consistently applied, could be a ‘recipe’ for disaster. It may mean that the nightly news could replace Master Chef and an evening on social media could become a virtual buffet. On a more serious note, if we cannot accept that intelligence is a morally relevant distinguisher when determining what we ought to eat, are we ethically bound to adopt vegetarianism?
The appeal to empathy
One way in which some argue for vegetarianism or veganism is through an appeal to empathy. You may be familiar with vegan activist and animal rights campaigner Joey Carbstrong. He attempts to use moral reasoning and emotive imagery to convince people that the only truly ethical choice is to live a vegan lifestyle and he makes many well formulated points. In a recent post he uploaded a clip where he visited what was termed the world’s ‘most transparent slaughterhouse’. Part way through the interview he stated that he liked to ‘put himself in the animal’s position…’ and he knew that if he were the animal, he would prefer life to death. He also appeals to the value of the individual animal ‘in there’. Movies that anthropomorphise animals, like Babe, do the same thing, they imagine that the animal is ‘just like us’. The Babe ‘in there’ is ‘just like’ the Andrew ‘in here’. We are hardwired to be aware of other minds and thus to infer subjective experience onto other creatures. The problem is that we infer that this subjective experience is akin to our own.
I find this particular approach at least partially problematic. The problem is that when we put ourselves in the position of the animal or we engage with a film about a fictional talking pig we subsequently presume that pigs talk, that they have an inner dialogue, and thus have a self-reflexive identity. These activities imply a certain level of higher order self-concept, they imply an ability to depict things symbolically, to conceive of oneself as a temporal creature. It implies that the animal can articulate its desires, have long term goals and create traditions. It implies some critical faculty of abstract reasoning. A considerable amount of the moral value that we attribute to people stems from these distinctly human capabilities. Even when people may not have these capabilities we seem to value them, at least partially, because we know that these abilities are emerging or in regular circumstances should be there. When we tragically lose these capabilities through injury, disability, age or accident we often see this as a significant loss, the person is diminished. We can say that those suffering these misfortunes are ‘no longer themselves’, they are ‘vegetables’ or ‘no one is home’. Some go as far as to say these kinds of significant losses equate to a life that is not worth living.
I would argue that our value and membership in the moral community is at least partly tied up in this unique form of self concept and self expression. Daniel Dennett once said that if a lion could talk it could not tell us anything about what it’s like to be a lion, not because we couldn’t understand it but because once it started to talk it would not know what it was to be a lion. The human experience and human conception of identity is unique. Anthropomorphising all sentient creatures to an equal extent and seeing ourselves in the eyes of the other can be problematic and it can lead us to overstate and over simplify our case.
This does not mean that the subjective experience and suffering of sentient creatures is morally irrelevant. However, if we are to avoid rash generalisations we cannot conflate disparate things into a single category for the sake of convenience. One philosopher who is acutely aware of this is Martha Nussbaum. When considering animals in her broader theory of justice she argues that animal capability and flourishing must be considered in a way that is proportionate to their dignity, it ‘…regards each animal having a dignity all its own’. The protection of animal capabilities must be commensurate with the kind of things that that animal can ‘do’ and the kind of thing that it can ‘be’. The ‘doings’ and ‘beings’ of particular animals are distinct. In this view, one can adopt a situational ethic that develops rules appropriate to the nature of the animal in question and the situation in which the rule is being made while ensuring that at least a minimum amount of dignity can be safeguarded. In short, Babe doesn’t need a name and voice in order to be worthy of some level of moral consideration, however the ability to feel pain doesn’t automatically grant Babe moral equivalence. Furthermore, it would be equally naive if one did not recognise cognitive ability and self concept as contributing features in a suite of morally relevant considerations.
The problems of ideology
In relation to the question of vegetarianism, ideology can reign supreme on both sides of the debate.
Those who indiscriminately defend the consumption of animal products often defer to tradition in one form or another. In a recent discussion with students I (playing the devil’s advocate) suggested that we should eat koalas. They were appalled – “but it’s a koala!” they exclaimed. Here are some facts: koalas have disproportionately small brains, low levels of adaptability, they sleep most of the day, they live mostly solitary lives and have minimal perceived benefits to the ecosystems that they are a part of. It seems that killing a koala for food could possibly be a morally neutral, if not justifiable, action… and yet it just feels wrong. At this point one student will interject and say ‘Aww… but they’re cute!’ I quickly respond, ‘Surely cuteness is not morally relevant and even if it were, we eat lambs, calves and piglets all of the time. Do you not find them cute?’
There is an awkward silence.
Problematic ideological reasoning can similarly infiltrate those who maintain an ideological commitment to vegetarianism. People become vegetarians for a multitude of reasons. The reasons include the intuitive wrongness of killing, the concerns for ecological sustainability and preventing the needless suffering of sentient creatures. Most vegetarians justify their positions with reference to one or more of these greater effects or principles.
Let’s consider a short case study: Peter is a strict vegetarian. Peter is at a restaurant, he orders the mushroom burger, what he doesn’t realise is that the mushroom is fried in a sauce that contains anchovies. Upon finding out this fact he calls the waiter, the waiter swiftly disposes of the burger. Peter orders the halloumi salad instead. Peter is satisfied.
In this case Peter has wasted food for no net gain. The suffering and killing that occurred has still occurred and no one has benefited. Furthermore, the second meal has added to the ecological impact of his dining experience, food has been wasted and more food has been produced. Finally, replacing halloumi for anchovies may also be more generally problematic. Anchovies are small fish with relatively low cognitive ability, high reproductive capacity, short life spans and they are often consumed in short timeframes in their natural settings. Dairy on the other hand, involves proportionately higher levels of cruelty. Dairy cows have a significantly higher cognitive capacity and are kept perpetually pregnant or lactating, they have their calves routinely stripped from them, their male calves supply the veal industry and their female calves share the fate of their mothers. When they are no longer useful they are slaughtered. In this case ideological commitment to vegetarianism leads to a response that is contrary to all the morally relevant reasons as to why one may be a vegetarian in the first place.
It would seem that deference to tradition either through affiliation to a particular ideological group or the enculturated values of one’s own society inhibit one’s capacity to make ethically defensible choices.
Back to the BLT
Sometimes we have a tendency to habitually exclude animals from the things that we see as morally relevant. Once we stop and consider that animals too have inner lives, we may be led to see reflections of ourselves in them. We may very well share some common experiences, however the homosapien is a very distinct species and the human experience is a unique one. Animals are not mindless machines and they are not fully functional, responsible human beings – their place in our moral community is nuanced and complex.
Personally, I think that it is unjustifiable for a person of sufficient means and education to indiscriminately dismiss the preferences and experience of sentient creatures. Equally, I do not think that all creatures, or their experiences, are equal. Ideological commitment to particular rules inevitably sets the bar at an unrealistic height and can ultimately lead to the perfect getting in the way of the good. Furthermore, such rules can actually be, in themselves, inhibiting when attempting to reach more ideal standards in general terms. Avoiding deontological rules in favour of nuanced and situational analysis is hard and is riddled with problems of incommensurate goods and unforeseen consequences. Considering each meal, each moment can be exhausting.
Despite this, we can aim to develop a disposition that is considered, conscious of the proportional dignity and capabilities of sentient creatures and compassionate toward the pain of others. Such an ambition may enable us to imperfectly walk the line between apathy and dogmatism in a way that perfectly captures the complexities of the human condition.
Would I order the BLT?
Probably not, because such an action is seldom justifiable in my given context. Despite this, if you had already ordered it for me – perhaps while I was on my soapbox – I would eat it..
Andrew Costantino, Santa Sabina College, Sydney, Australia
Santa Sabina College Philosophy and Religious Education Teacher Andrew Costantino recently delivered an excellent Ethics Olympiad (Australia’s Ethics Bowl) case analysis presentation. The primary case: Is It OK to Punch a Nazi? The primary metaphor: baking and eating cookies!
cookie ingredients (chocolate chips, an egg, brown sugar, etc.) = case presumptions and facts
the recipe (mix, bake at 350 degrees for 12 mins) = construction of the argument
the eating experience (bland, burnt or perfecto) = the argument’s consequences and implications
Could there be a more delicious way to explain argument construction and analysis? Brilliant!
Costantino also considers and explains subject-centered approaches to ethics, providing substantial analysis from the perspective of Virtue Ethics, action-centered approaches, including Deontological Ethics such as Kantianism, and consequence-based theories, including Utilitarianism.
He does a nice job dividing Kant’s Categorical Imperative into the Humanity Principle and Universality Principle – much better labels than The First and Second Formulations (which I’m guilty of using). And is careful to explain how Utilitarianism should take into account long-term consequences (as suggested by Rule Utilitarianism), and can morph into preference-satisfaction Utilitarianism, as promoted by world-famous Australian moral philosopher, Peter Singer.
Whether you’re a coach, competitor, judge or fan, the vid’s almost certainly worth your time. Thanks to Andrew for putting it together, and thanks to Matthew Wills with Ethics Olympiad for recording and sharing it with the EthicsBowl.org community.
This past Tuesday evening, having grown bored of Adam Sandler’s Uncut Gems (Waterboy is more my style), I decided to call it a night around 11:30. Checking my email one last time, I saw a message from Ethics Olympiad director Matthew Wills from 9:55: “The Olympiad is beginning…”
I was confused. I’d been honored to be invited to serve as a judge for the online event. But it was scheduled for the following evening – Wednesday, May 27th at 10 p.m. Tennessee time, which would be 11 a.m. in Perth. My error became apparent when I realized that while it was still Tuesday, May 26th in Tennessee, it was in fact already Wednesday, May 27th in Australia…
I sent a quick apology, and wrestled with whether to hide or log on. My better side won the debate and I quickly joined the Zoom meeting (not taking time to change out of my blue jammies) to see if there was anything I might be able to do, and if nothing else, to apologize via video.
Matthew was all smiles and graciousness, per usual – not the nervous wreck that organizers sometimes devolve into, especially when their judges flake out…
Smartly, he’d pre-recruited a backup, just in case, and everything was progressing as planned. He asked if I’d like to sit in on one of the heats in a Zoom break-out room.
Surreal seeing the sun shining when it’s near midnight(!). Yay, technology.
It was for a match between Santa Sabina College and St. Peters Girls Academy. The teams were together at their respective schools, judges Rosalind Walsh and Jennifer Duke-Wonge appeared to be in their offices, and so too was moderator Theo Stapleton.
Considering the NHSEB case, “Is it OK to Punch a Nazi?” the teams were both well-prepared, and quick on their feet. They were respectful and engaged, and did a nice job sharing the floor, taking turns to elaborate on and clarify their arguments. The judges asked excellent questions (homing in on key aspects of the teams’ positions, but doing so in a friendly way), and Theo did an expert job keeping everyone on track – a wonderful balance of professionalism and warmth.
Zoom proved a superb platform. The video quality was great, and as far as I could tell, hardly glitched at all. My own connection was via a smartphone hotspot, which I worried might not be able to keep up. But it did without issue, and so did everyone else’s – a mini miracle I’m still impressed to witness.
The result of the event, which featured 8 teams from 8 different schools, was that St Peters Girls Adelaide, Santa Sabina College Sydney and The Kings School Sydney advanced to participate in the China Australia Ethics Olympiad on June 25th. Congrats to all three, and to the other teams who were all very close in the final scores.
Kudos to Matthew for doing such a nice job with the event. The participants appeared to enjoy themselves and grow from the experience. And this COVID-driven transition to online Ethics Olympiads (and Bowls) will no doubt continue to expand opportunities for international collaboration. There’s something reassuring about seeing teams on the other side of the globe (made apparent by the fact that it’s midnight where I am, yet I can see sunlight out the classroom window behind a team) think through cases addressed next door. There’s also something special about how Australians can say “cheers” with such authenticity…
And if you yourself are invited to participate in an international Ethics Olympiad, pay special attention to not only the local time, but the date. Don’t get sucked into bad movies on Netflix. And maybe be on standby the day before and after with a polo and sports jacket, just in case.
Our Ethics Olympiad friends in Australia are proving fast to respond to the COVID crisis, both in sustaining ethics bowl in the online environment, and in tackling virus-related ethical issues sooner rather than later.
Screen shot from the recent China/Australia Ethics Olympiad “friendly”
If you’re unfamiliar, Ethics Olympiad is very much like Ethics Bowl, and in fact often leverages U.S. ethics bowl cases. Founder Matthew Wills and team have been in the ethics bowl game for several years now. In fact, he soldiered through a very long flight to attend the very first National High School Ethics Bowl at UNC, and he and I co-hosted a virtual bowl around 2011 with teams from Tennessee, California, and Perth (Australia).
In an email update sent earlier this week, Matthew shared the results of a recent China/Australia online high school Ethics Olympiad friendly, upcoming ethics teaching and bowl coaching professional development online sessions scheduled for May, an invite to the Middle School Ethics Olympiad scheduled for November, as well as some COVID-19 ethical questions including “How should governments weigh violations of individual liberties against protecting the health and well-being of others during a health crisis?” – a tough one for sure, and something I’m certain our teams will have superb insights on. Feel free and encouraged to share yours in a comment below. P.S. Thank you for not killing Tom Hanks.
Participation in Ethics Olympiad, which requires registration, is open to schools everywhere. In addition to bonus teaching resources, members enjoy the ability to remotely compete with teams from North Carolina to Western Australia, New Zealand to the UK, Tasmania to Texas. School membership is $180 the first year, then $80 annually thereafter – click here or reach out to admin@ethicsolympiad.org for more information, and kudos to our friends down under for continuing to fight the good fight during this difficult time.
