I recently finished The Ethics Bowl Way while camping and loved it. Every chapter is superb, but one that stood out is the closer by Utah State Assistant Professor of Philosophy and longtime Ethics Bowl supporter Rachel Robinson-Greene. I reached out, Rachel agreed to an email interview on a key point, and here it is!
Matt: Rachel, excellent closing chapter in The Ethics Bowl Way. I love how you share your experience flying to an Ethics Bowl after 9/11 and then discussing a case on racial profiling, and how you confessed to at one time conflating morality with legality. Even the best among us have made that mistake. But few of us have admitted it in print!
Rachel: Thank you! I was honored to be asked to contribute a chapter; the Ethics Bowl has been a huge part of my life for decades now and it was nice to take a broad view and reflect on my experiences. I hope that some of the skills that Ethics Bowl teaches are intellectual humility and a willingness to recognize that you might be wrong about something. I’ve been wrong about many things over the years, including many of the things I argued for as a student.
Matt: In the book you broach the importance of a team holding consistent views across a set of cases, something I may have considered in passing, but never paused to ponder. As you say in the book, “from a competitive standpoint, there is no reason why a team’s position on two different cases must be coherent.” A team can promote a stringent Utilitarian view in one round, then play exclusive Kantians the next. They can take a Libertarian approach during prelims, then invoke Marx himself in the semi-finals. In fact, a team could laud Virtue Ethics while presenting their argument as Team A, then attack Aristotle while providing commentary on Team B. There’s no explicit point incentive to behave differently, for “when judging is done right, each case exists in isolation.” However, can you talk a little about why coherence and consistency are important for ethically-minded folks generally, and also why it’s something Ethics Bowl teams might want to pursue, even if there’s no official requirement to do so?
Rachel: One of the challenges for teams when they construct positions is that members might have different perspectives from one another, and some might be more sympathetic to one ethical theory while another would prefer to argue from a different ethical perspective. So, one of the reasons that coherence is not expected from one case to the next is that different people might have taken the lead on different cases. That said, coherence is an important consideration when forming beliefs in general. A lack of coherence can flag the existence of other critical thinking errors. For instance, if one is willing to argue using one theory in one case, but unwilling to use it in another, similar case, that may be a sign that the conclusion is driving the argument rather than the other way around. That said, many people are moral pluralists and think that different moral theories are appropriate in different domains of life. It’s also important to recognize that coherence for its own sake is neutral, after all, a person can have a coherent set of world views that all turn out to be false. That said, a lack of coherence can draw our awareness to false or poorly formed premises in our arguments. When students participating in Ethics Bowls observe inconsistency, it’s worth reflecting on why it exists.
Matt: Ah, excellent explanations as to why inconsistency might sometimes be OK (because different team members with different moral views might have taken the lead on different cases), why consistency itself is ethically neutral (I can imagine Nazis who are consistent, if nothing else), and how a lack of consistency can indicate close-minded moral reasoning (as you put it, “a sign that the conclusion is driving the argument rather than the other way around”). Reflecting on this, I recall Rawls promoting the benefits of what he called “wide reflective equilibrium.” Narrow reflective equilibrium is achieved when our positions on a variety of issues are consistent not only with our considered convictions (moral intuitions that withstand scrutiny) but with one another, and when we can articulate a coherent defense of the full set, plausibly explaining how our view on environmental ethics meshes with our view on abortion, how our view on treatment of animals meshes with our views on immigration, and how all of these mesh with our intuitions. But as you pointed out, that doesn’t guarantee morally-laudable views – maybe Hitler was consistent. However, “wide” reflective equilibrium happens when we engage in conversation with others, share our reasoning with them, and work to develop a collectively held set of consistent and defendable views. It’s been a while since I’ve read Political Liberalism or Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. But I suspect the search for wide reflective equilibrium was motivated by Rawls’s belief that seeking consistency not only internally, but with humanity at large, was the best way to improve our views. Two heads are better than one, five (an Ethics Bowl team) better than two, thirteen (both teams plus the judges) better than five, and society at large earnestly and respectfully deliberating together (following the Ethics Bowl model) even better.
Rachel: I think that’s right. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I think the Ethics Bowl is an excellent opportunity to practice arriving at reflective equilibrium both at an individual and at a group level. I also think we can arrive at a similar conclusion through many normative theoretical frameworks. I’m thinking in particular about John Stuart Mill’s arguments in On Liberty to the effect that we are all better off as a result of being exposed to a wide range of perspectives. This is fundamental to the mission of the Ethics Bowl at the inter-team level; teams benefit from actively listening and carefully responding to the views of others. It is also true at an intra-team level at which we may recognize a need for something different in a new case argued by a different team member.”
Matt: Rachel, thanks so much for taking the time. I love the book overall, but yours was an especially enjoyable chapter. Anything else you’d like to add?
Rachel: Of course, this was fun. Thanks so much! I do have a book coming out in November, it’s called Edibility and In Vitro Meat: Ethical Considerations published by Lexington Books. It’s on a topic we’ve debated in the Ethics Bowl in the past—cell cultured meat. Anyone who enjoyed those discussions might enjoy the book as well!
Thank you, Rachel! Hoping this helps teams think more about how judgments on one case can inform and complement their views on other cases. And be sure to check out The Ethics Bow Way, as well as Edibility and In Vitro Meat, available for pre-order now, fully live Nov 30th. We’ll have to see what Rachel has to say about it, but lab-grown meat sounds like a wonderful win-win to me. Delicious nutrition without the cruelty of factory farming? Sign me up!
