We’re behind schedule on a new NHSEB case pool analysis or two. But first, friend Archie Stapleton, co-founder and director of the Modus Ponens Institute, recently shared the below call for qualified judges and student competitors for the upcoming 2024 Global Ethics Olympiad. Open to all students anywhere in the world grades 6-12, check it out and email panamethics@modusponensinstitute.com with questions.
We are excited to invite you to the Fall TKEthics Global Olympiad on November 30, 2024, hosted by the Modus Ponens Institute. This virtual event, running from 6 PM to 11:30 PM EST, brings together students from grades 6-12 to discuss real-world ethical challenges.
This year’s Olympiad features 8 cases, with half focusing on the ethical implications of technology and artificial intelligence. These timely topics will challenge students to explore pressing questions on the role of AI in society—from privacy concerns to the future of AI-human relationships. The Olympiad provides a platform for students to showcase their ethical reasoning and public speaking skills, engaging in respectful, solution-driven discussions.
We Need Qualified Judges We are seeking qualified judgeswith a background in philosophy, ethics, or related fields to help evaluate the students’ performances. If you have experience in ethical discourse and would like to contribute, we encourage you to apply. Judges will play a key role in maintaining the high intellectual standard of the competition, helping to assess the students’ arguments and their ability to engage in thoughtful dialogue.
Coaching for Students Students looking to compete can also receive expert coaching from our renowned trainers, Archie Stapleton and Zach Bloom, who have coached the winners of the 2021, 2022, and 2024 International Ethics Olympiads. Our coaching sessions are designed to enhance critical thinking, ethical reasoning, and presentation skills, ensuring that students are fully prepared for the competition.
Upcoming Tournaments The Fall Ethics Olympiad will be followed by a Spring Tournament in March 2025. Details for the Finals are yet to be announced, but we are planning for a possible in-person event inCalifornia, with prizes for the winning teams!
Join Us! If you’re a qualified judge interested in participating or a student eager to compete, register now through the link below. For more details, you can also check out the attached invitation, or contact us directly at panamethics@modusponensinstitute.com.
This past Sunday, a small group of Ethics Bowl organizers, coaches and enthusiasts met for an informal, unofficial discussion on how ChatGPT and other generative AI tools might be used for Ethics Bowl. The purpose wasn’t to settle much of anything, but to inspire further discussion at the upcoming NHSEB regionals and nationals, as well as IEB nationals.
Why? Teams are surely using it. And given that Ethics Bowl participants, coaches, judges, moderators, organizers, their families and fans are among the most thoughtful people in the world, inviting them into a collective discussion on how to properly incorporate this technology seems a no-brainer. It’s an ethics question about Ethics Bowl – doesn’t get much more relevant than that. If you agree, please share this article and/or the accompanying recording, and report back any and all ideas worth sharing. Some upshots:
How to Best Leverage AI for Ethics Bowl Prep: Think of it as a conversation partner, tutor, rough draft-generator and/or judge/opposing team simulator. Understand its limitations. Fact check. Reason check. Moral blind spot check. Bias check. It’s a strong supplement to, but not a replacement for, human wisdom and deliberation. And it performs best when guided with insightful follow-ups.
On Worries that a Team Might Use AI to Write a Presentation Script: Using ChatGPT for Ethics Bowl prep isn’t analogous to asking it to do your homework because a) teams need to come to a consensus prior to the event (and it’s unlikely an entire team would agree to memorize and regurgitate a chatbot’s script), and b) due to EB’s live, interactive nature, any team overly reliant on an AI script would be embarrassingly exposed during commentary response and judge Q&A. Also, bowlers are a special self-selected subgroup of the population, far less likely to do anything that might constitute cheating than your average student (most of whom are also unlikely to cheat, but we educators are often paranoid about that).
Steps Ethics Bowl Leaders Can Take: While a team might get away with memorizing an eloquent opening presentation script written for them by a chatbot (the risk is low, but one could), this can be partially mitigated by adjusting score sheets to increase the relative weighting of the commentary, commentary response and judge Q&A portions. (Rules committees, steering committees, other leaders – please give this additional thought – tweaking rubrics might help as well.)
Steps Ethics Bowl Coaches Can Take: The broader community of Ethics Bowl coaches (including Ethics Olympiad, John Stuart Mill Cup, etc. coaches) can and should work together to test, share and recommend AI prompts and techniques that produce the highest quality outputs. They should also remind students of the virtues of democratic deliberation and the risks of intellectual laziness. Consider EthicsBowl.org one place to share such insights.
Steps Case Committees Can Take: Since generative AI seems more effective at scripting responses on cases about real world events (with published editorials for the AI to scan), case writing committees should consider using more fictitious scenarios or putting twists on real world cases (focusing on some interpersonal moral tension within the broader context of a real world issue). This may be unnecessary, but definitely deserves additional thought.
There was more – please watch the video when you have time. But one thing I argued is that AI can serve as an equalizer, connecting all teams (both advantaged and disadvantaged) with an on-demand tutor with an unmatched knowledge base and inexhaustible stamina. Students with the time and interest can learn pretty much anything, including philosophical ethics, so long as they know how to ask good questions. Background knowledge definitely helps, and learning will be slower when the topic is new. But I’m very optimistic about AI’s potential for education.
Special thanks to Michael Andersen for the idea, the planning and co-hosting, as well as to coaches Dick Lesicko, Angela Vahsholtz-Andersen and Chris Ng (thanks also, Chris, for your notes which helped with this article), organizers Jeanine DeLay and Greg Bock for your preparation, attendance and engagement. And apologies to Gabe Kahn, who gets credit for trying to attend! Next time I’ll more closely monitor the Zoom host notifications…
I recently finished The Ethics Bowl Waywhile 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!
“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.
The flecks of grey, the furrowed brows, the air of unspoken wisdom. Ethics bowl judges are an intimidating bunch. However, here’s a secret. Behind that aura of philosophical gravitas, judges are often the most nervous people in the room.
For one, they may be pedigreed, but are comparative amateurs when it comes to the cases. Teams (good teams, anyway) have dissected them from multiple angles, parsed the nuances and developed all-things-considered views for the entire set. They’ve anticipated objections, formulated pre-emptive replies and strategized how to respond come what may. Judges (good judges, anyway) may have read the case pool once. Those who’ve taken the time to sketch a few notes – and can actually read their handwriting – are doing better than most.
Then there’s the isolated responsibility. Teams can divvy up roles: Suzie covers the team’s general position, Sally the moral relevancies, Sam what a critic might say and a response. They’ve rehearsed, mock bowled with other teams and members knows that if one needs a little help, the others will pick up the slack. Judge collaboration is actually discouraged, each segregated island tasked with delivering an independent objective score. The pressure!
But it’s the last segment of each round – the judges Q&A – when vulnerability peaks. Everyone keenly listens to what you ask and how you ask it. Was there a hint of confirmation in her voice, of disagreement in his posture? Critiqued live and between rounds, while a judge’s role is to judge, they’re also being judged, and are hyperaware.
Then there’s the internal conflict. Part of you is tempted to use the platform to (humbly) steer the discussion towards whatever resolution you think best. Part of you wants to use your brief window to correct a glaring error or illuminate some neglected moral twist. Part of you wants to confirm your authority and expertise, indeed, the authority and expertise of the entire ethics profession.
Talk too much, and you risk coming across as pompous. “Will this guy ever shut up?” Talk too little, and you risk inspiring doubt. “Is that all he had to say?”
I share this not to inspire pity, but to reassure. If you’re a judge and feel any of the above, this is normal. Take a breath, do your best, and remember that without you, the many benefits of ethics bowl would not be possible. But if you’re a team member losing sleep over what a judge may think or ask, know that whatever anxieties and insecurities haunt your bowling experience, you’re not alone. In fact, there’s a good chance the kind volunteers entrusted to judge you are the most nervous people in the room.
