Tag: Ethics Olympiad

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.