Husky scholars earn Ethics Bowl invitation

Undergrads headed to Washington, D.C. for battle of brains

A team of University of Washington undergraduates is practicing for a big bowl game in Washington, D.C., but the game won’t involve a ball. The students are philosophy majors who are competing in the sixth annual Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl sponsored by the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics. Coached by graduate students David Shapiro and Kristen Intemann, the students will match wits with peers from throughout the country, tackling not each other, but the kind of messy problems that defy easy answers.

Ethics Bowl team members and coaches practice throwing a little philosphy around. Clockwise from lower left are Kristen Intemann, Noah Purcell, David Shapiro, Joe Cutler and Jeanine Lewis.

The bowl works like this: The 28 student teams competing have been given 11 case studies to prepare before the event, each dealing with some sort of moral or ethical issue. The students don’t know which case they’ll be asked to present at the competition or what specific questions they’ll be asked. One of the case studies, for example, concerns the recent case in which high school students in Illinois were expelled for fighting. Students might be asked what policies schools should adopt with respect to fighting, whether the students should have been expelled, what recourse such students should have, or any number of other questions related to the case.

Team members have one minute to confer about the question, followed by 10 minutes to give their answer and their reasons for it. Judges then ask additional questions for 10 minutes, after which the other team in that round has five minutes to give a response. A panel of judges scores the two teams, based on soundness of reasoning, clarity, focus and depth. Teams with the highest scores move on to the semifinals, with the two top teams from that round facing off in the finals.

“It’s really a fun event,” Shapiro said. “It’s a competition but it’s a friendly competition. The evening after the competition there’s a banquet, and students have a chance to discuss the cases they’ve all been working on. I think they learn a lot.”

Shapiro has, in fact, used the ethics bowl as a way of involving students in a class he teaches called contemporary moral problems. “It’s a really marvelous educational device,” he said.

The UW team - consisting of senior Joe Cutler, juniors Jasmin Weaver and Noah Purcell and sophomore Jeanine Lewis - will have spent six weeks wrangling with the issues presented by the case studies by the time they go to the competition on Feb 25. And they’re going to use some of their professors as a warm-up. Tomorrow, the students will face off against philosophy professors Bill Talbott, Ann Baker and Angie Smith in a mini-Ethics Bowl to which the public is invited. The competition will be from 3:30 to 5 p.m. in 249 Savery.

“We choose the issues we’re struggling with the most and pose them to the professors,” Shapiro said. “We pick up a lot of ideas that way.”

This is the second year that the UW has sent a team to the bowl. Purcell and Weaver are returning members of last year’s team, which didn’t place in the competition. But Shapiro feels the rewards go beyond winning a prize.

“This has been among the most rewarding experiences I’ve had as a grad student,” he said. “The students are committed; the cases we’re exploring are really interesting and have a rich dimension of questions to wonder about. It’s just fun. Our weekly practices involve getting together and talking through these cases, trying to develop the best answers we can to them. It’s a pretty unusual but quite rewarding way to spend a Saturday morning.” ¶

Nancy Wick