CSEP Hosts Second Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl
On February 24, 1996, CSEP hosted the Second Intercollegiate
Ethics Bowl on the IIT campus in Chicago. Teams representing IIT,
Loyola (Chicago), DePaul, Western Michigan University, and the United
States Air Force Academy squared off in friendly, but intense competition.
Ethics Bowl was inspired by TV's College Bowl, but with different
rules to adapt the College Bowl format to the subject of ethics. A
distinguished panel drawn from business, the professions, academia,
and the arts rated the teams' answers in terms of the clarity, ethical
relevance, focus, and judgment. The team from the United States Air
Force Academy emerged victorious, but all the teams turned in performances
that impressed the judges, audience, and representatives of the media
who attended the event. The Second Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl received
publicity before the event in the Chicago Sun Times and on
WMAQ News Radio in Chicago.
Other Ethics Bowl Activities This Year
There were two additional major activities related to the
Ethics Bowl this year, one preceding the intercollegiate event, and
the other following it. On February 3, an internal IIT Ethics Bowl
took place to determine the team that would represent IIT at the Intercollegiate
Ethics Bowl. The internal Ethics Bowl drew ten teams, who competed
vigorously on one of the coldest Saturday afternoons in the history
of Chicago. The twelve distinguished individuals who served as judges
for the event, were either IIT Alumni, IIT graduate school faculty,
or participants in past or present CSEP activities.
On March 1, the Friday following the Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl,
CSEP Faculty Associate and Ethics Bowl organizer, Robert Ladenson,
along with several IIT students, who had all participated in an Ethics
Bowl at IIT, presented a demonstration of Ethics Bowl at the banquet
of the annual meeting of the Association for Practical and Professional
Ethics in St. Louis. Ladenson and the IIT students received many favorable
comments, expressions of interest in participating, and suggestions
to make the Ethics Bowl even more exciting and educationally valuable.
CSEP has already begun planning for a substantially expanded Ethics
Bowl in 1997.
How Ethics Bowl is Played
In Ethics Bowl, a moderator asks teams of three to five persons
questions that pose ethical problems on topics such as the classroom
(e.g. cheating or plagiarism); personal relationships (e.g. dating
or friendship); professional ethics (e.g. engineering, architecture,
business, the military, law, medicine, and so on); or social and political
ethics (e.g. free speech, gun control, health care, and so on). A
team gets one minute to confer after which it must state its answer
to the question, including its reasons. The judges then have an opportunity
to ask brief follow-up questions. After the team responds to the follow-up
questions, the Moderator reads the "Moderator's Answer."
This answer is not the standard of ethical correctness in the
game but a device to model the element of discussion and dialogue
in reasoning about ethical questions. For this reason, a team has
three options upon hearing the Moderator's answer. First, the team
may rest, in which case it accepts the Moderator's answer, and the
judges then rate the team's answer. Each judge on the panel ranks
the answer on a scale from one to ten, from the standpoint of the
answer's clarity, ethical relevance, focus, and judgment. Second,
the team may challenge the Moderator's answer, and third, it may accept
the answer, but with qualifications. If a team elects either the second
or third option, it receives another thirty seconds to confer, after
which it states its reasons. The judges then make their evaluations.
Before the Ethics Bowl, the student participants receive a set of
twenty-five questions to study. The questions asked at the Ethics
Bowl are taken from that set.
-Robert Ladenson
Faculty Associate
