Ethics Bowl
The APPE Ethics Bowl combines the excitement and fun of a competitive tournament with a valuable educational experience for undergraduate students. Recognized widely by educators, the Ethics Bowl has received special commendation for excellence and innovation from the American Philosophical Association, and received the 2006 American Philosophical Association/Philosophy Documentation Center's 2006 prize for Excellence and Innovation in Philosophy Programs. The format, rules, and procedures of the Ethics Bowl all have been developed to model widely acknowledged best methods of reasoning in practical and professional ethics.
In the fall of 2009 ten regional ethics bowls will take place throughout the United States. In February 2010, the top scoring teams in the ten regional ethics bowls (32 total) will compete at the national championship of the Ethics Bowl in Cincinnati, Ohio at the nineteenth Annual Meeting of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE). The case studies for the regional ethics bowls can be seen here. Please visit APPE's Regional Ethics Bowl Competition page for information about the locations and dates of these events.
In the Ethics Bowl, a moderator poses questions to teams of three to five students. Questions may concern ethical problems on wide ranging topics, such as the classroom (e.g. cheating or plagiarism), personal relationships (e.g. dating or friendship), professional ethics (e.g. engineering, law, medicine), or social and political ethics (e.g. free speech, gun control, etc.) Each team receives a set of ethical issues in advance of the competition, and questions posed to teams at the competition are taken from that set. A panel of judges evaluates answers; rating criteria are intelligibility, focus on ethically relevant considerations, avoidance of ethical irrelevance, and deliberative thoughtfulness.
For more information, please visit the home page of the APPE Ethics Bowl maintained by the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics or contact the chair of the Ethics Bowl Organizing Committee, Dr. Pat Croskery, (419) 772-2197.
