In the first regional Ethics Bowl, college teams will compete to find the best solution to everyday quandaries.
By DONNA SELF
Published October 27, 2004
ST. PETERSBURG - This weekend ethics students from three colleges will debate right, wrong and why in a kind of Soul Bowl, a first in St. Petersburg.
The University of South Florida St. Petersburg, Eckerd College and St. Petersburg College will hold the first Southeastern Regional Ethics Bowl on Saturday at Eckerd College.
Using their knowledge of classical and contemporary moral theories, teams of three to five college students will analyze dilemmas. Judges will score the teams on the consistency, clarity and ethical relevance of their arguments.
It is not the same as a debate, the point of which is to come up with the strongest argument for an affirmative or negative position on an issue. In an ethics tournament, students arrive at moral solutions to everyday questions in political, public, professional and private life.
Teams may even agree on an answer but argue with a different line of reasoning.
The ethics bowl concept was created 10 years ago by Dr. Robert Ladenson, a professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Developed as a campus activity, it has expanded to a national level.
The original number of 14 nationally competing teams has grown to 40, with 22 schools on a waiting list to compete this year.
"With the enormous logistics of planning an event like this, 40 teams is the absolute limit," Ladenson said. "This is a problem because the strength of the ethics bowl is that it's an open event. The danger is that it could turn into a club with the same teams competing every year if we don't work out a way to allow more schools to take part."
Dr. Deni Elliott, ethics professor and Poynter-Jamison chair in ethics at USF St. Petersburg, is head of the planning committee for the first Southeastern Bowl. She expects this event to become a stepping stone to the national competition.
"There is a need for developing feeder bowls to distribute the competition," she says, "and it's likely that this will become one of those feeders."
Ethics education is more than 2,000 years old and was a large part of the college experience until the end of the 19th century.
With rising social issues in the 1960s and '70s came a resurgence of ethical teachings. In her manuscript Teaching Ethics in the First Person, Elliott wrote, "Civil disobedience and questions of justification for the use of violence by protesters and by authorities required the application of ethical thought."
Elliott also notes that Watergate lessened the public's trust in social institutions, and just as the civil rights movement provoked ethical thinking, so did the Vietnam War, women's rights, disabilities, abortion and the responsibility of the government toward its people. Technological advances in medicine began to, and continue to, create new issues requiring ethical analysis.
The field of teaching ethics continues to grow. Journalism, law, and medical, business and science curriculums include ethics courses. Graduate programs in ethics emerged in the 1990s.
Elliott has taught ethics to people that range from kindergarteners to ethics professors.
"Ethics education is necessary for the same reason that physical education is necessary," she said. "We all have the capability to perform physical functions like breathing and walking around, but we learn in PE that simply acting at a minimal level is not good. Ethics education helps people develop the potential to become ethically sophisticated and bring power and consistency to making choices."
Elliott stresses that moral sophistication does not equal perfection. "We all have the potential to be morally sophisticated, but that doesn't mean we'll be Mother Teresa. But we should try."
Elliot thinks the ethics bowl is a good way to teach systematic moral development, make students aware of their power and voice early on, and to bring a sense of moral responsibility to students' personal, public and professional lives.
"Inherently, we of normal intelligence have the potential to be ethically sophisticated," Elliott says. "Few develop this potential, but it is our ethical responsibility to do so."
The Southeastern Regional Ethics Bowl is open to the public. Competitions will take place at the Dendy McNair building at Eckerd College on Saturday. The preliminary rounds will begin at 9:15 a.m., the semifinals at 3 p.m., and finals at 4:30 p.m.
