Audience
On Saturday at the Chesapeake Regional Ethics Bowl (hosted this year by UMBC), the Seahawks Ethics Bowl Team won all four of its rounds, including against teams like Villanova and Penn State. The team thus progressed to the semi-final round, where we tied with Washington & Lee University.
Thus, we finished in a tie for second place, and won one of the three bids to the National Ethics Bowl, to be held March 7-8 in St. Louis.
(This is the fifth time in thirteen years that St. Mary’s has qualified for the Nationals.)
Finishing that high among the 16 teams means that St. Mary’s finished higher than teams like Tufts, Temple, Princeton, and Virginia Tech. (And of course, because we competed directly against them, higher than Villanova and Penn State.)
The team performed with excellence and grace, and is pictured above: Bechorah Aguoru, Philip Eisenstein, Argyrios Tasikas, Mason Lipczenko, Lainey Shankle, Ella Skidmore, and Coach Taber.
Yet one more thing for St. Mary's to take pride in.
These Seahawks spent the semester researching and preparing positions on the 15 cases posted by the sponsors of the Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl. Teams know the cases, of course, and therefore the general issues, but we don’t find out until each round what the question is that we’re being asked to address.
Cases on which we presented on Saturday were:
- Should a criminal record disqualify a candidate from holding office? (Using France’s Marine Le Pen as an example.)
- Should justice systems treat femicide as a distinct category of crime to highlight gender-based crime, or does this risk creating unequal justice?
- Do new burial practices that turn human remains to soil express proper moral respect for person or risk reducing human life to mere material?
- Under what conditions, if ever, is it ethical to use shock tactics such as animal cruelty to call attention to a practice like animal farming?
And in the semi-final round, our question was, “How should we deal with overtourism in a way that is fair to locals, tourists, and the concerns of political sovereignty?”
Ethics Bowl isn’t really a debate between teams, because teams can agree with each other on their positions on a given issue. (They can point out how the other team’s reasoning or examples could have been improved.) So no one need say anything that they don’t believe in.
Our thanks go to Mandy Taylor, director of the Writing and Speaking Center, and to the tutors, who provided valuable advice in a practice session.
And to Lucy Myers, our wonderful, fantastic Fiscal Associate, who took care of the ever-necessary logistics.