{"id":17673,"date":"2022-03-14T15:24:00","date_gmt":"2022-03-14T15:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/160-news\/?p=17673"},"modified":"2023-05-16T13:59:24","modified_gmt":"2023-05-16T13:59:24","slug":"making-the-right-arguments-together","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/2022\/03\/making-the-right-arguments-together\/","title":{"rendered":"Making the right arguments together"},"content":{"rendered":"

Students in Ethics Bowl take the national title<\/h3>\n

\u201cMy favorite thing about Ethics Bowl is that you\u2019re not assigned a side.\u201d
\nCasey Moerer \u201923
\n<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cIn Ethics Bowl you can be comfortable being unsure about a topic, or even being wrong,\u201d says Casey Moerer \u201923 (Santa Cruz, Calif.), a Macalester Ethics Bowl team co-captain. \u201cCountless times I\u2019ve come into an issue with my own perspective and have been gently and constructively challenged by my teammates.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"This winter, Moerer and teammates spent two months getting ready for the 26th Annual Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl national competition after qualifying at the regional level last fall. They prepared arguments for seventeen real-world ethical dilemmas, including facial recognition technology, hate speech regulation, drone warfare, and hybrid human-monkey embryos. And their hard work paid off: Competing virtually from campus in late February, the team was crowned the 2022 national champion.<\/span><\/p>\n

The national competition followed the traditional Ethics Bowl format, in which teams prepare arguments without knowing the question beforehand and are given only a minute or two before each round to prepare their thoughts. Competitors are judged on the clarity, nuance, and logical soundness of their arguments and, unlike other debate competitions, teams can agree with one another.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMy favorite thing about Ethics Bowl is that you\u2019re not assigned a side,\u201d says Moerer, a political science major and Russian studies minor. \u201cIn a lot of other debate formats, you\u2019re told you\u2019re either pro or con on an issue. Ethics Bowl really values and encourages people to actually think about what they believe and what they think the right thing to do is. And not just that, but to consider, why do you value that? Why do you think that\u2019s the right thing to do?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

After winning all four preliminary rounds, the team defeated University of California-San Diego and Westminster College in quarterfinals and semifinals, respectively. In the final round, the team competed against the University of Chicago, debating the Birds Aren\u2019t Real movement in the age of misinformation.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Macalester\u2019s approach of giving everyone a chance to speak and share their piece produces better arguments and better outcomes, says Moerer. Co-captain Sarah Falkovic \u201922 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina) agrees, adding that \u201cMacalester\u2019s egalitarian approach to debate is uncommon in the field of competitive ethics.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Moerer, Paul O’Connell \u201922, Joe McMurtrey \u201922, Dipakshi Sarma \u201924, Sarah Beth Hobby \u201924, and Ethan Glass \u201925 represented Macalester against thirty-six opposing teams from across the nation, who all had qualified at the regional level in the fall. Falkovic, Sarah Gotbetter \u201922, and Eli Schue \u201924 assisted the team as student coaches and researchers, alongside program alum and volunteer coach Nathan Vinehout Kane \u201918 and director of forensics Beau Larsen.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cEthics Bowl contests the idea that contemporary ethical dilemmas are merely two-sided disagreements, instead believing that there is a wider array of questions to ask and considerations to examine,\u201d says Larsen. \u201cStudents are asked to contemplate the relevant values, frameworks, and stakeholders of an issue while forwarding ethical arguments. It\u2019s an interdisciplinary activity here at Macalester that welcomes students of all majors.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The team, which also won the national Bioethics Bowl in 2021, will defend that title in April. The annual national competition focuses on a narrower range of ethical issues in science, medicine, and public health. But, for students, competition is only one meaningful aspect of the Ethics Bowl experience.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe Forensic Department as a whole really has created a community that fosters alumni connections,\u201d says Falkovic, a neuroscience major. \u201cIt\u2019s something that lasts much longer beyond our time in Ethics Bowl. We had a lot of conversations with alumni over the summer at social gatherings and on Zoom calls, and it was so fun to have this sense of timeless belonging and bonding. It\u2019s a wonderful place not only for what you do while you\u2019re here, but also for the community you gain once you graduate.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Vinehout Kane is part of that extended Mac forensics community. \u201cThroughout the eight years I\u2019ve been with the team, the faces may have changed, but the conversations have stayed the same,\u201d he says. \u201cMac Ethics Bowl has always been about fun tangents, commitment to community over trophies, and making the right argument over winning with the simplest argument. From the way my phone was blowing up after we won, I know it was extremely validating for everyone who built the program to see our style excel on the biggest stage.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A team of students take the national Ethics Bowl title<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1077,"featured_media":17675,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-student-life","mediatype-articles"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"fields":{"article_type":[8],"flickr_photoset_id":"","youtube_id":"","square_thumbnail":false,"press_photos":false,"story_title":"","story_caption":"","rotations":false,"maps":false,"marker_title":"","marker_text":"","geographic_location":false,"feature_embed":"","custom_link_url":"","news_icon_name":"","image_options":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1077"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17673"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17673\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30755,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17673\/revisions\/30755"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}