Tag: Ethics Bowl

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2015 Ethics Bowl Regional Champs

By Jim Spiegel

This past Saturday, November 21, the Taylor University Ethics Bowl team won the Central States regional championship for the 5th time in the history of the program.

Photo by Jim Garringer
Photo by Jim Garringer

Twenty-six teams from fifteen colleges and universities participated in this year’s Central States regional competition, which once again was held at Marian University in Indianapolis. The other schools involved were Belmont University, DePauw University, Illinois Wesleyan University (two teams), Indiana University (two teams), IUPUI-Fort Wayne, Marian University, Millikin University (three teams), Mount St. Joseph University (two teams), Northern Kentucky University, Ohio Northern University, Slippery Rock University, St. Mary of the Woods College, University of Arkansas (two teams), University of Southern Indiana, Xavier University, and Youngstown State University.

As usual Taylor entered two teams, and the rosters were as follows:

Team I:

  • Veronica Toth (Senior, English Writing)
  • Blair Hedges (Junior, Political Science)
  • Jackson Wilcox (Sophomore, Accounting)
  • Sarah Manko (Freshman, Exercise Science)
  • Caleb Holleman (Freshman, Math and Philosophy)
  • Loyal Juraschek (Sophomore, Philosophy)

Team II:

  • Kasey Leander (Senior, History and Political Science, Philosophy, & Economics)
  • Sam Moore (Junior, Philosophy and Biblical Studies)
  • Gabriel Harder (Freshman, Philosophy)
  • Chin Ai Oh (Sophomore, Political Science, Philosophy, & Economics)
  • Bo Thomas (Freshman, History and Philosophy)
  • Gloria Talbot (Sophomore, International Business Systems)

The top finishing teams qualify for the national tournament. At the competition each team competes against three other teams, and our teams had a combined record of six wins and no losses:

  • TU team #1 defeated Marian University (149-131), DePauw University (158-149), and Indiana University II (163-141)
  • TU team #2 defeated Univ. of Arkansas II (160-136), Ohio Northern Univ. (158-136), and Mt. St. Joseph Univ. I (149-139)

Taylor now has a combined 18-match winning streak, dating back to nationals earlier this year and regionals last year.

As is typical of Ethics Bowl competitions, very timely issues were debated in the various matches. These included the following:

  • Do religious freedom laws (protecting, say, a baker’s right not to make a cake for a same-sex wedding) properly balance constitutional rights?
  • Is the “Law Enforcement Officers Bill of Rights” (providing that law officers can’t be forced to make a statement within ten days of an incident) morally justifiable?
  • Does the American Freedom Defense Initiative (which ran the “Muhammad cartoon contest”) practice appropriate free speech or unacceptable intolerance?
  • Is the composting of human corpses, as advocated by the Urban Death Project (for environmental reasons) an acceptable way of disposing of the dead?
  • Is the Indian Child Welfare Act (mandating that social services place displaced Native American children with tribal relatives) morally appropriate?

These were just five of fifteen cases that all of the teams had to prepare to address. Other cases pertained to issues as wide ranging as the ethics of physicians’ prescribing hard narcotics to their patients, sexism in video games, a New Zealand species conservation case, special taxes on parents who refuse to vaccinate their children, the ethics of human egg freezing to delay motherhood, and the ethics of forcing parents to have their young teenager undergo chemotherapy. You can find a complete list of cases as well the competition rules and guidelines here.

In the regional competitions (unlike nationals) wins and losses do not impact teams’ overall scores. Rankings are determined entirely by scores awarded by judges. The top five at the conclusion of the day were as follows:

  1. Taylor University I
  2. St. Mary of the Woods College
  3. Illinois Wesleyan University I
  4. Indiana University I
  5. Taylor University II

The national Ethics Bowl competition is scheduled for February 21, 2016 and will be held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Reston, Virginia (near Washington, DC).  A total of 36 teams will participate, and Taylor will be striving to defend its national title.

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National Champions!

By Jim Spiegel

Last weekend the Taylor University Ethics Bowl team, which I coach, won the national championship in Costa Mesa, California.  Ethics Bowl is an intercollegiate moral issues debate competition, in which hundreds of schools participate nationwide. Taylor has been participating since the late 1990s, and our team has won numerous regional championships, and in recent years we’ve been doing increasingly well at nationals. Two years ago we advanced to the finals, only to be edged by one point in the IMG_1313championship match. But last weekend we took that final step, winning our first national championship in a very close match against Whitworth University (a superb team and one of the most consistently strong teams in the country).

Our team won all three qualifying matches (against Duke University, Santa Clara University and Texas Pan American). Then we defeated Villanova University in the quarterfinals and Indiana University in the semi-finals, culminating in the showdown against Whitworth University.

The competition took place at the Hilton Hotel in Costa Mesa, California. As usual, 32 teams participated, all having qualified by finishing among the top teams in their region. There are ten regions nationwide, and ours is the Central States region, which features some of the best teams in the nation, including former national champions Indiana University (2004 and 2009), Wright State University (2002), and DePauw University (2013).

The topics debated at nationals were the following (two cases covered per match):

  • Unpaid internships
  • The use of ancient artifacts (Roman lead ingots) for scientific purposes
  • “Prescriptive planting” farming technology
  • The killing of civilians in war
  • Parental rights of rapists
  • Fracking
  • Artificial intelligence
  • Minimum wage
  • Horse slaughterhouses
  • Stealth (undercover) journalism
  • Media use of “crowdsourcing”
  • Transgendered people and public bathrooms

The Taylor team roster:

  • Jess Biermann (Senior, Philosophy)
  • Nathaniel Cullen (Senior, Philosophy and Environmental Studies)
  • Kasey Leander (Junior, Political Science, Philosophy, and Economics)
  • Davis Meadors (Senior, Philosophy)
  • Caleb Nagle (Senior, Political Science)
  • Mark Taylor (Senior, Philosophy)
  • Veronica Toth (Junior, English)

And non-roster Ethics Bowlers who were on the Fall regionals team and made the trip to nationals, supporting the team in various ways:

  • Kyle Carruthers (Senior, Professional Writing)
  • Lydia Grace Espiritu (Senior, Philosophy)

Katie Duncan is my assistant coach, and she led the team while I was on sabbatical in the Fall when the team qualified for nationals by finishing second at regionals.

We couldn’t be happier for the students, as they worked like crazy for the last two months and performed brilliantly all day during the competition.  It’s an amazing bunch.  For the seniors, they’ve made it to two finals in three years, and now they’ve won a national championship.

Soli Deo Gloria!

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Taylor University Ethics Bowl Team Finishes #2 in the Nation!

By Jim Spiegel

Last Thursday the Taylor University Ethics Bowl team, which I coach, finished in second place at the national Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl Competition in San Antonio, Texas.  This is our best finish ever and our second consecutive year to make it to the “elite eight.”

Our road to the final was not easy, as we had to defeat last year’s champion, Whitworth University, in the semi-final match.  In the championship match we faced DePauw University, a team with whom we are very familiar, having faced them many times before in our Central States Regional competitions.  Like Taylor, DePauw is a liberal arts college from Indiana.  It was an exciting match, as the Wyndham Hotel ballroom was packed, and the cases debated were highly controversial—illegal immigration and active euthanasia.  Both teams did brilliant work articulating

Semi-final match against Whitworth University
Semi-final match against Whitworth University

and defending their views, and the judges were divided as to who the winner should be.  In the end, DePauw prevailed by the narrowest of margins: 154-153.  Congratulations to the DePauw University team!

The issues debated during the course of the day’s competition concerned such topics as pre-natal genetic testing, protest tactics used by animal rights groups, art museums’ use of stolen art, and a novel technological approach to combating global warming.  Each year the fifteen national tournament cases are posted in mid-January, so teams have about six weeks to prepare.  However, the questions posed are not known until match time, so teams must know their cases thoroughly and be prepared to address the many ethical dimensions of each case.

Other schools that competed included Colgate University, Villanova University, Loyola University Chicago, University of Oklahoma, Georgetown University, Utah State University, Maryland University, University of North Florida, the U.S. Naval Academy and twenty others.

Our team included Tom Weingartner (Senior), Sarah Sawicki (Senior), Suzanne Neefus (Junior), Nathaniel Cullen (Sophomore), Mark Taylor (Sophomore), Jess Biermann (Sophomore), Kasey Leander (Freshman), and Veronica Toth (Freshman).  And my assistant coach is Cathy Kerton-Johnson.  Ours is a relatively young team, so Cathy and I are looking forward to having another strong squad next year.  Of course, the outcome of these competitions is not as important as the qualities that Ethics Bowl develops in the students, including ethical reasoning abilities, public communication skills, and a deeper moral seriousness.  So like athletics, Ethics Bowl is a means to the end of character formation, rather than an end in itself.  But the competition really is a great motivator and a lot of fun!

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Ethics Bowl Regional Champs

By Jim Spiegel

This past weekend the Taylor Ethics Bowl team, which I coach, won the Central States Regional championship.  This is our students’ second regional championship in the last three years.  And all three teams that we entered finished in the top four (1st, 2nd, and 4th) out of a total of twenty teams.

The other schools that competed included Belmont University, Butler University, DePauw University, Eastern Kentucky University, Indiana University, Xavier College, Wright State University, University of Southern Indiana, Marian University, Illinois Wesleyan Universiby, St. Olaf College, IMG_1225and the College of Mount St. Joseph.  The cases debated in the competition, as always, covered a broad range of issues.  This year the issues were drug legalization, gay conversion therapy, the ethics of “street art,” racial bias in death penalty rulings, the justice of a student loan forgiveness act, and the ethics of medical experimentation on animals.

At regionals, the top four teams qualify for the national tournament in San Antonio, Texas, which will take place on February 28, 2013.  So, technically, all three of our teams qualified.  But since we can only send one team (with a maximum of 5 students) to nationals, we’ll have to select that team from among our twelve E-Bowlers who competed this past weekend.

It’s gratifying to coach such a talented bunch of students, and I’m excited about getting them prepared for the national competition.

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Taylor University: Central States Region Ethics Bowl Champions!

By Jim Spiegel

For the last ten years I have had the privilege and joy of coaching the Taylor University Ethics Bowl team.  Ethics Bowl is an intercollegiate debate competition focusing on moral issues.  Each Fall semester teams are given fifteen cases dealing a variety of ethical dilemmas, including issues in business ethics, bioethics, social ethics, and international politics.  Being located in Indiana, Taylor participates in the Central States regional competition, which was held last Saturday at Marian University in Indianapolis.  This year fifteen colleges participated.  Schools are allowed to enter a maximum of two teams, and five schools did so, including Taylor, which brought the total number of teams competing to twenty.

Among the issues debated were these:

  • Do developing nations have the moral right to use coal despite its negative environmental impact?
  • Should the NCAA allow women an extra year of athletic eligibility (so that female athletes will not be tempted to play sports while pregnant)?
  • Should the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution be changed by dropping the citizen-by-birth clause (to eliminate an incentive for illegal immigrants to cross the U.S. border to give birth to their babies)?

There are ten regional competitions across the country, and the top finishers in each region receive bids to the national Ethics Bowl tournament, which is held in the Spring.  In our region, the top four teams were to receive bids to nationals.  Our teams finished 1st and 4th overall, thus (doubly) clinching a bid to nationals (and actually allowing the 5th place team to qualify as well).

Both of our teams performed brilliantly.  My co-coach, Jeff Cramer, and I were thrilled for the students when the results were announced.  We beamed like proud parents.  Soon we will begin to prepare for nationals.  In fact, our line-up for the competition has already been established.  (Since each school may enter only one team at nationals, we had to select five students from among the ten students on our two teams who competed at the regional.)  We’re all excited to see the next round of cases, which will be announced in early January.

Taylor teams have made it to nationals 50% of the time over the past decade, and this is our second regional championship since 2003 (along with two 2nd place and a 3rd place finish).  However, we have never made it to the quarterfinals at nationals, and that is one of our goals this year.  Time, as they say, will tell.