Union College will host this year's Northeast Region Ethics Bowl for college students on
Saturday, Feb. 19 from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. at College Park Hall.
The Ethics Bowl is a debate-style competition during
which teams of undergraduates discuss ethical issues related to a set of
prepared case studies. Moderators will pose questions to teams of three
to five students. They will address ethical problems on classroom topics (i.e.
cheating or plagiarism), personal relationships (i.e. dating or friendship),
professional ethics (i.e. engineering, law, medicine), or social and political
ethics (i.e. 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 soundness of intelligibility, focus on ethically relevant
considerations, avoidance of ethical irrelevance, and deliberative
thoughtfulness.
This is the third year that Union College will participate in the Ethics Bowl. It was started 11 years ago by professor Robert
Ladenson of Illinois Institute of Technology. Teams from Boston College, Dartmouth, Marist, Rochester, and Williams will be on campus to compete against Union's team.
The
competition has grown so much over the years that the bowl had to be broken
down regionally before teams compete nationally. Forty teams,
representing colleges and universities throughout the U. S. will attend the national ethics bowl.
A round of three
preliminary matches begins at 10 a.m. and finishes at 2 p.m. Semi-final matches
begin at 3 p.m. and end at 4:15 p.m., and the final match begins at 4:20 p.m.
and ends at 5:30 p.m.