by Tim Sommers
Having previously discussed Ethics Bowl here, I can’t resist bragging just a little, tiny bit.
On Sunday, May 8 in St. Louis, Missouri the Ethics Bowl team from William & Mary – our team! – became the 2026 APPE International Ethics Bowl® Champions. The crew on the stage, led by Team Founder/Coach Bernardo Jimez, won the trophy with the support of the whole William and Mary team. For discussion, research and analysis, participation in other Bowls, and practice, practice, practice, the team also includes Teddy Friesz, Chaewon Kang, Nicholas Leonard, Lydia Kipp, Sheoli Lele, Dani Munrayos, Ben Schatz, and Harper Willim. Oh. And me. The humble Faculty Advisor/Coach.
Ethics Bowl focuses on a small number of sensitive, controversial, and challenging cases of applied ethics with new cases coming out every semester. The Championship Bowl featured fifteen cases including, what to do about a hypothetical billionaire experimenting with geoengineering to mitigate global climate change without cooperating with any nation or group? Can medical professionals who refuse to be vaccinated or give vaccinations be justifiably limited in completing clinical rotations or securing a residency? How are our views of consent and intimacy perniciously influenced by reality television? Is it immoral to idolize so Luigi Mangione, the man who shot the CEO of UnitedHealthcare?
It interesting to watch such a diverse and intelligent and motivated group of people – not just my team, all the teams – focus so single-mindedly on a relatively small set of ethical questions. It taught me a few lessons over the last few years – or at least raised some issues I am still ruminating over. Here are three.
“Swamped” by the Facts?
Suppose we were debating the ethics of immigration. Here are some questions we might ask. How many of the immigrants in question are involved in drugs or violent crime? Will crime go up if we allow more immigration? Will new immigrants take jobs from citizens? Will wages go down? Will new immigrants use more in the way of social services – schools, hospitals, safety net programs, etc. – than they will pay back in taxes? Or is immigration the key to keeping Social Security solvent?
Notice something about this list. None of these are ethical questions. They are all empirical, factual questions. However, if we had consensus on the answers to these questions, there might not be much of an ethical debate left to have. For example, and purely hypothetically, if immigrants brought in fewer drugs than current citizens and committed fewer crimes and without taking jobs away from American or lowering their wages, but in fact paying in to the system more than they get out and keeping social security solvent. If we agreed on these facts, there wouldn’t be that much of an ethical controversy left, would there?
My research is mostly on equality – on wealth and income inequality, in particular. I think we should have less of it. If you tell people this, the main response you get is there may be a little too much inequality, but that inequality is good for economic growth and that helps everyone.
These are factual claims. Economic growth helping everyone has not been what has happened in the last 50+ years in the U.S. We have every reason to believe that inequality has become a drag on the economy, slowing growth – and, oh boy! – people’s estimates of the level of inequality that we have versus the level they think is ethical… Well, one person summed it up like this: “Americans actually live in Russia, although they think they live in Sweden. And they would like to live on a kibbutz.”
It seems to me then, that a lot of supposed ethical issues lose a lot of their heat once you get your facts straight.
Less Moral Disagreement?
No one I have seen at any Ethics Bowl has ever come out in favor of torturing kittens, slavery, or lying. It looks like there is so much disagreement in ethics, and Ethics Bowl, because we focus on the disagreement.
If you study the sciences, you are taught a body of knowledge. You don’t read much, if any, history of science, and you certainly don’t take classes entirely structure around what it is that, say chemists, disagree about.
But every ethics class I have ever heard of is structured around ethical disagreement. So, is Ethics Bowl. I am in no way against this. It seems valuable, however, to pause from time to time to remember how much ethical common ground we share.
I am not as optimistic, but I am intrigued by Derek Parfit’s take on the prospect for agreement in ethics.
“Belief in God, or in many gods, prevented the free development of moral reasoning. Disbelief in God, openly admitted by a majority, is a recent event, not yet completed. Because this event is so recent, Non-Religious Ethics is at a very early stage. We cannot yet predict whether, as in Mathematics, we will all reach agreement. Since we cannot know how Ethics will develop, it is not irrational to have high hopes.”
Consequentialism or Deontology: That’s It!
Finally, here’s a claim that will no doubt result in some strongly worded missives coming my way from fellow ethics professors. Consequentialism and deontological (duty/rule-based) theories are the most useful for analyzing cases. In fact, though there are other theories they are not much used in Ethics Bowl, and, when I have seen them tried, it was disastrous.
To explain. Consequentialists say all that matters ethically are the consequences of an action. Always do whatever has the best consequences, they. Deontological, or duty-based theories, say there are moral rules that don’t simply reduce to consequences. We ought to follow certain rules or principles even when they sometimes don’t have the best consequences. You shouldn’t lie even where the truth hurts versus all that matters is whatever hurts the least.
Both views have, in my humble opinion, a lot going for them. Maybe, some other views do too, but whatever it is, I don’t see it. Take virtue theory. You should do what a virtuous person would do. Which is what? One widely used ethics text with a flair for understatement says that virtue theory “can be vague about what to do in specific dilemmas.” You think?
Aristotle, the original virtue theorist, says we need to be educated to “Arte” or excellence at a very young age and taught ethical habits. That useful. Here’s a moral dilemma. Now, the way to solve it is to time travel back to childhood and give everyone a better education. And by the way the good judgment that Aristotle himself was habituated to led him to support slavery and oppose democracy.
Am I caricaturing virtue theory? A bit. But I think that it is fair to say that virtue theory is unlikely to be the best way to address specific ethical dilemmas. That’s all I am saying.