By Beth Guluk Isensee
Is it moral to continue having children in the face of the impending global climate crisis? Or is it wrong to even associate reproduction with such a controversial topic? Is legalizing marijuana ethical or is it simply serving to worsen pre-existing levels of systematic injustice? Is the Chinese government’s new social credit system a violation of human rights?
These are just a few cases that UC Santa Barbara’s Ethics Bowl team will be debating at the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics Intercollegiate regional competition this December at Arizona State University.
Although not well-known among many students, the Ethics Bowl trains an academic team under the Department of Philosophy. The team travels and competes against other schools from around the country, debating the ethical principles and boundaries of contemporary issues, on topics such as politics, medicine, science, law, and business. While most members are philosophy majors, the team is open to undergraduate students of all ages, interests, and departments.
As someone without much of an interest in either debate or philosophy, I had never heard of the Ethics Bowl until my roommate, Natalie McCosker, joined the team two years ago. Since then, she has traveled and competed with the team, gone to weekly -- often several times a week -- meetings, and she has recently become the team’s vice president.
Natalie comes home from every meeting excited, talking vigorously about whatever case is being discussed that week and the hours that have been spent going back and forth over a variety of different perspectives and arguments, sometimes without ever reaching a consensus.
As competition season approaches, it is not unusual to see Ethics Bowl members sprawled out on the floor of our living room, debating and writing up arguments until the early hours of the morning. While preparing for the nationals last year, the team was faced with an especially controversial case concerning the ethics of introducing sex robots into society, which they spent many hours debating. For that particular case, like all others, the members devote huge amounts of time and effort preparing for competitions.
“Being on the team takes a lot of dedication,” Natalie said. “But it is incredibly rewarding and absolutely worth it.”
In November 2018, the Ethics Bowl team won first place at the Wasatch Regional Competition in Salt Lake City, allowing it to advance to the March 2019 APPE Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl national competition in Baltimore, Maryland. There, they won two out of three debate rounds before being eliminated from the competition.
In preparation for the fall quarter competition, the executive board has just finished selecting the team’s final roster. It accepted only two new students this year, adding to the returning ten members in order to create two teams to represent UCSB at regionals in December 2019, rather than only one as in past years.
Natalie personifies how much the team as a whole “values commitment and hard work,” and she is excited about the regionals and prospects for advancing to the nationals this coming spring.
Beth Guluk Isensee is a fourth year Communication major at UC Santa Barbara. She wrote this for her course Journalism for Web and Social Media.
UCSB’s Ethics Bowl Team competing in Baltimore, Maryland, March 2019. The writer’s roommate Natalie McCosker is second from the right.