Getting Students Excited about Ethics
>> Monday, December 19, 2011
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| Dr. Kelly Smith |
It all begins with a set of 15 case studies we receive about 9 weeks before the competition. The cases raise interesting ethical issues in a variety of fields and are often drawn from recent headlines. They are designed so as to be fairly open-ended. By that I mean two things. First, the team will be asked to respond to a specific question about each case in the competition, but the questions are not given in advance and there are many possibilities. Second, the ethical issues are rich and complex, to the point where one can reasonably argue for more than one position. Thus it’s never clear in advance what we will be asked, much less what “the right answer” is. This is all done on purpose, since it forces teams to really think through the issues. You can’t prepare a polished speech and just deliver it, since you don’t know exactly what you will be asked to talk about. You also have to really defend the positions you take, because there are always good objections you will be called upon to respond to. How do you deal with this level of uncertainty?
The secret to our success is a very old one and familiar to any student of philosophy: merciless application of the Socratic method. When Socrates wanted to explore some concept like justice, he would find someone who should know about it and pose them a basic question. When the person responded, he would expose weaknesses in their answer and force them to reconsider. People sometimes think of the Socratic method as just asking simple, annoying questions over and over. It can certainly be annoying (they killed Socrates to shut him up, after all) but the questions are not simple. Socrates was very good at seeing where the reasoning of the person he was talking to was weak and then pressing on that exact spot with his questions. The irritation this produces is just a byproduct, the point is to knock people away from their complacent attitudes and force them to think through all the different aspects of the problem. In short, it’s a process perfectly suited to the needs of the ethics bowl.
Let me illustrate by talking about a specific case from the just completed regionals. One of Kyle Sporrer’s cases dealt with Indian fishermen on the Amazon River killing the endangered pink dolphin to use as bait. In the early discussions of the case, it seemed this was a pretty straightforward conflict between the needs of an indigenous culture, which uses the dolphin for fishing, and the outside world, which is concerned with conservation. But we asked all sorts of questions about how long this practice had been going on and how it fit with the beliefs of the local people. Kyle went off to do some research and even emailed the main ecologist responsible for the study, which brought this issue to light. It turns out that this practice was actually a cultural import, which completely changed our take! The locals hadn’t killed the pink dolphin at all until very recently, learning to do so from large scale fishing operations run by multinational corporations. Having this information in hand made it much easier for us to argue that the pink dolphins should be preserved. But we still had annoying questions to deal with. For example, if the locals, who are very poor, can’t use pink dolphin to fish with, what are they to do? Should the government provide them with an alternate bait at subsidized rates? Should they take up another way of making a living and, if so, what should it be and how will they get the training and capital necessary to make the switch? Should the international community, who values the ecological importance of the pink dolphin, be asked to pay for its upkeep? I will not try the patience of my gentle reader by talking about how we answered all these questions and others we considered, but suffice it to say that one question tends to lead to two more and it took weeks and weeks of work before Kyle was confident that he could not only make a strong argument, but that he knew very angle of every possible objection. That’s the really hard part.
After the Socratic process is complete and we have a really good argument for our position, it remains to memorize the basic components of our presentation. Since we don’t know in advance precisely what the question will be, we can’t memorize a speech, but on the other hand we only have 2 minutes to prepare once the question is announced, so we can’t just “wing it” either. What we do is organize the answer in a series of “modules” and memorize these backwards and forwards. Then after the question is announced, the presenter has two minutes to organize the modules into a coherent answer. This is the most stressful part of the whole competition – so much so that, when a question is announced, you can see one team member put his or her head down and start writing furiously, while the other four relax and smile. They are relieved to be off the hook for a few minutes.
The presentation itself is usually not that stressful, (except to the coach who has to sit and watch without taking part!) Since the team member responsible has eaten, slept, and breathed this case (and two others) for 9 weeks, the words just flow. Things really get interesting once we have completed our presentation. Now the other team offers a response, and the judges pose questions. Our entire team must work together seamlessly to answer them. This is all improvisation, and since no one member is perfect, it’s critical that the team members work together closely to make sure we deal with what’s important without saying anything that might get us in trouble. When this works well, it’s a joy to watch and our team really excelled at the teamwork aspect this year – one team member would say something that would make me wince a bit internally, but it was immediately corrected by another team member. This was extremely gratifying because it’s the hardest aspect to teach and it shows the team members are all actually thinking deeply about the ethical issues involved.
It’s easy to emphasize all the hard work that goes into this, but the best teams also have fun doing it. Clemson has a reputation not just as a tough competitor, but also as a team, which enjoys the back, and forth and is genuinely interested in exploring the ethical issues with everyone in the room. And there are also moments of levity to lighten things up. Question: What do you do when a member of your team develops a nosebleed in the middle of the competition (as happened to us in the regionals)? Answer: You make a joke about their brain working too hard!
The ethics bowl was created as a way to get students to think carefully about ethics in a way that’s both challenging and fun. Anyone who has ever been to the finals of the national competition, where hundreds of students from across the nation listen in rapt attention to the final round, knows the energy this creates. It’s a wonderful thing for so many young people to be so concerned about how to behave ethically. And it’s even more wonderful that Clemson’s students are among the very best in the country at ethics! We’d like to bring home the national championship trophy in March!!
Dr. Kelly C. Smith
C. Calhoun Lemon Fellow
Rutland Institiute for Ethics
Want to know more and don’t recall reading about this topic in earlier issues? Just click on some of the archived articles:
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