After taking state and regional titles, the Debate Club earned its highest National High School Ethics Bowl (NHSEB) finish in school history, placing third in the nation.
The tenth NHSEB National Championship took place at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (UNC) from March 31 to April 2, and six Tigers participated. Twenty-four teams, each ranging from five to eight people, competed for the title, and many students passed up spring break trips to contend.
Ethics bowl is a competitive debate competition in which teams discuss the ethical implications of contemporary issues. Teams are presented with 15 scenarios, such as a Google engineer’s claim that artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Bard had become sentient, and teams, after evaluating the ethical considerations of a situation, develop and argue their opinion.
After winning six matches spanning 13 hours, the team—consisting of seniors Cristina Payst and Olivia Zhao, juniors Nora Decker, Matthew McCowen, Caroline Munsell, Emmaline Phillips and Maya Vizuete—took the NHSEB Ethics Bowl state title on April 2. The Tigers then faced the top team from South Carolina on February 15, which it beat to earn the newly established divisional title.
“[At the state competition,] there were three judges, and each cast one vote. We very much did not trounce our opponents or anything, but once they announced that the winner won by three, my first thought was ‘Did we really lose that badly?’” Zhao said.
The team won that round.
In the second half of each round, panels of three judges, consisting of UNC undergraduates and professors in philosophy, posed their own questions to teams.
To prepare for competition, members of the Debate Club individually read each case, after which they came together to develop stances.
“I think our method was rather different from a lot of the other Ethics Bowl teams because we had normal club discussions where we essentially just had everyone read the case,” Zhao said. “We’d talk about it, give our initial thoughts and then wrestle out the most ethical position to take.”
Often members of the club did not immediately come to an ethical consensus.
“For the AI [case], someone said, ‘I don’t think we should care about AI sanctions because it’s a robot. I don’t care about robots.’ And then someone else said, ‘Well, if you can feel feelings, then what is the difference between a robot and a human?’” Zhao said.
McCowen, who joined the club on a whim after seeing its booth during Club Day, said that he enjoyed the collaborative aspect of club meetings and hearing others’ viewpoints on cases.
“[For] cases where we didn’t agree, we were able to agree to disagree,” he said. “It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, I’m right; you’re wrong.’ It was like, ‘Oh, we have different viewpoints,’ but I think that’s important.”
Debate Club advisor Timothy Campbell said that he enjoyed students’ lively conversations during the weekly meetings.
“There was a lot of laughing. I could care less about a trophy or whatever. I just really liked that it seemed like [the team] enjoyed and grew through [their time together],” Campbell said. “I think that outlets like Ethics Bowl are something students need because there’s so much high-stress stuff in this world.”
Campbell said that this year’s team “experienced Ethics Bowl the way [he] thinks it’s meant to be experienced.”
“I really like that our meetings were super laid back, and a lot of people had opportunities to give input,” Campbell said. “Even if somebody came up with a silly thought or opinion, people just laughed about it and didn’t get angry.”
Zhao speculated that, as a whole, the Debate Club members did not take competition preparation as seriously as some of their competitors.
“[Other clubs] actually looked up articles of the pros and the cons [of a scenario] and weighed them out,” Zhao said. “We did have competition-focused, smaller meetings with just the people who went to the tournament, because not everyone in the club is part of the seven people who participated.”
While whole-group discussions took place at school on Tuesday afternoons, Payst held smaller sessions at her house.
“We had meetings at my house until about 6:00 p.m or so leading up to the competition. [We also] had Saturday morning meetings, where we talked about cases that we hadn’t totally figured out,” Payst said.
Only five of the seven competing members could participate in any given round at the state level, so the team developed a system fit for five people, complete with communicative hand signals.
Person one introduced the team, person two stated the group’s position, persons three and four elaborated and then person five summed everything up. Zhao noted that only persons three and four had intimate knowledge of any given case because the team did not know which cases would be brought up in competition.
Payst said that the club’s fiercest competition were the teams representing the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics and Eastern Alamance High School.
“They take it really seriously, and [we were] not surprised that they made it to the finals, but, honestly, the scariest school of all of Ethics Bowl was Eastern Alamance,” Payst said. “They have a class dedicated to ethics, and they all pulled up in matching black suits and sunglasses.”
Campbell said that, while placing high in the tournament is “kind of cool,” creating an enjoyable collaborative experience was his primary focus for the team.
“My goal for [the team members] is not for them to feel like they need to win or they need to perform at a certain level, but [for] them to enjoy performing while also engaging with topics in a meaningful way, so they can voice their actual views and not just shape their views to try and achieve some sort of result-based narrative,” Campbell said.
While Campbell is elated by the club’s accomplishments, he is especially gratified that students cultivated strong relationships throughout their collective journey.
“[There is the] third place trophy at nationals, but I feel like the bigger triumph, so to speak, would be that [the kids] were able to really experience what it’s like to get together as a team, grow as a team and get to know each other in unique ways that regular society doesn’t typically allow for,” Campbell said.
