MARL conversation series

Emily Muller on the Ethics Bowl – First part.

This is an interesting conversation with one of the pioneers of the Ethics Bowl in Canada, Emily Muller. It has been split into sections that will be sequentially published on this blog. This first part explores the origin and history of the contest as well as the way cases are prepared for discussion.  

– Emily, where did your relationship with the Ethics Bowl come from? What motivated you to get involved in this activity, which is intended for youths and for letting them think about important things in life?

I was working as a sessional instructor at University of Manitoba, teaching philosophy classes, like ethics and society and philosophy of law. I’ve always liked to talk to students about applied issues in ethics, and some of the complications of making theory and ideal philosophy show up in the real world; making those connections and seeing how students remap their own sense of themselves in the world.

During that period of my life, I met Estelle Lamoureux. She had already begun working with some high school teachers to set up field trips for them, to go and join the US teams who were participating in the Ethics Bowl there. I got a chance to talk to her about her motivation and experience. They really needed somebody who cared about ethics and philosophy to help with the content. I was in a good position to do that because I was at home with my children, had time to volunteer, and liked the idea of getting these cases in front of students. One of the motivations to provide content for Canadian students was that although going down to South Dakota and talking with students had been really positive, the issues that Americans were dealing with were different than Canadian ones. Students had a different landscape of not just ethical concerns; but also, ethical tools, policies and legal channels.

So, it made sense to create a contest in which Canadian students could talk about their own laws, policies and issues. I think since then it’s become increasingly important to introduce high school students to that kind of content because they’re swamped by Internet and the American news feed. Even when I was teaching at the University of Manitoba, there were students, who were taking a philosophy of law class and said, “The Bill of Rights…, this or that;” and I had to tell them, “That’s not actually your law. That’s not really something that covers you.” That is why it is important to get this Canadian conversation going on as well. This content is the seed that made us start doing it ourselves, at the level of case writing.

“It made sense to create a contest in which Canadian students could talk about their own laws, policies and issues.”

– I think that even if ethical issues could be more or less the same, they have to be landed on a particular context.

Yes, just to have a framework. Another thing is that we were addressing a question like, why is it hard to have ethical conversations in classrooms? That’s something I’m looking at in my Peace and Conflict Studies work. I think it’s hard for a number of reasons; but teachers really benefit from us helping set up a conversation that they can just bring into their classroom, rather than being completely responsible for the framing of it themselves. Also, students know they’ll have a chance to talk to other students about that same content. As you talk about ethics all the time, having that structure – focused on a case – is really valuable to promote ethical dialogue; it’s really helpful to have meaningful conversations.

– I understand you’ve written some of the cases. I guess it is not always easy to find current cases that could be interesting for students to discuss. How is this process like? What is the most challenging part of writing a case, of choosing the cases you are ready to dive in, research, and write about?

At the beginning it was quite informal; we were just trying to place paragraphs together about cases to give teachers a good start. Over the many years the contest has developed and grown, we’ve become clearer about our process, and also more rigorous. We have different elements that we apply to look for cases. First, we look at the UN development goals and big picture issues about ethical goals globally; and when possible, national or local manifestations of that in Canada.

We also try to look at issues that affect youth in particular. Right now, in the regional cases we have something about bids to change the voting age in Canada, connecting that to some national issues and other places wanting to do that. So, I’m looking at things that specifically might engage teenagers to become experts on; commenters on cases that involve them, and are about them. It’s also the case though, that in the contests we found that students really like very standard cases; those that people have been debating about forever, like is it OK to lie? or should we be charitable? Thus, we try to provide some cases that are, not free of context, but are sort of universal in their application and let the students play around with them too.

Most of the feedback we get is that students like a diversity of cases because teams are made-up of all kinds of different people. Some prefer popular culture cases, others the straight up ethical cases, like those involved in friendship or war. We prepare some cases that set up opportunities for independent research in medical or environmental issues, for example. We provide a variety of cases in each set to keep students interested and bring ethics in a range of different ways: questions about the good life and how we can pursue it together; questions that involve duty-based ethics, like our requirements to one another; structural justice issues that may involve more indirect harms and their consequences.

Case-writing for Ethics Bowl Canada is now produced and approved by a committee of volunteers that includes ethicists, teachers, and graduate students from around the country.  As the project has developed, there’s a much more robust process of sharing responsibilities for getting the cases in shape, reviewing them together, and approving them. We do that cooperatively at the national level. Then the cases that we’ve developed are translated also into French. So, there is more processes going on with the cases than there used to be. The seed of just getting stuff in front of teachers has now become a little bit more rigorous because we know the teams really use the cases to prepare for an ever more rigorous competition. Teams keep getting better, too. It’s a growing thing.

“The seed of just getting stuff in front of teachers has now become a little bit more rigorous because we know the teams really use the cases to get prepared.”

But I think it’s a kind of a peer-review process…

Yes, one of the things we’re trying to do on the committee is developing and finding great content for teachers and students. The case-writing committee is working with researchers and other organizations, like museums, to work collaboratively on the case development. This could provide case-writers with an even broader scope of expertise, resources, and materials for future cases. There’s a lot of ways we can keep growing and adding to our skill sets, as committee, to put cases together. 

– What about the cases that will be discussed in 2025? Can you tell us something in advance about them?

Well, the regional cases are already cut out and circulating, so the teams have them. So, I can tell you what the cases are. The only part that winds up being quite confidential is the questions that we ask in the contest; and I couldn’t divulge them, even accidentally, because they’re not developed yet. 

I think the cases will be interesting to students. I am actually lucky. My daughter is in Grade 12 at Kelvin High School and she participates so I can see the cases are being discussed. Kelvin has been national winner in the past, and more recently a semi-finalist at the nationals. I know they’re interested and arguing about some of them, which is always a good sign . One is about the ethics of a smoking ban proposed for people under a certain age, so that nobody becomes addicted to nicotine. 

However, one of the things I’m most looking forward to in this year’s even is not about the cases. This new regional contest in 2025 has an even greater number of students than we’ve ever had before in Manitoba, but also throughout the country. Many of these ethical cases we create in committee are going to get used more than once; as people meet in regional competitions, and tiered contests. I think in Ontario sometimes people, who make it to the national, have already competed on some cases three times.

Making sure that the conversations are always different is something I was really worried about in the beginning because there is a lot of repetition of the case material. But in fact, as the competitions have different participants, and usually have different prompts, and sometimes a team will lead and other times respond in a round, the conversations wind up being quite different, even with the same content setup. There’s a lot of room to actually grow the conversation through repetition. We don’t want to prepare as many cases as we have contests, because the students would not have time to get into the same depth of analysis and research. Giving them the chance to have several conversations about the same subject is a really fascinating experiment that is underway, and working better than expected so far.

In addition to working with Ethics Bowl Canada and the Manitoba Association of Rights and Liberties for the Ethics Bowl, Emily Muller is a philosophical counsellor in Winnipeg. She also works with the Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics at the University of Manitoba and is a doctoral student in Peace and Conflict Studies.

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Nicolas Dousdebes – MARL Communication Coordinator