Students from Bethpage High School celebrate their victory as finalists of the 2024 Long Island Ethics Bowl. // Photo courtesy of Matthew Cusumano.

While the world woke to a blustery morning on Saturday, Feb. 3, excitement imbued the Multipurpose Room of the Sondra and David S. Mack student center as high school students prepared for a competitive yet enlightening day. Students and coaches from 24 schools across Long Island gathered to compete in the 2024 High School Ethics Bowl. Faculty and students from Hofstra’s philosophy department assisted as moderators and judges.

Differing from a debate, the Ethics Bowl challenges students to think critically and deeply about current societal and personal issues while appreciating diverse perspectives as they participate in a civil discussion. Students are not forced into adversarial positions but are free to defend whichever position they believe is ethically just. Although the event was hosted as a competition, opposing teams worked alongside one another to explore ethical issues presented as case studies to enable each other to reflect and consider how their beliefs would resolve an ethical dilemma from multiple perspectives. To win, teams were required to demonstrate multifaceted and perceptive thinking.

“The goal is to help students see that there’s a deeper philosophical way of looking at the world,” said Roberta Israeloff, director of the Squire Family Foundation and co-founder of the National High School Ethics Bowl. This event was adapted from the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl. What began as a lesson plan by philosophy Professor Robert Ladenson of the Illinois Institute of Technology expanded to a national collegiate event seeking to promote rational skills and virtues among students.

The Squire Family Foundation was established in 2007 by Gary Squire, an attorney and businessman who attended Syosset public schools and later studied philosophy in college and graduate school. “[Squire] thought that philosophy should be included in K-12 education,” Israeloff said. “We chose ethics because it is an accessible way to enter the larger discipline of philosophy.”

“Ethics is the study of how people ought to act,” said Kennedy Delaney, a senior philosophy major and moderator for the event. “Ethical issues are taking something morally significant and debating on set principles or rules.”

Throughout the day, teams discussed a wide range of topics, including the virtues of misinformation in social media, the right to use college consultants to boost college applications, the morality of owing reasonable resale value, the navigation of benevolent deception, the ethics of using artificial intelligence to create art and many more complex ethical cases.

Since the Ethics Bowl does not require teams to be oppositional, judges were more critical of the justifications of a team’s position on a case, how both teams interacted and learned from each other, and how they responded to questions from the judges. “It comes down to if the teams can follow a logical argument, if they can recognize contradictions [and] fallacies, if they can go from one premise [to] another to a conclusion, [and] how well they respond to counterarguments and questions,” said Benjamin Morawek, a second-year law student and judge.

Overall, Morawek looked for a spark in students as they sought complex truths and answers to big societal questions. He reflected that participating in the Ethics Bowl requires respect for the process of engaging with difficult topics and arriving at reasonable answers. “[It requires] opening oneself up to learning new things, and that takes a lot of humbleness and recognizing [from students] that [they] might not know everything the first time around,” Morawek said.

Zahreena Rahimi, a junior philosophy and economics student, volunteered to be a moderator since she appreciated “seeing all the high school students being passionate about what they like and the hard work they put into [discussions during their rounds].”

At the core of the Ethics Bowl is the value of both expanding on students’ intellectual capacity to think ethically about societal dilemmas and equipping them with the tools needed to mediate a reasonable answer and discuss their perspectives. According to Israeloff, the Ethics Bowl also serves as a way for students to express their opinions on everyday issues that they might experience, bear witness to, or would have never otherwise been exposed to. “We introduce the philosophical lens – we call it the way of looking at the world and seeing that at the root of everything important is a philosophical issue,” Israeloff said.

Students, such as Shayla Zheng of Roslyn High School, found value in their voices being heard and the ability to use their acquired skills to participate in civil discourse about ethical issues. “I value [ethics] because it is wide-reaching and [considers] real-world issues. It is a big factor that plays a role in society,” Zheng said.

“I joined the club because a lot of my friends were there, but I stayed for the interesting conversations,” said Dora Fields, a student from Northport High School. Fields explained that she enjoyed participating in the Ethics Bowl because it allowed her to meet new students who may have differing views, whom she can learn from and expand her understanding of the world. “Ethics is a way to better understand the world, how you are a part of it and how the world around you works and how you should work with it,” Fields said.

The event also allowed students to become acquainted with philosophers from a wide range of fields and universities.

“Professionally, I’m a psychologist, so human behavior is extremely important to me, and I believe that I have to live my life a certain way and that is to be a very moral and ethical person,” said Dr. Stanley Zwick, an Ethics Bowl judge. “[Ethics] is a certain kind of moral code, a way that is appropriate for people to live their lives which always involves consideration of both parties, being able to empathize with other people – that, at its core, is to be ethical.”

All but four of the 24 schools participating in the Bowl entered two teams, the maximum number allowed. At the end of a long day, Bethpage High School was declared the winner, followed by Oceanside High School as the runner-up. Roslyn High School and the Stony Brook School were semifinalists. Farmingdale High School was recognized for their quality responses to judges’ questions, and Northport High School won the prestigious Robert Ladenson Spirit of the Ethics Bowl Award.

Bethpage High School will participate in the next tier of the Ethics Bowl, taking place later in February. The national championship will occur in April at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.