On Feb. 25, the UNC Ethics Bowl team became national champions, beating 35 other schools who competed in the Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl National Championship.
The championship was hosted by the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics in Cincinnati, Ohio. UNC defeated Vanderbilt University in the semifinals and UC Santa Barbara in the competition's final.
“There's honestly no feeling like this that you can get anywhere else,” Abigail Barbu, treasurer of the UNC Ethics Bowl team, said.
The Ethics Bowl is a debate-like competition in which students from two teams engage in facilitated conversations about contentious ethical and moral dilemmas affecting society.
In an Ethics Bowl competition, each team is assigned an ethical case to discuss and is allowed to defend whatever position they agree with the most in an attempt to create mutual understanding between both sides.
Zach Buckler, co-president of the Ethics Bowl team, said the Ethics Bowl is unlike speech and debate in that winners aren’t determined by the number of points scored. Rather, the team that can display deeper ethical reasoning is named the winner.
“You really have to be strong in your ability to create a cogent argument,” Buckler said.
In various matchups during the tournament, the team discussed topics such as nepotism and the use of morally gray characters in fiction.
At the beginning of each ethics bowl season, the APPE releases the case set for the national competition. Ann Goulian, co-president of the Ethics Bowl team, said each member took the lead on three or four cases and were expected to have their arguments memorized.