In early March, Macalester’s Ethics Bowl team travelled to St. Louis to compete in the Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl National Championship. The six-student team finished the competition fifth in the nation.
Mac competitors progressed through five distinct rounds of competition across two days, ultimately being succeeded by the College of William & Mary’s team, who went on to claim the national title, in the quarterfinal round.
In Ethics Bowl, a unique forensics competition, teams of four to six people are presented with a case packet covering a range of real-world ethical scenarios. They work to develop a position of their choosing on the issue and decide how to best support it using evidence and ethical frameworks.
Since Ethics Bowl’s establishment as part of the Macalester forensics program in 2012, the team has won two national championships and placed highly in both national and regional competitions.
Behind these successes lies a tight-knit team that has found their place amongst the Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl network of over 200 teams.
Ethics Bowl’s season begins in September and continues as the team fights through a tiered competition structure beginning with local and regional competitions. The top 36 teams across the 12 regional competitions earn a place at nationals. In December, after regional competitions are completed, teams competing in nationals receive a docket of the seventeen cases that will appear at the tournament.
Over J-Term, the team met on Zoom to discuss the provided cases and choose their approach to arguing them.
“A lot of the work is discussing the dilemmas presented in the case and trying to figure out … the most important dilemma that they are asking us to consider and how would we answer it,” Forensics Coach Casey Moerer ’23 said.
Approaching nationals, the team’s strategy centered around developing a consensus, playing to their diverse set of strengths and capitalizing on close bonds.
The team’s approach differs from the strategy of some of their competitors. While some teams assign cases to individuals, on Macalester’s team, “everyone talks about all the cases. And we try as hard as we can to come to a consensus,” team member Elena Krentz ’29 said.
The open-format nature of Ethics Bowl allows the team to develop arguments they can all personally come to an agreement on.
“Why Ethics Bowl is enchanting to me and other people who join is the fact that you can say whatever you want and you’re not going to be punished for being too leftist. You’re not going to be punished for thinking too expansively or imaginatively about it,” team captain Eva Strum ’26 said.
While it is not always easy to come to an agreement, the team sees this strategy as integral to their continued success.
“A lot of discussion makes it so that we are dynamic and can answer questions, and answer unexpected questions, because we’ve talked about these different parts of an issue,” Krentz said. “We’re aware of more blind spots that way, because we’re not assigning cases to one person and then having them do it based on previous knowledge.”
The cases each year come from a variety of topics, with this year’s spanning everything from AI water usage, to vaccination policies, to business bluffing.
To best manage this variety, the team comprises a diverse distribution of students in all grade levels and across areas of study.
“I remember when I was a student, there were people on the team who were dance and math majors, who were neuroscience majors, and fellow humanities and social sciences majors … and I think that helps, because you get a bunch of different perspectives,” Moerer said. “You can’t answer some of these questions without some of those backgrounds.”
This year, team members said they felt the pressure of defending their national title, but they came into the cases levelheaded about their strategy and resolved to develop strong arguments. They also considered what winning means in Ethics Bowl.
“Winning an ethical competition is never saying something I don’t agree with fundamentally,” Sturm said.
One particular case the team took on was focused on the experience of Adrianna Smith, a pregnant woman in Georgia, and a state law that required that she carry her pregnancy to term while on life support after being declared brain-dead four months prior.
“We talked a lot about how we should respect someone’s wishes post-life … and how much consideration we should give to people who have passed on and people who are not alive yet,” Krentz said.
The team’s strong bonds aided their ability to successfully develop arguments for complex and challenging topics.
“Something that really helps is there is just so much time spent together as a team,” Strum said. “There is a sense of camaraderie and a sense of teamwork and bonding.”
While ultimately not taking home a second national title, the team’s aspirations go beyond winning. Team members said they take tremendous pride in being fifth in the nation and continuing to represent Macalester on the national stage.
“If you go and do your best and you express what you truly believe is the right answer, that is a victory in and of itself,” Moerer said. “That takes a little bit of the pressure off competitively. [We] just go and do something really cool and have a good time.”
