In most debate programs — and in the broader world around us — rhetoric is primarily seen as a tool. Using rhetoric to argue a point better than anyone else, its value is derived from beating someone else. Ethics Bowl doesn’t subscribe to that framework. It’s the strong emphasis on teamwork and arguing for what Macalester’s Ethics Bowl team believes in that pushed them to become national champions this past February, and encourages them to be greater in communities outside Macalester Forensics.
Ethics Bowl, like other forensics programs at Mac, follows specific rules and guidelines for each competition. At both the regional and national competitions, a set amount of cases are given to each team. A case consists of two to three pages on a specific ethical issue. This can range from “Case 3: ‘Bring Out Your Dead!’”, a case on the concern of social media broadcasting images of violence, to “Case 16: “When Civility Falls,” dealing with the ethics of civil disobedience. Each group has a maximum of six members, and, at least for Macalester’s team, each member plays a different role.
“When I was a student, when we first started, there were no defined roles, and something that made Mac really strong, but also was a struggle as a competitor, was a kind of scrappiness … Everybody’s responsible for every part of the argument,” Ethics Bowl Head Coach Casey Moore ’23 said. “So we’ve started dividing up the roles to address different responsibilities and different things that needed to happen in these presentations.”
The first of these roles is introductions. The goal here is to establish the group’s argument in a clear and concise manner. This sets the stage for the rest of the talk, and gives people a roadmap for the case the team will be making. Next comes the frames section, which aims to center the argument around a specific ethical system.
Different cases require using specific frameworks, like deontology, more rule based ethics; utilitarianism, maximizing pleasure at all costs; or harm reduction, which focuses on reducing the most harm possible. While it may seem strange that different ideas necessitate different philosophies, that type of work is fundamental to Ethics Bowl.
Connecting an argument back to the framework helps one to understand its reasoning, and is what concretely separates a good faith idea from a rigorous, ethical project. Colette Lawler ’27*, a philosophy major, spends most of her time on these frameworks. Frameworks are what ground an argument, and it is almost impossible to understand a person’s perspective if one doesn’t understand the framework they follow.
This is where we get into the ‘meat’, or core arguments: why the team is right, and the logic they used to get there. To Vin Leang ’27, this is what Ethics Bowl is really about. While frameworks and intros are pitching the ball, meat is swinging the bat.
“I’ve always been meat, which is constructing the main argument. They give you a question and this is your answer,” Leang said. “Why do you think that this is the right way to approach that question?”
Three people get assigned to this role because it, fundamentally, is the most important part of a case. ‘Meat’ is the more argumentative style of debate most people are more used to. Finally, there are counters. The goal here is that throughout the process of thinking about a case, a group not only comes to their own conclusions, but reviews the arguments they expect to be made against said case. Counters ‘steel-man’ these arguments to the best of their ability, and spend the rest of time explaining why they are obsolete, lacking a full picture, or simply wrong. The talk concludes with a recap of the argument, and a short conclusion.
To get to this point in the season, the team had to qualify for nationals in the regional tournament in Chicago. The team worked on cases specific to this competition in the fall. Although it might seem like this tournament was easy for the future national champions, matches have no power ranking and three judges are given the incredibly subjective job of evaluating each argument. There is lots of competition, even on the regional level.
“Last year Mac very, very narrowly — with only, I think, a point differential or two — didn’t quite qualify for Nationals. And I think that was the first time that’s happened, certainly in my time in Ethics Bowl, either as a student or as a coach, and certainly in many, many years for Macalester,” Moore said. “Both last year’s team and this year’s team worked so hard, but I think that experience of not succeeding last year and not making it to Nationals only made the team stronger and really made them more dedicated.”
After the team’s qualification for Nationals, more work was set in front of them. The national competition presents entirely new cases for teams to learn and develop. A lot of time is spent on preparing these cases over winter break.
“We always get started during J-Term. We get this big packet of cases — this year there were 17 of them,” Moore said. “Something unique about Ethics Bowl is that we don’t know exactly what the students are going to be asked in round … and so really the task for the students is to come up with questions, answers to those questions, and a position that they want to defend.”
This all culminated in a trip to Norfolk, Va. on Feb. 21, the team, excited and nervous for the upcoming round of pool play. Four rounds and the points gained from each would dictate if Macalester moved onto the quarter finals.
“Although we were anxious, we figured that we had made it [to the quarterfinals] since we went 4-0,” Sihaam Barre ’28 said. “They announced all of the teams on a screen, and we ended up being like the third seed.”
The team won quarterfinals by one point and moved on to the semis against Youngstown State. Here, Macalester got “Case 11.” This case asked a question about Ring cameras and surveillance: specifically, if recording someone who didn’t want to be recorded with a doorbell camera was ethical.
“We ended up saying, ‘Yes, it is,’ because it is your property — but you ought not to. You should have to try to keep their opinion in mind and not post the videos online,” Barre explained. “We had a distinction between sharing the videos online to the wide public and sharing them interpersonally, within a close-knit community.”
After both teams had gone, it was time for the judges to cast their votes. The first voted in favor of Macalester, the second for Youngstown. The last judge, with anticipation from everyone in the room, tied Macalester and Youngstown with 48 points each.
“We didn’t know who was gonna go into the finals, and the guy running the competition had to come in and call somebody, asking, ‘What are the tie breaks?’” Leang said. “He was on the phone for like, five minutes, and the first tie break was also a tie. And then the second or third tie break went to us. But yeah, it was insane.”
Tie breaks come down to point differentials in past matches. This means that if one judge in a past round had given Macalester just one fewer point, they may not have made it to the final; a bit fitting after being a hair under at last year’s regionals.
But after an exhausting day of over seven hours of debate, Macalester sat down at their seats on stage. They were in the finals. With Stanford facing them, the finals started. “Case 2: ‘Begun, the Star Wars Have,’” asked Macalester about continued militarization in space, and the US’s future roles in potential space wars. This question, like many cases in the final rounds, was one of the most difficult of the entire tournament. This case covered policy, ideals, global conflict and new frontiers, meaning there was a lot to tackle in the 10-minute time limit.
“Something that I think Macalester does particularly well within Ethics Bowl … is bringing [a case] to the realm of ideals as well. Student captain Eva [Sturm ’26] mentioned having a radical imagination about imagining a better world when it comes to conflict and when it comes to militarization among other countries,” Moore said. “Can we imagine a world of peace? Can we hold on to … our ideals of diplomacy and collaboration with other nations, even when things have not gone smoothly in the past? You get that kind of freedom in Ethics Bowl … you don’t have to be totally embedded in the world of policy.”
After a rebuttal and a case given to Stanford, the competition was over. Now was time for the results. The first judge gave the lead to Macalester, the second to Stanford. Finally, winning narrowly, by a single point, the final judge crowned Macalester College the 2025 National Ethics Bowl Champions.
A lot can be said about the work this team put in. Multiple team members pointed to the hours per week, length of synth docs and individual case notes and time spent flying, driving, laying in bed or eating lunch all while practicing for this championship, as evidence of the commitment Ethics Bowl requires. Work like this does not come easy, and it’s abundantly clear this team put in the work to win.
More important is the passion that’s put into this program. Talking with students, they genuinely care about and love this forensic program. Idealistic virtues and competitive satisfaction aside, this team won because they care.
“They get a lot of freedom in what they argue … that gives them an opportunity to really hatch out amongst themselves and to work as a team, to try to come up with answers together,” Moore said. “In the world of debate, that’s not super common.”
“[Moore] calls Ethics Bowl a very emotionally intimate activity, because you get to learn a lot about people’s experiences and what makes people believe in the things they believe,” Barre said. “Some other schools choose to argue what is easiest, choose to argue what maybe one or two people believe. I really liked how everything that we argued and everything that we said was because we believed in it. We put all this time and work to come together to find this middle ground, even though we’re all so different.”
*Colette Lawler is a Web Editor at The Mac Weekly
