Our First Ethics Bowl: Creating a Space for Ethical Dialogue
Aanya Padhi is a junior at Monta Vista High School in Cupertino, California. She is interested in applied ethics and political philosophy and is active in advocacy work to overturn wrongful convictions and address prosecutorial misconduct. Aanya is also a member of PLATO’s Student Advisory Council.
I remember the moment when the world stopped being black and white for me: when I studied the classic trolley problem about five doomed workers and a mechanical lever. This hypothetical case brought home to me the highly nuanced, gray aspects of morality. It confronted me with ambiguous questions like: Is killing worse than letting someone die? Should every life count equally regardless of personal relationships? Is it right to purposefully cause one death to save five? I was fascinated by the possibilities of exploring these questions with my peers.
Yet the more I wanted to grapple with these questions, the more I noticed their absence in my classrooms. And the more I recognized the applications of ethical considerations in my everyday life, the more I felt the need to challenge my peers to think deeply and engage the gray areas of our world together so we could learn to agree and disagree constructively. That desire led me to pitch the idea of an Ethics Bowl chapter at our school. I argued that no matter what careers students choose, they will face moral choices, and participating in Ethics Bowl could equip them with the tools to navigate them.
In the spring, introducing a philosophy-centered club to a predominantly STEM-focused school proved to be simpler than I thought, as I quickly secured a faculty advisor and obtained official club status. Recruiting students also proved easier than I’d expected, with fifteen among my friends and friends of friends willing to step into unfamiliar intellectual terrain. With our roster set, my teacher advisor suggested I create a comprehensive handbook and training schedule. I spent hours dissecting official rulebooks, analyzing past cases, and studying recordings of past Ethics Bowl events to understand how the event actually worked. I realized that the concept itself is easy to grasp: teams receive a set of ethical dilemmas months in advance, research them deeply, and develop responses. During the round, they present their reasoning and respond to probing questions from judges and opponents. Unlike traditional debate, the goal is not to defeat another team but to collaboratively explore ethical tensions through respectful discussion and careful reasoning.
That summer, we began practicing together as a team, which proved more difficult than I expected. Building initial excitement was easy; sustaining it through dense readings and long case analyses was not. To keep momentum, I recorded video case breakdowns and assigned collaborative partner work. Looking back, I may have pushed too hard, because the excitement surrounding my large team was short-lived. Of the original fifteen students who expressed interest, eight gradually let me know that they simply did not have the time to commit.
By November, the reality of leading a team through a format I had never personally participated in began to set in. I had to learn alongside my teammates while staying one step ahead in order to guide them effectively. We drilled the basics into our heads — deontology, utilitarianism, care ethics, Aristotelian ethics, civil discourse strategies, and targeted use of supporting references. With conflicting schedules, we relied on short, intensive meetings, especially during December, to build both confidence and cohesion before the event in early January. The night before regionals at UC Santa Cruz, I felt both nervous and proud for getting the team to that point.
That morning when we entered our first classroom, we were paired with a team of three boys and one girl. I noticed that every team had at least one boy, and most teams were majority male. We were likely the only all-girls team there, and that realization sharpened our resolve. We were not only representing our school but, in a way, we hoped to show that an all-girls team from a public school, participating for the first time, belonged there.
We chose to go second in our first round so we could observe the other team first, which set the tone for the day. When it was our turn, we felt much more comfortable stating our claim—until the judges challenged our reasoning. In analyzing a case involving the environmental ethics of paving a new walkway in a national park, we anchored our argument in Kantian deontology but quickly ran into tension during the judge’s cross-examination. We had relied on this theory to frame our analysis of the duty of park rangers, but the judges questioned whether it supported our reasoning because we emphasized wildlife preservation, even though Kantian ethics focuses more directly on rational human agents. In Ethics Bowl, if your initial ethical framework proves less persuasive, you are encouraged to adjust your approach if necessary. But rather than being receptive and treating the judges’ questions as an opportunity to refine our reasoning, we were adamant about proving ourselves “right.” When the round ended, I was convinced we had not responded to the judges’ questions effectively.
But I was wrong. We won the first round.
Participating in that first round immediately shifted our confidence. With our initial jitters gone, we felt much more comfortable and ready to engage with the discussions that followed. On the walk from the first round to the second, the team we’d just met walked with us and complimented our performance. I really loved how positive and respectful the Ethics Bowl environment was, and that moment of collegiality has stuck with me because it perfectly captured what I came to appreciate most about Ethics Bowl: teams genuinely wanted to learn from one another.
Energized, we went on to win the second round, helped by one teammate’s strong real-time synthesis of a complex, context-heavy case (I was so proud of her!). In the third round, however, we faced a far more experienced and articulate team that presented an especially thoughtful and well-structured analysis. Although we did not advance to the semifinals, we left feeling proud of our performance and received a special commendation from the event organizer, who noted that our performance placed us above more than half of the experienced teams.
More than anything, I found satisfaction in watching my idea to create a space for ethical dialogue become a functioning program at my school. But that achievement belonged to the team as much as it did to me—especially because they trusted me to guide them through something entirely new. After the tournament, I told them they were the “founding mothers” of the club, responsible for shaping a permanent forum for important discussions at our school.
Starting an Ethics Bowl chapter requires navigating ambiguity, but the National High School Ethics Bowl provides clear resources, and regional organizers offer strong support. The work required to build the program is absolutely worth it because it gives students a structured framework for exploring moral complexity together.
