“The Bowl” – A New Documentary Showcases High School Ethics Bowl
Peter Fristedt is a member of PLATO’s Academic Advisory Board. He holds a PhD in philosophy from Stony Brook University and has published scholarship on ethics, Continental philosophy, and the philosophy of history.
I recently had the opportunity to attend a screening of the new documentary film “The Bowl,” from Ethereal Films and filmmaker Eli Yetter-Bowman, slated for broadcast on PBS in 2026. The screening was part of a conference session called “Start an Ethics Bowl,” held at the annual Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association (APA), which took place in Baltimore in early January. The film follows a High School Ethics Bowl team from North Carolina as it competes in the National Championships. The film takes a verité approach that combines interviews with the young women on the team with footage of the rounds they compete in as part of the championship.
As with any Ethics Bowl, the questions the teams discuss are wide-ranging and very much current. One round takes up the question of whether parents should be allowed to earn a profit from their kids’ online videos; in another the teams are asked whether the fact that girls look up to female athletes as role models obligates those athletes to behave in certain ways. Each round begins with one team presenting their position; the opposing team then provides feedback on the strength of the first team’s arguments. The first team revises its position to meet that feedback and then answers questions from Ethics Bowl judges. The second team is then posed either the same question or a new one, and the process starts again. The film captures the intellectual ferment of ethical discussion and the excitement of young people discovering that they have something valuable to say about the big questions facing their communities.
The film also makes it clear that Ethics Bowls differ substantially from what at first might appear similar: Speech and Debate competitions. The major difference is that in Speech and Debate, the personal views of the participants on the topic at hand are almost entirely irrelevant: the point is not to say what you yourself think but to be able to persuade an audience to accept the validity of both ‘pro’ and ‘con’ sides in a given argument. In that sense Speech and Debate trains its participants in the ancient art of rhetoric: how persuasive can they be? Ethics Bowls, on the other hand, ask participants to offer their views – what they really think – and it does so on the condition that they provide reasons for those views and open themselves up to changing them should they be presented with compelling reasons from the other side. As such, students participating in an Ethics Bowl gain exposure to the ideals of democratic citizenship. Citizens in a democracy have to decide for themselves what to believe with respect to the questions facing their community, because as citizens they are called on to decide what that community should do. Ethics Bowls demonstrate that the best way to decide what to think (and so what to do) is to develop your thoughts in conversation with others in a spirit of mutual trust and commitment to truth.
In addition to the screening, the APA session featured three members of the University of Baltimore community who are involved in Ethics Bowls. They emphasized that students in Ethics Bowls learn deeply about the nature of ethical deliberation through examining ethical case studies, and a team that makes it to the national competition might have reviewed as many as 30 different such case studies. One panelist captured the collaborative nature of the competition by saying teams are not trying to outmaneuver or outflank each other, but to push each other to provide the best reasons: “it’s great training in philosophy.” The session moderator added that the emphasis is on dialogue rather than debate, and indeed a team is penalized if it does not take the other team’s arguments seriously. Examples abound of politically opposed students becoming friends while participating on an Ethics Bowl team. As one students says in the film, “if you’re going to dissect someone’s moral positions, you’re going to get to know them a little bit.”
As the proud father of a 7th grader who loves participating in his school’s Speech and Debate club, I was inspired by the APA session and the documentary as offering a complementary experience for young people embarking on the great adventure of intellectual and public life. As members of the APA panel pointed out, ethical deliberation is about examining our assumptions; ethics is not about having an unassailable worldview but about working through difficult questions, developing good reasons for your views, and even changing your views through an openness to understanding the reasoning of others. Students gain many things from school-based activities like Speech and Debate and Ethics Bowls, from leadership and teamwork to social trust, critical reasoning, and feelings of accomplishment and independence. But the Ethics Bowl in particular helps students understand the value of turning around and looking at their own most basic beliefs – what Descartes thought he should do at least once in his life but that in philosophy forms an ongoing practice.
