ONU's Ethics Bowl Team

ONU's Ethics Bowl Team meets weekly throughout the school year to discuss some of the more pressing ethical and political issues of our time. In the process, students practice what some call “constructive disagreement.” According to an opinion piece in the New York Times, “In encouraging students to practice this skill, the Ethics Bowl fosters what may be the most important intellectual virtue of all: openness to changing your mind.” You can read more about the Ethics Bowl in this article by the Associated Press.

In the fall semester, our team prepares for a regional competition of the APPE Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl®, a debate-like event where teams present and defend their views on a series of “cases” that they receive in early September. 

This school year (2025-2026), we competed in the Ohio River Valley Regional Ethics Bowl. We addressed cases related to automatic crash notification systems, non-disclosure agreements, dog hunting, age verification laws, do-not-resuscitate orders, and chatbots designed to simulate the dead. 

By coming in 2nd at the regional competition, we received a bid to the Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl National Championship in St. Louis, MO. In that competition, we addressed cases related to scientific consensus, business bluffing, marijuana legalization, affinity housing on college campuses, responding to immoral orders, responding to violent criminals, memory erasure technology, and the environmental costs of LLMs. We ended up coming in 9th out of 36 schools.