Events for the Florida Blue Center for Ethics

Ethics Bowl at UNF

The Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE) Ethics Bowl combines the excitement and fun of a competitive tournament with a valuable educational experience for undergraduate students. Recognized widely by educators, the Ethics Bowl has received special commendation for excellence and innovation from the American Philosophical Association, and received the 2006 American Philosophical Association/Philosophy Documentation Center's 2006 prize for Excellence and Innovation in Philosophy Programs. The format, rules, and procedures of the Ethics Bowl all have been developed to model widely acknowledged best methods of reasoning in practical and professional ethics.

In the Ethics Bowl, a moderator poses questions to teams of three to five students. Questions may concern ethical problems on wide ranging topics, such as the classroom (e.g. cheating or plagiarism), personal relationships (e.g. dating or friendship), professional ethics (e.g. engineering, law, medicine), or social and political ethics (e.g. free speech, gun control, etc.) Each team receives a set of ethical issues in advance of the competition, and questions posed to teams at the competition are taken from that set. A panel of judges evaluates answers; rating criteria are intelligibility, focus on ethically relevant considerations, avoidance of ethical irrelevance, and deliberative thoughtfulness.

The Florida Blue Center for Ethics is a sponsor of three areas related to Ethics Bowl: The UNF Ethics Bowl Team, the First Coast Ethics Bowl, and the UNF Ethics Academy.