This month, Georgetown will be sending a team of twelve undergraduates to compete in the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE) Ethics Bowl for the first time in the university’s history, sponsored in part by the Kennedy Institute.

APPE’s Ethics Bowl is a debate-style tournament in which teams are asked to analyze, in advance of the competition, a set of cases imbued with ethical problems according to the best methods of reasoning in practical ethics. In each round, a moderator reads a case from the set and presents the teams with a question pertaining to the case; a group of qualified judges assesses the responses on the basis of ethical relevance, deliberative thoughtfulness, and intelligibility. For instance, the 2011 National Championship competition featured a case on the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” practice in the military; students were asked questions about the morality and constitutionality of this practice in competition.

Georgetown’s Ethics Bowl team heads to the regional competition in Baltimore on November 19th. The top three teams from regionals will advance to the national championship in Cincinnati in February. Returning members from Georgetown’s Bioethics Bowl team (and last year’s National Runners Up) include captain Elizabeth Bakacs (C’12), Michael Vu (C’14), and Corrine Schmidt (SFS’14). Tandice Ossareh (C’12), Joelle Rebeiz (SFS’14), Maggie Cleary (SFS’14), and Charlotte Iupe (C’14) are the new additions to our star crew.