It was Wednesday morning, around 10:15a.m., and I was walking down the hall on the third floor in the Classroom Building when I heard a man’s voice. He was asking, what seemed at the time, a terrible question. I heard the question of “because it would save the five people that are tied to the tracks already, is it not our moral imperative to throw the fat man in front of the train?”
I could not believe that in the university I attend there was actually a group that was planning to murder a fat man. Who tied those other people up in the first place? I grabbed my cell phone out of my coat pocket to call the police immediately. These crazed lunatics had to be stopped! I was not about to stand there and be complacent in…. but wait….oh….as I looked further into the room I saw Dr. Daniel Milsky, a philosophy professor at Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU.)
He was talking to his Ethics Bowl team. They were not actually going to kill a man by throwing him in front of a train; they were just discussing the merits of a philosophical doctrine that says the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people should be the aim of all social decisions.
What would you do with the fat man? Does this kind of thought experiment give you a headache? That kind of situation doesn’t even faze the team of philosophers that competed in the National Ethics Bowl on March 5. Two professors coached eight of their finest students at NEIU to compete in the National Ethics Bowl.
In the Ethics Bowl, teams are given 15 applied ethics cases to discuss and evaluate ahead of the competition. During each round of competition each team is given a case and must prepare an analysis that addresses a question pre-selected by the Ethics Bowl administrators, Milsky explained.
The eight students who went to the national competition were Jessica LaPiana, Brian Kruchten, Jack Colt, Kris Henry, Phil Mayo, Charise Barlow, Rosendo Intengan, and Kendra Wilson. The two co-coaches were Dr. John Casey and Dr. Daniel Milsky, both professors and advisers in NEIU’s Philosophy Department.
“Our team is comprised of eight individuals with very different backgrounds and beliefs which lead to some very interesting arguments, thoughts, and some really great quotes that will live on forever,” Brian Kruchten said.
NEIU has competed in the Upper Midwest Regional Ethics Bowl for the last four years, and this year they went undefeated against nine other universities from Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin and Michigan, making NEIU’s team one of the top ten teams in the nation.
So what does this accomplishment mean for NEIU?
“Our participation in the Ethics Bowl over the last several years has raised the profile of NEIU’s philosophy program, and therefore NEIU,” Casey said. “Word of mouth is a big deal in academia, so as word gets around that we have prepared, engaged and interesting students, this can only be good for us.”
Now you might be sitting in the cafeteria thinking, “I’m in NEIU going for an education degree, philosophy just doesn’t pertain to my interests. When I look at my delicious cheeseburger I see a cheeseburger, not a tortured cow that lives his short life confined in a cage.” Our winning team of philosophers would have a rebuttal ready for you.
“Philosophy has taught me ignorance is bliss, but it’s also morally repugnant. We have a duty to know, even if knowing prevents us from the happiness of not knowing any better,” LaPiana said.
Kruchten would agree with LaPiana. “The studying of this field never allows me to become complacent with the world. I feel too many times we become comfortable with our own lives, thus never wanting to become involved in things that affect our status quo,” said Kruchten.
“The Ethics Bowl is a great way to illustrate the value of philosophy in our everyday lives. The cases we examine are real, and therefore so are the problems,” said Casey.
When it comes to our everyday lives, problems are everywhere. So is studying philosophy the answer?
“Philosophy has helped me crystallize thoughts that I have been pondering my whole life, that people have made fun of me for,” Barlow said. “I think that part of what I love about philosophy is that it seeks to deconstruct larger questions so that others can pick a bit here or there and really take a look at it; shake the gristle off, see how it feels and tastes in their mind, share it with others flavored with their own perceptions and extra bits of their own intuitions.”
“Every choice a person makes has an impact on an individual, social, and even global level,” LaPiana said, “I think that philosophy has more of a chance to change the world then any other aspect of society.”
Casey added, “Philosophy teaches us to be responsible thinkers- i.e. careful, honest, rigorous, fair, and open-minded thinkers. This is what the Ethics Bowl is all about.”