The University of Minnesota Morris Competitive Ethics team captured 4th place in the annual Midwest Regional Ethics Bowl competition on Saturday, Nov. 15 at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago.
Ethics Bowl is a collegiate debate competition where teams of students present arguments on ethically complex and controversial cases.
The regional competition featured 20 teams from across the Midwest. The UMN Morris team—Muthu Meenakshisundaram, Ewan McKenzie, Josh Turpin, and Jayson Weber–beat teams from Loras College, Western Michigan, and University of Pittsburg, but lost a close match with the host team of Northeastern Illinois.
Over the course of the competition, the team confronted a wide range of challenging cases, including proposals to offer reduced sentences to incarcerated people who donate organs, the constitutionality and ethics of former President Trump’s proposed “Golden Visa” citizenship-by-investment program, and the moral permissibility of restricting SNAP purchases to “healthy” foods.