Should the parents of school shooters be charged and held legally responsible for their children’s actions? How do we balance sustainable food practices with freshness standards to ensure safety? Should we kill barred owls to protect spotted owls? Are family influencers exploiting their children? These and other thorny issues are the types of questions students on the UCF Ethics Bowl team will wrestle with, along with thirty-five other teams of undergraduate college students from across the country in the 2025 APPE Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl (APPE IEB)® national championship in Norfolk, Virginia.
The UCF Ethics Bowl Team has won the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics’ (APPE) Southeast Regional Ethics Bowl Championship for the third time in the past five years. Their victory against 14 teams will lead them to the national competition for the eighth time, marking the strong critical thinking skills and ethics that UCF instills in its students. Read more about the UCF Ethics Bowl team’s accomplishments here.
Using a set of cases that are drawn from real-life ethical challenges in education, business, life, and politics, teams participating in the APPE IEB® will be judged not by their answers to such questions, but by their ability to identify and analyze the ethical dimensions of each case in a clear, focused, and thoughtful manner and with an appreciation for varied perspectives.
Other cases to be considered include topics such as:
- Space weaponization
- Media usage of photographs of tragedies
- The practice of tipping culture
- Using AI to monitor driving systems and behaviors
- Lifetime appointments for judges
- Civil and uncivil disobedience
“Like in life, the cases are complex, difficult to resolve, and sometimes polarizing,” said Michael Jordan, APPE IEB® Council Chair. “Unlike debate, in Ethics Bowl, teams are not assigned ‘pro’ and ‘con’ sides of an ethical issue. Each team’s goal is to identify the various ethical considerations, analyze the importance of those, and engage in civil discourse with another team that expands the conversation based on its position. Our goal is to help students see the value of continuing to engage with others despite difference, to understand more about views that differ from their own, and to help students think of collaborative solutions to solve societal problems.”
This year’s nationally qualifying teams advanced from 13 Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl regionals that took place last fall from California to the Chesapeake Bay. More than 160 universities and colleges — and nearly 200 teams — participated.
The 36 qualifying teams are:
- Baylor University – Waco, Texas
- Cabrillo College – Aptos, California
- Coastal Carolina University – Conway, South Carolina
- DePauw University – Greencastle, Indiana
- Duke University – Durham, North Carolina
- Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) – Atlanta, Georgia
- Georgia Southern University – Statesboro, Georgia
- Harper College – Palatine, Illinois
- Indiana University – Bloomington, Indiana
- Loras College – Dubuque, Iowa
- Loyola University Chicago – Chicago, Illinois
- Macalester College – Saint Paul, Minnesota
- Northeastern University – Boston, Massachusetts
- Oklahoma State University – Stillwater, Oklahoma
- Rollins College – Winter Park, Florida
- Salisbury University – Salisbury, Maryland
- Seattle University – Seattle, Washington
- Seton Hall University – South Orange, New Jersey
- Stanford University – Stanford, California
- Taylor University – Upland, Indiana
- United States Military Academy at West Point – West Point, New York
- University of Arizona – Tucson, Arizona
- University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego) – La Jolla, California
- University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara) – Santa Barbara, California
- University of Central Arkansas – Conway, Arkansas
- University of Central Florida – Orlando, Florida
- University of Colorado-Boulder – Boulder, Colorado
- University of Iowa – Iowa City, Iowa
- University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) – Baltimore, Maryland
- University of Minnesota, Morris – Morris, Minnesota
- University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) – Edinburg, Texas
- Utah State University – Logan, Utah
- Utah Valley University – Orem, Utah
- Virginia Tech – Blacksburg, Virginia
- Whitworth University – Spokane, Washington
- Youngstown State University – Youngstown, Ohio
The national competition is held in conjunction with the annual international conference of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE). APPE is an international non-profit membership organization founded in 1991 dedicated to advancing scholarship, education, and practice in practical and professional ethics.