Ann Arbor is a cerebral community, making it a great place to bandy about principles – and not just those of the academic kind. Principles were open to spirited interpretation at the recent Big Ethical Question Slam, an ethics troubleshooting team competition. The event, held at Conor O'Neil's last month, was hosted by
A2 Ethics, a non-profit devoted to promoting ethics through education and events. The organization says the slam, held annually since 2011, is the first of its kind in the nation.
"The Slam is an opportunity for people of different ages – in business, education, government and philanthropy organizations – to consider a number of ethics issues we face in the workplace or in our daily lives," A2 Ethics President Jeanine DeLay writes in an email. "People tend to get all twitchy when you bring up ethics – thinking that ethical questions are too abstract, intimidating, or polarizing to publicly discuss. Let's face it. This event is one evening spent at a local pub, talking with people we may have just met – about how we can live together amicably and yet have very different ideas about how we should live the good life. If those involved in the Slam come away with this idea, that's good enough."
This year, six teams answered three questions apiece pulled from a pool of 35 submitted by the public at large. Questions were unedited, so it was left to the team to decipher the issues. Participants received the batch of questions a couple of days before the slam. At the event, teams drew questions at random and then had two minutes to prepare an oral response to be delivered to a panel of three judges. Each team answered different questions, so the order in which they answered conferred no advantage. Judges then delivered a brief commentary on each of the answers, à la
American Idol, as Greenhills School team member Mark Randolph puts it. A few of the questions, as submitted:
- If Oscar Pistorius, the double amputee running on prosthetics had won a medal in the 2012 Summer Olympics, would he have won using unethical means? Should we consider that his performance was "enhanced?"
- People think that if you just disclose a conflict of interest that it passes the ethics smell test. Can you tell us two examples when just disclosing a conflict of interest is NOT ethical enough?
- If I need my electronic devices, like my iPhone to run my business, but I know the working conditions of people making iPhones suck, is it still ethical to own one?
The team from
Greenhills School, an independent college preparatory school in Ann Arbor, took this year's $600 grand prize and the Philosopher's Hat. The team members were: Mark Randolph, an English teacher and 10th grade principal; Lisa Ortiz, a Spanish teacher; Bob Ause, a chemistry teacher and science department chair; and Carl Pelofsky, head of the school.
Concentrate's Tanya Muzumdar gets the winners' perspective from team members Mark Randolph and Lisa Ortiz. Edited excerpts follow.
What is your personal interest in taking part in the Big Ethical Question Slam?
ORTIZ: I love the discussions. The questions are generated by the Ann Arbor community. People at large are invited to send in their questions by email to A2Ethics.org...They're compiled, basically not edited and thrown out to us. We get questions picked out of a hat that we have to address. I think the discussions are fascinating. It's an intriguing proposition to have to take a question and decide, what are the issues here and how am I going to address these issues? But even more importantly for me, it's interesting to see what other people say about the very same issues for me to consider.... These are things we should talk about in our everyday lives, and we usually don't.
Do you get together and practice beforehand with questions?
RANDOLPH: That is an interesting question. There are two schools of thought. One is that you do and one is that you don't.
ORTIZ: We didn't this year.
RANDOLPH: One of the big decisions that you make is who is going to have to get up and make this presentation and usually that depends on the person who feels really comfortable with that topic. For example, there was a question about Oscar Pistorius...an amputee who wanted to run in the Olympics. Well, I teach a sport and culture course, I've been a coach for 20 years, I think a lot about issues of sports ethics and so I said if this one comes down the pike, I'm happy to take it.
How were you able to clinch the grand prize?
RANDOLPH: Grit, determination.
ORTIZ: Silver tongued-ness
RANDOLPH: We all like to talk. That's what we do for a living. We all like to think. To be honest with you, if there's one advantage we had even over the lawyers is that our job is not only to think about things deeply, to articulate them, but to make them incredibly relevant to our audience. Our audience is a group of really bright 15-18 year-old young men and women and they require that we be clear and challenging at the same time. And for myself, I feel really comfortable talking even in a gigantic room of strangers because the Greenhills students have prepared me to do that.
Was there a team-favorite question?
ORTIZ: The one we didn't get.
RANDOLPH: We watched a lot of pretty ships go by that we wanted.
ORTIZ: Part of the interesting thing is, because these questions come from the general community and they're not edited, part of the task is to reframe particularly poorly written questions into a context in which you can distill the basic premise...Some of the questions are very vague, some don't seem to be related to ethics at all...One of the 35 questions was 'What's wrong with surveillance?' Any one of us could have spent two minutes just parsing that question...It didn't come up.
Which question was the toughest to field?
RANDOLPH: It was the end of life question. [When my mother was terminally ill, my sisters and I did not agree on whether we should take her off the machines that were keeping her alive. One of my sisters decided for us. Are there instances when it is right for one family member to make the decision? What are they?]
It's basically the Terry Schiavo question: If you have a husband and a parent who are disagreeing vehemently about whether to maintain life support or to cut off life support. So it seems like it's an insurmountable problem, but I framed it in a different way. I didn't find that it was insurmountable at all...What I did notice was that no one was jumping up to the front of the line wanting that one.
How could events like this fit into the bigger community?
ORTIZ: I would very much like to do the high-school version here at Greenhills. I think we could have some great assemblies, getting our kids to think about these questions and debate them among themselves. I would very much like to see this event really take hold and spread.
RANDOLPH: It kind of is like the pebble in the pond theory. The ripples travel and they have all sorts of wonderful consequences for the community. It would be neat to see 36 teams and have to have an elimination tournament over the course of six weeks. It would be great also for the local pubs, I think... We'd love to try and connect town and gown as much as possible. We'd love to connect the high schools as much as possible. Ann Arbor is justly proud of its public school system...It always pleases me when we can work in concert with the public schools, and that would be a wonderful thing to do.
Does taking part in this benefit your professional life?
ORTIZ: Professionally, I can work some of these questions into my language classes. They are fabulous opportunities to elicit advanced language from my students.
RANDOLPH: To me, it absolutely dovetails with what I'm doing. I'm teaching a post-colonial senior seminar, talking about what are fundamentally the ethics of creating security by getting involved in the sovereignty of another people. I'm talking about the Belgian Congo in the late 19th-century...In another class we're getting ready to talk about Chaucer and to talk about the church and about major economic and social changes. These are conversations that are easily portable into everyday lesson plans.
ORTIZ: I don't think anyone from the Ann Arbor community is going to shoot off a question to Ann Arbor Ethics about bullfighting, but that's something I'm considering with my advanced classes. The face of Spain is changing. Catalonia just last year became the second autonomous community to prohibit bullfighting, and this is a tradition that was written about in the epic of Gilgamesh. Since there has been language, there has been bullfighting. And even before. These are thorny questions, so we do get into ethical issues.
Yes, ethics comes into play when things are gray like that.
ORTIZ: It's the job of the ethicist, because people will so often tend to see things in black and white. The job of the ethicist is to bring out those shades of gray.
RANDOLPH: Sure. We were talking in a writing class about the failed syllogism used by Wayne LaPierre, who says the way you stop a bad guy with a gun is by having a good guy with a gun...What I challenge kids to do is keep using the middle term "gun", but he's suggesting there's an obvious difference between a bad guy with a gun and a good guy with a gun. Well, it doesn't take very long for students to realize the difference between a bad guy with a gun and a good guy with a gun is a matter of perspective because oftentimes bad guy with guns think they're good guys with guns. It's just that they're outnumbered.
See a video of highlights from the competition here.
Tanya Muzumdar is a freelance writer and the Assistant Editor of Concentrate and Metromode. Her last article was: "A Cast of Sculptures."
All photos by Doug Coombe