Ethics Bowl team gets ready for nationals

By Kaitlin Martinez

LOGOS STAFF WRITER

After qualifying for national competition, the University of the Incarnate Word Ethics Bowl team will go up against some of the country’s best March 2-5 in Portland, Ore.

UIW’s team qualified last November after finishing fourth at the Texas Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl, a regional competition of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE).

The association is a non-profit organization “dedicated to advancing scholarship, education, and practice in practical and professional ethics,” according to the association’s website. At the fall competition, UIW’s team involved six student competitors and a student researcher. The competing members were Baylor Frandsen, a junior biology major; Isabella Ortiz, a freshman biology major; Victor Torres, a junior biochemistry major; Beni Resendiz, a senior communication arts major concentrating in strategic and corporate communication; Abraham Rivas, a junior business administration major; and Nathan Smith, a senior biology major. Carla Verver y Vargas served as the team’s researcher, and Dr. Chris Edelman, a professor of philosophy, is the adviser.

To prepare for competition, the team receives case files from the APPE office that present several broad ethical situations. The team then analyzes the cases and researches the ethical dilemmas presented. During the event, a moderator questions the competitors about the case files to gauge the team’s understanding of the ethical dilemmas. Teams are then rated on their “intelligibility, focus on ethically relevant considerations, avoidance of ethical irrelevance, and deliberative thoughtfulness.”

In an interview with the Logos, Resen-