Arts & Culture
UC Santa Cruz Ethics Bowl team qualifies for national championships
A hard-working group of UC Santa Cruz undergraduate Ethics Bowl competitors is heading for the 2026 Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl National Championships in St. Louis, MIssouri, in March.
The Honey Badgers, from left to right: Allison Suydam, Eric Bostrom, Olivia Smith, Maury Burnett-Cavoto, Maggie Spalding, Joah Rubin, and Jackson Pollard
A hard-working group of UC Santa Cruz undergraduate Ethics Bowl competitors is heading for the 2026 Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl National Championships in St. Louis, Missouri, in March.
Undergraduates Allison Suydam, Joah Rubin, Maggie Spalding, Olivia Smith, Jackson Pollard, Eric Bostrom, and Maury Burnett-Cavoto—who call themselves The Honey Badgers—earned their invitation to the nationals after a strong showing at a regional tournament in San Diego this fall.
Ethics Bowl is a national debate competition where teams of debaters take on complex real-world problems, from concerns about artificial intelligence to moral dilemmas involving science and research.
UC Santa Cruz’s team is sponsored by the Philosophy Department. Team members enroll in a class, Philosophy 143, that prepares them for the rigors of Ethics Bowl debates. Philosophy continuing lecturer Kyle Robertson, who coaches the team, said the group is well prepared for the nationals.
“This will be the 7th team UC Santa Cruz has sent to the nationals since I started coaching in 2009,” Roberson. “I think that the defining feature of this team is their intellectual collaboration—they work exceptionally well together, and they support and explain each other’s viewpoints unusually well. This is a big part of their excellence in the event, as ethics bowl values collaboration across the board.”
At the upcoming national competition, the UC Santa Cruz team will face a demanding schedule of multiple rounds over two days, with judges drawn from philosophy, law, education, and public policy. The team will be asked to respond to opposing teams as well as the questions of judges.
Judges pay close attention to the way teams take on the ethical dimensions of urgent issues, engage respectfully with opposing sides, pay close attention to opposing views, and demonstrate on-the-spot reflective reasoning skills.
“Ethics Bowl makes it clear that the people you’re engaging with are people, and they are rational actors, and you have to assume that they have good intentions to have a productive conversation,” said team member Maggie Spalding, a double major in legal studies and the history of arts and visual culture.
Life lessons in civic discourse and critical thinking
Robertson says programs such as the Ethics Bowl ultimately play an important role in supporting American democracy.
“Respectful, serious argument is a powerful collective practice for grappling with the complex, difficult world,” he said. “And in our culture, particularly in the last 10 years, arguments look to me like a form of zero-sum, dishonest, intellectual warfare. Ethics Bowl rewards more constructive, collaborative, productive, and deliberative forms of argument.”
For Maury Burnett-Cavoto, a philosophy major on the team, the Ethics Bowl is also a great opportunity to boost analytical thinking, while trying on different philosophical approaches.
“It’s really helped me engage with complex, difficult-to-grasp problems by giving me the tools to come up with solutions that are just as nuanced as the issues,” Burnett-Cavoto said. “Before joining the Ethics Bowl, I was very prone to immediately thinking I was wrong when I had a stance that someone disagreed with. But now I actually engage with the disagreement and try to understand the reason I think the way I do and what viewpoint the other person is coming from.”
For fourth-year student Allison Suydam, a double major in philosophy and education, democracy and justice (EDJ), Ethics Bowl is a chance to put her intensive training in philosophical theory into action.
“The work we do in Ethics Bowl is applied ethics, meaning we take certain theories on how it is to be ethical and apply them to real-world problems,” Suydam said. “This has changed how I think about my academic work. Rather than seeing certain theories as abstract concepts, I have the skills to apply it to real-world situations.”
One recent Ethics Bowl debate topic that stayed with Suydam this season focused on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), a federal program that helps low-income individuals and families afford food.
The Ethics Bowl case pushed students to examine broader ethical questions, weighing public health goals with other concerns, such as undermining the personal autonomy of SNAP recipients.
For Burnett-Cavoto, another recent Ethics Bowl case on the ethical dimensions of commercial surrogacy hit home.
“As someone whose parents went through a lot of external means to bring me here today, I didn’t realize how strong my opinions were on reproductive rights and liberties until I really engaged with this case and my own life,” Burnett-Cavoto said.