Next week, 36 college and university teams will travel to Portland to compete in the Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl. It is the first time in the 30 year history of the competition that it will be held in Portland, in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics. Over the course of two days, judges will score matches between opposing teams based on how they respond to case studies that require ethical reasoning and decision-making. Each team has been given six weeks to research and prepare for the 17 case studies crafted for this year’s event. The cases span current affairs topics ranging from free speech on campus to the limits of copyright protections; the merits of trying to save the giant panda from extinction to the merits of efforts to combat accusations of racism and bias on reality TV.

John Garcia is the chair of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl Council and a professor of philosophy at Harper College in Palatine, Illinois. Eleanor Jeffers is a junior majoring in philosophy at Whitworth University in Spokane. They join us to talk about the ethics bowl, how it differs from debate competitions and what it offers in an era of political polarization and misinformation