Strong Showing for Ethics Bowl Team

Seattle University’s Ethics Bowl team reached new heights in an already long and impressive winning streak, placing second at the 30th Annual Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl in early March in St. Louis.

The runner-up finish was the highest ever for SU, which has reached the semifinals in 2022 and 2025. It’s the eighth-straight year Seattle University made it to the national tournament, which it earned by placing in the top two at qualifying regional ethics bowl events. In all, roughly 170 schools start regional competition in the fall with 36 teams making it to the national tournament.

The Seattle University team is comprised of Alonso Lee, Mariam Gohar, Callie Wilker, Lindee Cutler and Kimi Yokoyama.

“I couldn’t be happier with the students,” says Ethics Bowl Coach Dr. Ben Howe, assistant teaching professor in the College of Arts and Sciences who has led the team for the past 11 years. “As a professor of applied ethics, it’s incredibly rewarding to work at a Jesuit university where all students, regardless of major, have an opportunity to study ethical theory and philosophy in the Core Curriculum.”

On its way to the nationals SU defeated LSU, Occidental College, Central Arkansas and Georgia Tech in the preliminary rounds. In the quarterfinals, the team took down Harvard using a theory of misogyny developed by Kate Manne of Cornell University, who recently visited SU to deliver a talk for the philosophy department’s endowed lecture on human values.

By defeating Stanford and Florida in the semifinals, Seattle University and William & Mary advanced to the final, where SU presented on an anti-abortion law in Georgia using a theory of personhood that senior philosophy major Wilker developed during her research assistantship with Dr. Alexandra Romanyshyn. In the end, though, William & Mary came out on top.

Training for the competition took several months as the team received 17 cases from the National Ethics Bowl on a wide range of topics including geoengineering, domestic violence shelters, online surveillance technologies and rank choice voting. They engaged in multidisciplinary empirical research and philosophical analysis to prepare. During the competition, presentations are judged by a panel of three professors who award points based on the depth of each team’s analysis and ability to address alternative viewpoints.

Check out this video to watch SU’s performance against William & Mary in the Ethics Bowl final.