By: Alexis Jimenez Maldonado
This conversation happened on September 30, 2022. The transcript of the interview has been edited for clarity.
Katie Sierra is a senior at Harvard College from Northport, NY studying Integrative Biology. Katie spends her time on campus involved with the Harvard College Conservation Society, conducting research in Dr. Hecht's dog behavior lab, and leading the Harvard Undergraduate Ethics Bowl. She is extremely passionate about Ethics Bowl and enjoys being a part of an inclusive space on campus for discussions that apply ethics to real world issues. She hopes to use the skills she has gained from Ethics Bowl in order to have a future career involved in animal healthcare and public policy.
Anisha Laumas is a senior at Harvard College from Stamford, CT concentrating in Integrative Biology. On campus, she is mainly involved in the Harvard Undergraduate Ethics Bowl and conducts (or assists with) biomedical research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. She is passionate about creating a space to think about and discuss a variety of ethical issues in a collaborative and engaging environment, especially those concerning medical ethics and bioethics. Anisha hopes to apply the ideas and skills she has gained from Ethics Bowl to a future career in medicine, healthcare, or the life sciences.
Alexis Jimenez Maldonado: Katie and Anisha, you are Co-Presidents of the Harvard Undergraduate Ethics Bowl. Could you talk a bit about what the Ethics Bowl is and what it does? How did the Ethics Bowl develop at Harvard?
Katie Sierra: Ethics Bowl was founded at Harvard by Jill Sharples ‘21, former ELSCE undergraduate fellow, and we were a part of the first class of members. I found out about Ethics Bowl because Jill handed me a flyer during the club fair.
Anisha Laumas: I took a Gen-Ed class on medical ethics during my freshman fall. After the class had ended, during winter break, the professor sent out an email about Ethics Bowl. And so I just showed up to a couple of meetings and knew this was an activity in which I’d be interested!
Katie: I would describe Ethics Bowl as being an extremely accessible and inclusive twist on traditional debate. In traditional debate, oftentimes, you're assigned a position to argue. The cool thing about Ethics Bowl is that you're not assigned a particular side. So, you have the ability to craft your argument however you'd like. We'll get a case packet that includes a wide range of current issues. For example, right now we have a case on the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the ethics underlying global responses to this crisis. After we get the case packet, we discuss them in a group setting and come up with a proposal and a philosophical framework. It really centers on having deep conversations with people and trying to get at the root of these issues.
Anisha: As Katie mentioned, we participate in the intercollegiate Ethics Bowl competition, a national competition where we talk about a wide variety of issues in a less formal way. The case packets have one-to-two-page summaries of an ethical issue or dilemma. That serves as a starting point for our discussions.
This fall, we are running a comp for first years who are interested in joining Ethics Bowl. We have them come to meetings and participate in our discussions to show them the kind of work we do. We're talking about different philosophical frameworks and how they can be applied to issues.
Katie: One thing that really differentiates us as an undergraduate organization compared to other groups on campus, is how people join our club. At Harvard, in order to join a club, you complete something known as the “comp process.” Most clubs have competitive comps and are inherently exclusive spaces where only a certain number of people can get in. In contrast, Ethics Bowl has a completely completion-based comp. If you come to meetings, show effort, and complete the comp, everyone is welcome! We really want it to be a space that anyone can join. It's not an exclusive space at all. Inclusivity is a number one priority for our organization.
AJM: How did you each become a part of the Ethics Bowl?
Katie: I went to the Ethics Bowl introduction meeting on a whim my first year after I got handed a flyer during the student org fair. There are hundreds of organizations, you get a bunch of different slips of paper, and so it’s easy to miss something. I thought, you know what, I'm going to go to this meeting tonight and see what happens. And it was incredible! I loved the conversations that we had. It was just kind of luck of the draw for me that I happened to walk by Jill. That's something that we've tried to really improve upon this year for the recruiting process. We're really trying to make the larger community aware of us so that as many people as possible can join!
Anisha: Like I mentioned before, I learned about Ethics Bowl through my medical ethics class. The first meeting was in the Quincy dining hall in one of the rooms in the back. We just talked about different ethical issues. I had taken a class about ethics and philosophy, and I found it to be really interesting, so I thought, why not do Ethics Bowl? I guess both Katie and I just gave it a try and now we're here.
AJM: Can you describe your experience with the club so far?
Katie: I would say it's been really amazing. It’s been incredible to not only have these meaningful conversations and grow as an individual, but to also see the evolution of the club itself. It's really evolved to the point where we regularly compete at the Ethics Bowl Intercollegiate Competition, have an established board, and have started having events with the Center and the wider Harvard community. We also have an official Pedagogy Fellow from the Center who serves as our coach [Malcolm Morano]. It’s just generally become a lot more formalized and has experienced a lot of growth.
Anisha: From a social perspective, it's been fun to get to know a bunch of new people. It’s also been interesting to have both a social and intellectual space to have these discussions.
AJM: Anisha and Katie, you are both concentrating in Integrative Biology, could you talk about how you use your academic backgrounds in your work with the Ethics Bowl?
Katie: I'm a pre-veterinary student and just applied to veterinary school this cycle. I'm interested in the intersection of veterinary medicine, animal ethics, and legislation for animals. I'm hoping to have a voice in animal public policy one day, so Ethics Bowl has been incredibly informative for that goal. We have discussed many animal ethics cases and bioethics cases which were a really good way to challenge some of the assumptions I had coming into college. Ethics Bowl has helped me to expand my mindset and to really figure out and refine what I actually think about important issues. It's been beneficial in that it helped me understand what I want to do with my life, and the path that I have going forward.
Anisha: I'm considering a career in medicine, life sciences, and health care more broadly. I like computational biology research and am interested in the intersection of research ethics and medicine. Those issues have come up in Ethics Bowl time and time again in the past couple of years. We've had multiple Ethics Bowl cases about different aspects related to the pandemic, mask mandates, and vaccinations. Understanding the hard sciences and being able to talk about these issues using established philosophical frameworks has informed how I think about those ethical cases. In terms of pursuing a career in medicine going forward, I think it's especially important that I have a grounding in ethics.
Katie: One of the cool things about Ethics Bowl is that we come from diverse academic backgrounds! We have people who are in a wide range of different fields like government, philosophy, history, etc. It's amazing when we have these conversations, to hear so many of the different perspectives and how we can integrate different ideas. Sometimes we'll have a discussion, and someone will mention something that completely changes everybody’s preconceived notions about a case. By having people from so many different backgrounds and academic disciplines, it really helps to engage with these big applied ethical situations, and to develop comprehensive frameworks for our cases. I think that having a diversity of thought within the club (not just people studying philosophy) has been one of its greatest strengths.
AJM: Katie, you described the Ethics Bowl as an inclusive space on campus for discussions about applying ethics to real world issues. Could you say more about this and maybe share some examples?
Katie: We've had some cases where everyone has very different opinions. Sometimes we approach a case and we're all thinking differently, and thoughts are flying around the room! One that comes to mind is a bioethics case that had to do with the prosecution of a nurse for medical malpractice after she gave a patient the wrong medication, which ultimately led to their death. We ended up having this incredibly deep conversation about the boundary between systematic issues and personal responsibility. We were asking to what extent should people be held personally culpable within systems that are designed for them to fail? There were extremely different opinions on it. We also considered the really big gray area between legality and morality. Some people thought that she shouldn’t be punished legally, but face moral consequences. It was really interesting.
Another thing about Ethics Bowl is we'll have these discussions, and then we'll sit on them for a week. We will keep on discussing them over and over again. Sometimes it takes a while to get to a conclusion. But for this one, it's still kind of unsettled what our final verdict is going to be. That is just one example that came to mind.
Anisha: Another example of a polarizing case that we had recently was about the Russia and Ukraine conflict and the impact that it has on Russian athletes. The question was basically, how do national identity and politics infiltrate and insidiously find their way into sports and athletic competition if the ultimate goal of sports is to have fun and compete for the sake of competing? But to what extent can athletics and sports be co-opted for political purposes? How does that happen? I think people had a variety of different gut reactions and we were able to go from there and talk more deeply in order to dissect the core ethical issues at play.
Katie: One of the great things about Ethics Bowl is that people feel comfortable disagreeing. When we get these cases, people feel like it's okay to have a different view than the person sitting across from them. It comes down to this idea of having deep ethical conversations and seeing if we can come to a mutual understanding.
AJM: The Ethics Bowl has been described as dissimilar to traditional college debate because of the back-and-forth that happens with teams and judges. Anisha, could you talk about the advantages of this format and how the team prepares for this style of discourse?
Anisha: The format of the Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl Competition, as you mentioned, is more of a conversation between two teams. The judges ask questions, and everyone is involved at the same time. A more formal debate has a clear line of presenting a certain side, and then the judges deliver a final verdict. I think the advantage of our format is the emphasis on conversation. Everyone has an emotional and intellectual buy-in rather than just arguing in the affirmative, or negative on an issue. In a traditional debate, you start with the answer and then try to find a way to get to that answer by finding evidence that fits your argument. But with Ethics Bowl, the conclusions and consensuses that we come to are very much organic and are born out of conversation and discussion. Everyone reads through the case doc, and then we're kind of just like, okay, what do we all think? It's not like we're starting with a fully formed conclusion and then trying to get there. It’s about the iterative process and gaining a deeper understanding of the ethical issues and principles at play.
The team prepares by having organic conversations about the case docs and then trying to come up with how we can put together a unified argument or conclusion. We implement that discussion in our team meetings, and we feel like that translates well when we're preparing for competition. Practice really involves listening to each other. I like the phrase “taking space, making space.”
Katie: To give more insight into the format, basically, one team will present a case, then the other team has time to give a response to it. And one of the cool things about the Ethics Bowl is that the other team doesn't have to disagree with the presenting team! Often when we're in competition, we'll hear another team present, and we'll totally agree with their conclusions. It's fantastic! One of the goals of Ethics Bowl is that it's not supposed to be confrontational. It's more about the discussion of the core issues of a case and coming to the best ethical consensus on it.
During our commentary, we will focus on things like, why did you use this particular ethical framework to consider this case? Or we really love this idea, but did you consider this particular case scenario? It's not about tearing down the other team, but more about trying to figure out a way to use that conversation as a way to build a great case. And then after that commentary, you'll respond and then it's time for the judges' questions. I feel like it's very wholesome, it's very respectful, and unlike any other forms of debate. Sometimes we do disagree with the other side and come to a different conclusion. But that's one of the cool things about ethics: it relies on conversation.
AJM: What is on the horizon for the Ethics Bowl?
Anisha: This upcoming semester we're really looking forward to having our first in-person Regional Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl Competition. The past two years we've had competitions on Zoom, and everything has been virtual. This upcoming academic year, the plan is to have everything in person so it'll be fun and interesting to have those sorts of conversations in person!
Katie: Our first competition is going to be in Baltimore, Maryland. We're traveling and very excited about it! We're also really excited to do future events with the Center. For example, this past year, it was amazing to interact with visiting philosopher Seth Lazar at an event that was hosted by the Center. We were able to sit down with him and have an Ethics Bowl conversation, which was incredible! We're hoping to continue that this year, with other visiting philosophers.
AJM: What do you envision as the future for the Ethics Bowl?
Anisha: We want to see the Ethics Bowl continue to be accessible for everyone, whether they are first years or just anyone in the community! We want people to feel like they can join and be a part of what we are doing. Maintaining that inclusive and welcoming environment is something that we want to carry into the future of Ethics Bowl. I think eventually having an ethics review journal would be a great way to write up and compile the arguments we discuss in competitions. In the coming years, if we could gather resources and materials and put together a published product, that would be super cool.
Katie: It'll also be interesting to see how our curriculum changes over time. One of the key facets of our comp process is that you don't have to have any philosophical academic background in order to join. We will teach you everything that you need to know. This year was our second year implementing that curriculum. So, it'll be interesting to see how that continues to function. Also, to see how that process becomes optimized in the coming years.
AJM: What's the #1 thing you each have gained from your participation in Ethics Bowl, would you say?
Katie: I think I’ve undergone an upheaval of my own personal ideas. I feel like this space has given me the opportunity to have my ideas challenged and I have been able to rethink things and ask myself, what do I believe? What do I want to do with my life? Ethics Bowl has really led me towards a route more focused on animal ethics and public policy for my own career. The number one thing isn’t about winning competitions or anything like that, it’s been about the conversations that have informed the person I am and how I can contribute to the world.
Anisha: Yeah, I was going to say something similar. In entering college you’re also entering into an environment where people around you, whether implicitly or explicitly, are going to try to tell you what you should think or believe. Having this space where I was able to dedicate time to thinking about a wide variety of issues has been so important to my personal growth.
Ethics Bowl has given me a way to think about and talk about issues and ideas through our more formal case briefs. I think that it has been super useful in terms of just pure exposure to new issues and dilemmas that I had never thought about prior to coming to college.
We all come from a wide variety of backgrounds, both academic and personal, and there's something very special about the environment that these sorts of conversations create.
Katie: To add onto that, I feel like Ethics Bowl has been the most transformative aspect of my undergraduate Harvard experience. It's been my favorite org that I have been a part of, especially because of the people that I've met. Beyond Ethics Bowl and beyond competitions, I think that this has given me a toolkit to be able to address future issues that I haven't even considered yet. I feel able to go out into the world and understand how to handle different problems or ethical dilemmas in a very mature and deep way.
AJM: What’s the best part of the Ethics Bowl?
Anisha: I think this goes for any club, it's only as good as the people in it. I'd say, the best parts of Ethics Bowl are the people and the environment that we've been able to create. The Ethics Bowl has been able to be meaningful and sustainable because of the people who have continuously shown up. They have been willing to both emotionally and intellectually put themselves in this space and have their ideas challenged or validated by others.
Katie: I agree 100%, it's the people. I’ve made a lot of great friends at Ethics Bowl. It's a group of people that I really love having conversations with. I look forward to each weekly meeting. I get hyped to go to Ethics Bowl! Sometimes I hear from some of my other friends of the orgs they are a part of and sometimes it feels like a chore. But I think everyone loves Ethics Bowl and it is something that feels like a break from whatever they're studying. It's just a really fun space to be with other people.
AJM: How can other students get involved with the Bowl?
Anisha: We meet every Thursday at 7pm in the third-floor philosophy lounge in the Emerson Philosophy building in Harvard Yard. Just show up to a meeting and participate in a discussion, that’s all! You can also get involved with the ethics review article by coming up with ideas and engaging with that process as well.
AJM: I'd like to give you an opportunity to share anything I have not covered!
Katie: We'd love to give a big thank you to the Center, they've helped us out so much! Also, our coach, who really helps us to guide us through these cases. It's really helped us to have an official Pedagogy Fellow from the Center as a mentor.
Anisha: Yeah, shoutout to Malcolm Morano and our previous coach, Dr. Caitlin Fitchett. She's a graduate student in philosophy and was also a Pedagogy Fellow with the Center. She was someone who came to meetings and helped us with the more formalized ethical frameworks. Especially since we are just undergraduates who are just getting started with taking philosophy classes. She was always someone who was open and willing to pitch in, especially when we were struggling with certain concepts. Thank you to Caitlin and Malcolm, for helping us with everything.
AJM: How do you unwind; do you have any hobbies or things you do for fun?
Katie: You know, I really love running very slowly. I love going on trails and hiking and walking. I really like just being out and appreciating the outdoors. I'm not from Boston so while I'm on campus it’s been great to go places to hike in the greater Boston area. I'm from Long Island, we have beaches, but we don't have much in the way of mountains and forests so that's how I've enjoyed my free time here.
Anisha: I like to participate in house life. I'm a big fan of intramural sports like soccer and football. You name it and I'll probably try it! I like doing that in my free time and have a lot of fun with it!
AJM: Do you have a podcast or show that you are currently listening to/watching?
Katie: Right now, I'm watching House of the Dragon. I'm really big into Game of Thrones. It's a prequel and it’s very good! There's a lot of intense ethical issues in that show. They don't make a lot of very ethical choices, so I watch with Ethics Bowl running in the back of my mind.
Anisha: Recently I’ve been watching Cobra Kai on Netflix. It's a spinoff of The Karate Kid film series and it's about kids who do martial arts in high school. I think it's fun and interesting. And actually, a show that I’ve been recommended with a more philosophical angle is The Good Place. I've been meaning to start that!
AJM: What are you most excited about in the coming academic year?
Katie: I'm really excited for us to have our first in-person competition. That's the highlight of this semester for me. After I graduate, we'll be handing off our co-presidency to other people. So, I'm also really excited to see how new student leaders take over. I'm also looking forward to writing my senior thesis on dog behavior. It'll be nice to have that culminating paper. Those are my three things that I'm most excited for.
Anisha: I feel like I must agree with Katie here. I'm also really excited for us to have our first in-person regionals competition. I’m excited to see what the vibe is like at the competition and I’m looking forward to those in-person conversations. I feel like there's something special about the intercollegiate scholastic competition environment.
I'm also excited to write my senior thesis, which is more focused on computational biology. I'm looking into protein expression in cancer, at least that's the current plan. I think in terms of academics and extracurriculars, we're both really excited for our theses and to see where Ethics Bowl is going to go in the future. I am also looking forward to being involved as both a Harvard alum and an Ethics Bowl alum once I graduate!