Finance majors crowned Ethics Bowl champs

BY DANIEL MONTAIE

VN SPECIAL WRITER

This year’s Ethics Bowl winner is pretty super.

“The Fantastic Four + One,” a group of finance majors, beat out a team called “The Lunchables” to prevail in this year’s annual quiz of moral principles.

The 17th annual Ethics Bowl took place Friday, Nov. 3 in the student center. The event, sponsored by the philosophy department, is inspired by TV’s College Bowl, but focuses on ethics.

Questions may address ethical problems on classroom topics like cheating or plagiarism; personal relationships like dating or friendship; professional ethics like engineering, law or medicine; or social and political ethics like free speech, gun control, etc., according to the Detroit Mercy website. Each team receives a set of ethical issues in advance of the competition, and questions posed to teams at the competition are taken from that set. A panel of judges rates answers in terms of intelligibility, focus, depth and judgment.

Teams can be comprised of between three to five members.

Paola Ramirez, Hector Castiglioni, Angelo DiPonio, Shawn Spezia and Jerod Hoekstra made up the winning members of “The Fantastic Four + One.”  They advance to the regional Ethics Bowl competition on November 18 at Oakland University.

“Both teams put up a good fight,” said Jack Censoni, a senior at Detroit Mercy who attended this year’s event. “After I graduate I’m still going to find time to attend the ethics bowl.”