The Department of Philosophy is proud to host Nottingham's inaugural heat of the nationwide Ethics Cup.
The Ethics Cup has a dual purpose: to promote interest in philosophy among secondary school students and to model and promote civil discourse on issues of public concern. It is founded on three fundamental tenets:
(1) In a multicultural democracy disagreement about important moral issues is inevitable.
(2) The members of the public should not shy away from expressing, in the public forum, their convictions on these issues.
(3) As a society we could make quicker progress toward reaching mutually acceptable resolutions of these disagreements, without creating resentment and hostility as a side effect, if more entrants in the public debate made use of the philosophers’ toolkit: the attention to logic and fallacy avoidance, the back-and-forth cycle of argument-counterargument-revision, the principle of interpreting one’s interlocutor’s position as charitably as possible, etc.
It isn’t a debating tournament and is designed to reward not the ability to win an argument but rather the ability to thoughtfully advance debates on ethical issues of public concern.
Good luck to all the teams taking part in this tournament.
Posted on Saturday 3rd December 2022