A Roslyn High School team won third Place at this year’s Long Island High School Ethics Bowl held on Feb. 3 at Hofstra University.
The team was captained by senior Spencer Lazar who was assisted by junior Lauren Christenson. The other four team members were junior Gemma Schneider, sophomore Daleep Grewal, sophomore Charlotte Levin and sophomore Jake Stoller.
Also competing at this year’s Ethics Bowl was another Roslyn team comprised of senior and team captain Bailey Kaplan, junior and assistant captain Jasmine Berger and junior Adrian Ke, and sophomores Andrew Goldberg, Feyi Rufai, and Daniel Sung.
Both teams were coached by Allyson Weseley.
The goal of Ethics Bowl is to encourage students to think about thorny moral dilemmas. The dilemmas range from the kind of issues one is likely to encounter in one’s life such as whether it is ethically permissible to move into a neighborhood undergoing gentrification if one believes gentrification is harmful to existing communities to policy-based issues such as the ethics involved in driverless cars and breed specific legislation.
Kaplan has competed on Roslyn’s Ethics Bowl team for the last four years.
“I’ve gotten a lot out of participating in Ethics Bowl,” Kaplan said. “I’ve learned about philosophy and how to think about ethical dilemmas and also improved my public speaking skills.”
The Long Island Ethics Bowl is held annually at Hofstra, and the first place team wins a trip to the University of North Carolina to compete in the National High School Ethics Bowl; this year’s winning team was from the Stony Brook School. Roslyn has had a team in the semifinals for each of the last three years.