European Ethics Bowl 2022

The 2022 season of the European Ethics Bowl was a special one, as it was the first season with a live event. We managed to organise the semi-final in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and the final live at the EIB in Luxembourg for the first time.

The number of EEB member institutions grew as new institutions joined the competition. Of the 13 member institutions, 11 organised a national competition and sent their teams to the semi-finals. Finally, nine teams arrived in Ljubljana, Slovenia, to compete for the three places in the final.

After two rounds of tough debates, the teams from Bulgaria, France and Portugal came out on top. And after a two-hour debate in the final at the EIB in Luxembourg, the ISCTE Business School team won the competition.

The organisers of the EEB would like to thank everyone who took part in the 2022 edition of the European Ethics Bowl. Whether as debating students, coordinators, judges or in any other capacity. Thank you for making this season a success. Congratulations to all the teams who successfully represented their countries and universities, and of course congratulations again to this year’s winners.

Institutional competitions

The Institutional competitions followed the lead of previous years and were organized by each institutional member. The case study titled “Is it ethical to force progress through standardization?” was presented during the launch of EEB 2022.

This year participating students faced two dilemmas presented in the case study. First one was: “Should EU institutions exclude countries and companies that do not comply with the standards from important business activities to force progress?” and the second one was: “Can a group of countries, through collective action, enforce standards that should ultimately lead to a fairer, greener, and more inclusive world, thus imposing a temporary cost on progress to some other countries?”.

Semi-final competitions

The 2022 semi-final was EEB’s first live event since its launch in 2020, and featured nine teams from eight European universities, as well as one team from the Alumni Programme of European Investment Bank Institute’s Summer School. The 27 students who made up these nine teams competed for three spots in the final round.

Students debated in two rounds and presented their views on assigned ethical topics related to this year’s overall theme, “Standardising the Business World.”. After brief presentations, they debated with opposing teams, followed by questions from a panel of judges and assessment. During the competition, students had the opportunity to learn and practise the skills they need as European citizens and as global citizens. The ethical issues were presented to the students in the form of specific case studies. The case studies were titled “Are gender quotas really enabling gender equality?” and “Standardization of non-financial reporting”.

Teams from ISCTE Business School (Lisbon, Portugal), Université Paris Dauphine (Paris, France) and Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” (Sofia, Bulgaria) qualified for the final round. The final round was held on December 9, 2022 and was hosted by the European Investment Bank Institute in Luxembourg.

The organizers would like to thank the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners – ACFE Slovenia and the companies TBA d.o.o., Henkel Slovenia and Atlantic Grupa for their support and sponsorship of the event.

Final competition

On Saturday, December 9, 2022, the European Ethics Bowl Final competition was organised in Luxembourg and hosted by the European Investment Bank Institute. Teams from three European universities ISCTE Business School (Lisbon, Portugal), Université Paris Dauphine (Paris, France) and Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” (Sofia, Bulgaria) qualified for the final round.

In the final round of EEB 2022, three teams were given the final case study three days before the competition and had additional two hours of preparation time on the day of the competition. The final case study was titled “Standardisation of higher education”. All three teams first presented their views directly to the opposing teams, judges and esteemed guests. Then they had a few minutes to prepare questions for the opposing teams. After that, they debated on the presented topic and answered the questions of the opposing team and the judges. The debate lasted for two hours.

The group of three judges coming from European Investment Bank, Moniflo, and University of Szeged had a very difficult task of evaluating the teams, who in their debating showed a high respect for opposing team members. After an hour of deliberation the judges selected a winner of EEB 2022.

Team from ISCTE Business School (Lisbon, Portugal) won the competition.

Dr. Ana Lúcia Martins, vice dean for teaching and innovation at the ISTE Business School, who observed the students’ participation in the competition stated: ” Our students’ participation in this European competition helped to broaden their “know-how,” as they had the chance to put some of the soft skills they learned in class, such a critical mindset, debate abilities, and argumentation ability, to use.”