The Cherry Hill East Ethics Team recently took first place in its regional competition, and is now preparing for Nationals, which will be held in North Carolina. The Ethics Team has only been a club at East for two years and it has been coached by former East teacher Mr. Lodge, who also coaches the debate team.

The team has improved its performance since last year by winning Regionals against Radnor High, a team that eliminated East in last year’s Regionals. Despite Radnor winning 16^th in the nation last year, East’s team will be the one advancing to Nationals this year, with high hopes of taking a higher ranking. The teams that compete are assigned cases with ethical dilemmas in which they have to decide to whether the case is ethical or not ethical. Cases in Regionals included the Trayvon Martin case and China’s controversial 2-child policy.

“It’s hard to tell how we’ll do,” Mason Williams (’16), a member of the team, says, “since we’ve never been [to nationals] before. I personally think we’re going to do pretty well.”

However, since this is only the second year for Ethics, the team will need to do a lot of preparation to do as well as they hope to, as any team needs to do. More pressure is added because it will be East’s first time in Nationals. In order to prepare, the team will have to look at each case and prepare a position on them. The team has not gotten the cases yet, and the possibilities lie within a huge range of topics. In order to continue to perform as well as it has been, the team will need to continue to come up with strong positions and be able to successfully argue their points.

“We have to set evidence to show that our opinion holds out,” Williams says.  “Ethics is about interpreting the ethical problems that plague the modern world.”

Needless to say, the world isn’t expected to have a lack of ethical dilemmas anytime soon, and our Ethics Team will continue to argue their points in competition except this time it will be on a national basis.