My Collaborations with Loyola Students outside of the Seminar Room

Ethics Bowl

I have had the good fortune to coach Loyola’s Ethics Bowl team since the spring of 2014. My colleague Dr. Joel MacClellan and I help to prepare our students to compete against teams from other universities at both the regional and the national level. I have also served as a judge at the national Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl competition since 2016. Some of our students have put the skills to work in programs such as Teach for America. Others have gone on to law school and to graduate fields as varied as environmental science, linguistics, and philosophy. We have even had a Fulbright Award winner recently.

Jointly Authored Reviews

I have co-authored two book reviews with my students. In 2016, Tara Malay and I reviewed Carol Gould’s Interactive Democracy: The Social Roots of Global Justice. And in 2019, Emily Ortiz and I reviewed Will MacAskill’s Doing Good Better (to be completed by May). Both of these reviews appear in the journal Philosophy in Review. I plan on continuing the practice of reviewing scholarly books with undergraduates in the future. While co-authoring peer reviewed articles with undergraduates in philosophy is highly unusual and considerably more difficult in this discipline than in some others, I am very much on the lookout for students who are ready to take this step.

Collaborative Research on Effective Altruism

Recently, I have begun to collaborate with Loyola students on topics concerning Effective Altruism. Here are two examples of recent projects.

First, I worked with a team of undergraduates - Melody Bigelow, Kayla Koonz, and Emily Ortiz - on determining the environmental costs of treating neglected tropical diseases in low-income countries. We will present our research during the Earth Week celebration at Loyola on April 23, 2019. In the fall, we will begin to develop a “best practices” document designed to help charitable NGOs minimize their environmental impact.

Second, I assigned a paper to students in my spring course on global ethics, challenging them to explain the most effective way to help others by working in groups of 3-5 over 6 months with $10,000 to spend. I will choose the best proposal, and over the summer and fall the winners will fundraise and then put the proposal into action. (Stay tuned.)