UA Center for Ethics to Host Moral Forum Competition, Will Award $13,000 in scholarships

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — The University of Alabama Center for Ethics & Social Responsibility will be hosting the final round of the third annual Moral Forum Tournament on Friday, Oct. 26 at 7 p.m. in Morgan Auditorium to award some $13,000 in scholarships.

Two exemplary pairs of students from this semester’s Moral Forum course will debate in the final round of the tournament on the topic of “Immigration and the Role of a Moral and Just Society.”

The debate addresses the issue of whether Congress should pass the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act (DREAM Act) which would provide a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants who entered the country before they turned 16 and have lived in the United States for at least five years. The students would be granted a six-year provisional legal status during which they must attend college (for two years) or serve in the military for at least two years before being eligible for citizenship.

Moral Forum, in its third year of operation, was designed to help UA students develop the skills necessary to evaluate and respond to moral claims and engage in moral discourse. Striving to foster both open-mindedness and conviction, Moral Forum seeks to help students distinguish between making reasoned judgments about the moral legitimacy of views as opposed to being intolerant and disrespectful toward individuals or cultural groups.

To these ends, the Moral Forum initiative is organized around the analysis of one particular controversial “moral” resolution. In teams of two, students conduct research, attend a six-part lecture series and construct position statements that address both sides of the current resolution in preparation for two required preliminary debate rounds. Each team must be prepared to argue both affirmative and negative sides of the same resolution.

It is anticipated that Moral Forum will become a required component of the honors curriculum at UA beginning in spring 2009, with the number of student participants competing for scholarship money exceeding 400 per year.

Moral Forum is one of the founding initiatives of the Center for Ethics & Social Responsibility, which began in fall 2005 under the direction of Stephen F. Black. The center was made possible by a gift from Mignon C. Smith to establish a university-based ethics program that would support the study of ethics and develop projects to nurture social responsibility and reflective, thoughtful citizenship.

This event is free and open to the public.

For more information on Moral Forum and the work of the Center for Ethics & Social Responsibility, contact cesr@ua.edu, call 205/348-6490 or go to http://cesr.ua.edu/.