Learning to See the World with Ethics | Chaewon Yoon | TEDxChadwick International School
A student shares how participating in an ethics olympiad transformed her understanding of ethics from simply choosing right over wrong to a complex process of questioning, listening, and understanding different perspectives. She argues that ethics is not an abstract concept but appears in daily decisions and teaches valuable skills for thinking with others rather than against them.
Summary
The speaker begins by establishing that every person makes dozens of choices daily, all with underlying reasons, and that ethics is the process of understanding those reasons. She shares her transformative experience participating in an ethics olympiad, which differed from typical academic challenges by focusing on questioning and commenting rather than memorizing formulas or finding right answers. The competition presented real-world scenarios from news stories, daily life, and technology, where different teams interpreted the same situations in completely different ways. This experience taught her to think with people rather than against them. She provides a specific example of debating whether it's ethical to use AI to write letters to family, where team members had different perspectives without any being definitively right or wrong. The speaker explains that ethics asks people to consider stakeholders, consequences, and motivations before acting, applying to business decisions, scientific research, and daily interactions. She concludes that the ethics olympiad taught her that learning comes not just from reading and memorizing, but from engaging with people who challenge your thinking, that asking good questions is often better than giving fast answers, and that ethics provides a way to understand ourselves and others rather than just giving rules.
Key Insights
- The ethics olympiad was structured around questioning and commenting on others' claims rather than traditional multiple choice questions or debate arguments
- Each team interpreted the exact same ethical scenarios in completely different ways, which initially felt confusing but became powerful for stretching thinking
- The competition taught her to think with people rather than against them, a skill that can almost never be taught through traditional methods
- In debates about using AI to write family letters, none of the participants were definitively right or wrong, even when discussing the very concept of right and wrong
- She learned that asking a good question is often better than giving a fast answer, and that ethics provides understanding rather than just rules
Topics
Transcript
[0:07] Every person in this room makes dozens of choices every day. Some are small, some are meaningful, but all of them carry a reason behind them. Ethics is the name we give to the process of understanding those reasons. We tend to think ethics belongs in textbooks or debates, but it appears in everyday life more than we realize. I want to invite you to a moment that changed how I see the world. It began when I decided to participate in something called the ethics olympiad. [0:38] It was not a typical academy challenge. There were no formulas to memorize, no unit tests waiting at the end. Instead, it opened the door to a kind of learning I…
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