Fall '23 Course Offerings
This fall, the Ethics Lab team is offering classes in environmental ethics, AI ethics, social media & democracy, and design. Below are more details on each class, along with course registration numbers (CRNs) for students interested in registering.
Ethics of AI & Health * New! *
PHIL-2090, 3 credits
Taught by Ethics Lab faculty
Class meets Tuesday and Thursday, 12:30pm–1:45pm in Ethics Lab (Healy 201)
Satisfies Georgetown Core requirement (Philosophy)
Course Registration Number: 44449
Artificial intelligence is re-shaping health and healthcare at a blistering pace. Doctors are using machine-learning algorithms to diagnose illnesses faster and more accurately than a human can. Smart devices are tracking and analyzing the personal health metrics of millions. Surgical teams are using augmented reality underpinned by AI algorithms to guide scalpels and increase precision. These advances hold both ethical opportunities and ethical challenges—from the promise of cheaper, more effective, more personalized care, and advancements in research and therapeutics to the perils of algorithmic bias, the loss or devaluing of human care, the cementing of health inequities, and the surveillance and exploitation of minoritized and vulnerable groups. This course will provide an introduction to critical issues in AI and Health Ethics that aims to equip students with key ethical concepts, theories, and frameworks to help navigate this complex emergent terrain. Particular foci will include AI developments in areas of physical, mental, sexual, and social health, and the course will canvas key readings in bioethics, political philosophy, and feminist and critical race theory.
Ethics & the Environment * New! *
PHIL-2214, 3 credits
Taught by Ethics Lab Assistant Professor Jason Farr
Class meets Monday and Wednesday, 11:00am–12:15pm in Ethics Lab (Healy 201)
Satisfies Georgetown Core requirement (Philosophy)
SFS/CULP Social Science
Course Registration Number: 43908
Our time is marked by unfolding ecological crises. Climate change is here, bringing drought and fire and extreme heat waves, sea level rise and powerful hurricanes. Meanwhile, rainforests are making way for cattle ranching and palm plantations, and our oceans are in unprecedented decline. When governments are unwilling to meet these challenges and companies are more interested in greenwashing than helping, the allure of despair can be overwhelming. In this class, we will orient ourselves back toward a responsible hope. We will challenge the very conceptions of nature that hold us captive to our resignation while opening ourselves up to new relationships with the world around us. We will investigate what a systemic response to a systemic crisis might look like, finding our own roles and agencies within it. And, crucially, we will find the human in nature and the nature in what is human, recentering environmental and epistemic justice in a field that for too long ignored it. Topics in the course will include: economic and social/cultural underpinnings of our conceptions of nature and our place within it, alienation and the wilderness ethic, environmental justice, the ethics of climate change, food ethics, animal ethics, technology and the environment, and the values of biodiversity and sustainability.
Ethical Challenges of AI
PHIL-2102, 3 credits
Taught by Ethics Lab Postdoctoral Fellow Shannon Brick
Class meets Mondays and Wednesdays, 11:00am–12:15pm in Ethics Lab (Healy 201)
Satisfies Georgetown Core requirement (Philosophy)
Satisfies new Tech, Ethics, & Society program “tech + ethics” elective requirement
SFS/STIA Growth/Development
SFS/STIA Science/Tech/Security
Course Registration Number: 39966
Is artificial intelligence a force for good? Or is it a threat to human life as we know it? On the one hand, it promises economic development, efficiency, convenience, and medical breakthroughs. On the other hand, we already see negative impacts of artificial intelligence in our society today, from inequality and inequity to privacy violations to unprecedented accumulations and concentrations of power. What will human life look like once we fully incorporate artificial intelligence into our lives—indeed, into our bodies and minds? What will it mean to flourish as a human being? What will our social lives look like? Are these lives we want? Are they morally laudable? Are they inevitable?
In this course, you will learn new philosophical concepts and perspectives that will enable you to reflect on human life in new ways. You will practice interrogating your assumptions about ethical issues relating to artificial intelligence, and you will practice clarifying your assumptions and clarifying the ethical issues that arise in the course of your reflection. You will also practice reading and writing philosophical texts, charitably reconstructing philosophers’ arguments, and crafting careful, well-constructed arguments of your own. And, importantly, we will practice respectful and detailed discussion of important ethical issues relating to tech and AI.
Social Media & Democracy
PHIL-2103, 3 credits
Taught by Ethics Lab Postdoctoral Fellow Kate Wojtkiewicz
Class meets Mondays and Wednesdays, 12:30pm–1:45pm in Ethics Lab (Healy 201)
Satisfies Georgetown Core requirement (Philosophy)
Satisfies new Tech, Ethics, & Society program “tech + ethics” elective requirement
Course Registration Number: 43906
From conspiracy theories to annoying family members, there’s little question that social media has become an integral part of our political lives. Think pieces from across the political spectrum have bemoaned the populace’s use of social media platforms for years, blaming them for an increasingly polarized political landscape. But what is the relationship between social media and democracy really? When we pull back the rhetoric and the hand-wringing, what problems remain? Is it all bad? Or can social media be shaped into a truly democratic—and democracy-friendly—online space?
This course interrogates the complex ways social media has influenced our participation in American democracy, and does so with the help of tools from the fields of philosophy and design. On the philosophy side, we utilize theories of democracy developed in political philosophy, as well as theories of knowledge sharing—and the roadblocks thereof, including bias, prejudice, polarization, echo chambers, and the like—from epistemology. From design, we adopt the language of affordances and values, to develop our understanding of the creation and function of social media.
(un)Mapping Just Futures * New! *
UNXD-2125, 1 credit
Taught by Ethics Lab Assistant Professor Akshaya Narayanan
Class meets Thursday, 2:00pm–3:40pm in Ethics Lab (Healy 201)
Part of The Red House’s Just Communities project
Course Registration Number: 44453
We are constantly shaping and being shaped by our environment, that is layered with built and natural systems. Packed into this are the layers of human interactions with and within these systems. This 1-credit course offered by Ethics Lab faculty seeks to unravel those systems hidden in plain sight.
Using exploratory design methods that center responsible play, reflection and curious awareness we will be building objective interpretative maps of every kind — sensory, participatory, colored with memory, intuition and embodied experiences to identify our roles in transitioning towards just environmental futures. Participants will learn to apply design-led-research methods along with basic drawing/collaging techniques (analog and digital) as a way to responsibly navigate complex environmental systems.