Teaching
My primary aim as an ethics teacher is to help every student on their path to developing practical wisdom so that they can lead flourishing lives. I work to provide every student with fair access and outcomes by understanding the strengths and needs they bring to the classroom, and by helping them to recognize the pervasiveness of ethical considerations in their daily lives.
My favorite topic to teach is the problem of luck, because of how strongly it hooks in students and forces them to wrestle with threats to their illusions about the world. Repeatedly working through the problem with students is part of what convinced me of both the efficacy and necessity of luckpilling. It was always the most engaging topic in the course, and I still have students emailing me years later just to tell me they think about luck every day and it has changed their lives for the better. Providing students with the ethical understanding they need to navigate the unjust systems they live under is the most important way I get to promote flourishing as an educator.
I am also particularly interested in teaching A.I. ethics. There has been an explosion of demand for A.I. ethics courses since I first started teaching them as the technology pervades our lives and impacts our understanding of the world. In my experience, it is crucial to help students recognize how hype distorts many topics related to A.I. ethics, so that they can pull apart conflated concepts like understanding, consciousness, and agency and assess how plausibly they apply to emerging technology.
Whatever the subject, the core skill that I expect my students to develop is the ability to critically examine their own thinking and effectively format both written and oral arguments. I always emphasize that the best way to understand a position is to engage earnestly with the strongest objections they can find.
Sample syllabi:
Phil 329: Minds, Machines and Persons
Ghost in the Machine: AI, Ethics, and Personhood Honors Seminar
