Phil 327 – Ethics in the Information Age --Spring, 2023
Metropolitan State University
Position Paper Assignments (Note: these are carried over from last semester. They probably won't change much, if at all, but check back to make sure you have the current version.)
First Position Paper Assignment (Due Friday, February 24 by 10 AM)
Second Position Paper Assignment (Due Friday, April 7 by 10AM)
Third Position Paper Assignment (Due Wednesday, May 3, by 10AM)
Philosophy paper writing guides (relevant more to Position Papers #2 and#3 than to #1):
from Joe Cruz of Williams College
Date | Topic | Reading (to be completed before class) | Writing Due | Handouts - in class stuff |
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Jan. 9 | Introduction
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none
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None. | Cases for Discussion; Discussion Project: Identifying Ethical Issues |
Jan. 16 | No Class | Martin Luther King Holiday | ||
Jan. 23 | Overview:
Personal, Professional, and Social Issues in Information Technology
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1. The Case of the Killer Robot (online here) -- a fictional story, told as a series of imaginary newpaper articles, intended to raise a number of ethical and techncal issues. 2. Benkler, Wealth of Networks, Chapter 1, "Introduction: A moment of Opportunity and Challenge" -- [Note: you may safely skip the section called "Four Methodological Comments," but do read the section that comes after it, called "The Stakes of It All.] Benkler's book, published in 2006, laid out an optimistic vision of the ways that the internet could make life better. But the chapter ends with a warning -- these good things will not happen if the companies that profit from the old 'industrial' information system are allowed to write the rules for the new technologies. Fifteen years later, who won the battle?
3. Quinn, Ethics for the Information Age, Chapter 1 (Optional - read this if you have time and interest after doing the other readings);. [Note: this is our class textbook, available at the University bookstore in printed and electronic editions.] |
Response to Readings | Discussion Project: Killer Robot |
Jan. 30
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Ethical
Theories 1: Relativism, Religion, Kant
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1. Quinn,
Chapter 2, the first six sections, through p. 71; |
Response to Readings | Discussion Project: Applying Kant; Cases for Discussion |
Feb.6 | Ethical
Theories 2: Utilitarianism, Social Contract theory
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1. Quinn,
Chapter 2, the rest (but skip section 10 on virtue ethics for now); |
Response to Readings | Discussion Project: Applying Utilitarianism;
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Feb. 13 | Professional/Business
ethics 1: responsibilities, standards, codes
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1. Quinn, Chapter 2, section 10 on Virtue Ethics, (pp. 87-92 in the printed version); 2. Quinn, Chapter 9, the first five sections on the concept of a profession and the Sofware Engineering Code of Ethics, (through p. 462 |
Response to Readings | Discussion Project:Applying the Software Engineering Code of Ethics; Cases for Discussion |
Feb. 20 | Professional/Business
ethics 2: whistleblowing and loyalty
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1. Quinn,
Chapter 9, the rest (i.e., section 9.6 on whistleblowing); |
Response to Readings; First Position Paper due by 10am Friday, Feb. 24 |
Discussion Project on Whistleblowing |
Feb.27 | 1. Quinn, Chapter 3, sections 1, 3, 4, and 10 (skip section 2 on spam, or read it if you have time and interest; we'll read the remaining sections (5 through 9) next week); 2. Nicholas Carr, "The Platform Is the Conversation" (Carr is the author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing To Our Brains. Here he is responding to the news from a few years ago that Facebook ran experiments on the emotional psychology of its users.) 3. Nat Eliason, The Destructive Switch from Search to Social 4. Andrew Sullivan on Internet addiction: I Used To Be a Human Being (I'm putting this last, even though I think it's one of the best, because it is rather long. Maybe you won't have time, but I hope you will.) |
Response to Readings; First Position Paper due by 10am Friday, February 24; |
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March 6 | No Class | Spring Break | ||
March 13 | Free Speech, Censorship and related issues | 1. Quinn, Chapter 3, sections 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9; The three selections that follow represent a sample of the kind of arguments and recommendations made by public interest advocacy groups about how best to preserve freedom of speech on the Internet. 2. "CDA 230: The Most Important Law Protecting Internet Speech" from the Electronic Frontier Foundation 3. Testimony on proposed legislation to reform Section 230 from the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) 4. Recommendations from the Center for Countering Digital Hate:
If you can possibly find the time, please also check out these recent news stories:
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Response to Readings | Second Paper Assignment handed out; |
March 20 | Privacy
1
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2. MSNBC article on privacy law |
Response to Readings | |
March 27 | Privacy
2
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1. Quinn, Chapter 6, "Privacy and the Government"; 2. Privacy scholar Daniel Solove takes on the claim that people with “nothing to hide” need not worry about government surveillance and data-aggregation: 3. Solove answers some other pro-surveillance arguments: |
Response to Readings | Discussion project on Surveillance
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April 3 |
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Response to Readings;
Second Position Paper due by 10am Friday, April 7 |
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April 10 | 1. Quinn, Chapter 4 "Intellectual Property" -- If you have time and interest, read the whole chapter. If not read at least:
2. Richard Stallman, Misinterpreting Copyright—A Series of Errors (You might also be interested in Stallman’s critique of the very concept of “Intellectual Property” – but this is optional.) 3. links to further (optional) materials on copyright from Yochai Benkler's book The Wealth of Networks - read some of this if you have time and interest. |
Response to Readings Second Position Paper due by 10am Friday, April 7; |
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April 17 | Access, Equity, and Work | 1. Quinn, Chapter 10, “Work and Wealth” 2. Daron Acemoglu, “AI's Future Doesn't Have to Be Dystopian" (Optional: If you had time to read some of the replies to this essay that can be found at the top and bottom of the article, that would be great.) [Note: Some of the ideas in this essay will also be relevant the topic we will take up nest week: the effect of information technology and the internet on politics and democracy.]
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Response to Readings
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April 24 | The Internet and Democracy
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Some blame the internet for polarization and misinformation in our society: 2. Sunstein on Group Polarization and Cybercascades
3. An example from the Facebook files: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/facebook-knew-radicalized-users-rcna3581 But others blame increasingly propagandistic broadcast media (like Fox News): 4. "Selling Outrage" Deborah Chasman interviews our old friend Yochai Benkler. This interview begins with his diagnosis of the roots of these problems. About halfway through, the conversation turns to the question of what to do: Benkler's focus is on how to improve journalistic practices to make it harder for misinformation and propaganda to spread. 5. Philosopher C. Thi Nguyen tries to sort it out: https://bostonreview.net/articles/polarization-or-propaganda/ 6. "Understanding Social Media Algorithms" by Arvind Narayanan. A deep dive into the history and nature of the kind of recomendation algoriths found on social media platforms and some anlysis of their effects. If you have time for only part of this article, read at least the sections called "Three Types of Information Propagation", "The Core of the Algorithm is Engagement Prediction", "How Engagement Optimization Fails Users, Creators, and Society", "Algorithms Are anot the Enemy", and "Concluding Thoughts". [Optional extra stuff: If you want to dive even deeper into the literature on this question, the references in Narayana's article provide a good start, and here is a roundup of papers and studies put together by Joanna Bryson, a professor of Ethics and Technology at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin.]
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Response to Readings | |
May 1 | Wrap Up; Course evaluations |
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Response to readings Third Paper due by 10am on Wednesday, May 3
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Story of Stuff videos: Stuff in general; Electronic stuff |