Digital Ethics

About

In this course, we will focus on ‘digital ethics’, the branch of ethics that studies and evaluates moral problems related to data, algorithms, and corresponding practices, in order to formulate and support morally good solutions.

The course has three goals. It explains what digital ethics is, its problems, approaches, and methods. Secondly, it introduces some key concepts and phenomena related to digital transformation and their related ethical challenges. Finally, it seeks to shows how ethical conceptual analyses and solutions can inform the debate on the governance of digital technologies.

Outcomes

At the end of this course students will:

• Understand how new ethical challenges arise from the development of digital environments and unprecedented forms of agency and what approaches may be fruitful in order to deal with them;
• Know how to analyse the conceptual nature of fundamental digital changes;
• Be able to formulate research questions that are amenable to ethical analysis and use relevant conceptual tools to design cogent answers to them;
• Be familiar with important work on the philosophy and ethics of information authored by distinguished researchers in the field.