Digital Ethics

About

This course aims to provide students with a critical understanding of the ethical challenges posed by digital technologies, particularly those involving data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence. It introduces the field of digital ethics as a systematic approach to evaluating and addressing these challenges, with attention to both foundational questions and practical implications. Through a combination of conceptual analysis and case-based inquiry, students will explore key issues such as responsibility gaps in AI decision-making, the governance of high-risk technologies, and the ethical dimensions of digital power in contemporary societies. The course also examines the potential of digital technologies to contribute to social good, while fostering the analytical skills necessary to assess their associated risks, trade-offs, and governance requirements. Overall, it prepares students to engage thoughtfully and constructively with the ethical dimensions of digital transformation across academic, professional, and policy contexts.

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. 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 identify, analyse and address the ethical implications of digitally-related phenomena;
• Have obtained a critical understanding of the basic problems, concepts and methodology in Digital Ethics;
• 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 in this field.