Ethics: responsibilities in IT [INFOM121]

Learning outcomes

The student will be able to analyse texts (contexts, summaries, critiques) and situations (actors, issues, problems), to pose ethical problems (concepts, tensions, perspectives) and to imagine practical responses (actions, institutions, limits).

Objectives

The course focuses on ethical issues that may be encountered by computer science students, later or now, in their daily practice. The course has three main objectives -- each of which corresponds to a section. First, to expose students to a series of situations, documented by historians of technology, where technical systems have posed a series of ethical problems. Secondly, to equip students with some of the fundamental notions of ethics so that they can better think and act in those situations where the issues arise, especially from concepts of contemporary ethics and political philosophy. Thirdly: to lead students to reflect, in depth, on some of the ethical problems specifically posed by computer systems, their contemporary developments, computer-related professional practices, and their political and social impacts.