Ethics and Epistemology

Course content

This course provides students with philosophical knowledge in order to reason thoughtfully, judge effectively and act morally in the field of data science. Students learn to differentiate between concepts, phenomena and actions, which is relevant for understanding the presuppositions and implications of machine ethics. This new field is, on the one hand, concerned with established ethical approaches (Kant, Utilitarianism); on the other hand, with giving machines ethical principles, i.e. programs and operations for discovering a way to resolve ethical dilemmas they might encounter. Whereas enabling machines to function in an ethically responsible manner through their own ethical decision making is a long wished-for in AI and robotics, philosophers and society highlight basic questions still in need for an answer; for example: can machines be moral agents? When adopting norms and values, who should they take as paradigmatic role model? Who has the right to judge about that, and why? Students will learn the preconditions and limits of modeling the world according to machines. Not last, which kind of world machines face by means of artificial sensory perception matters for understanding the difficult questions of embodiment, and really being in the world instead of only having one.