INFO 5230

Ethical Perspectives on Digital Technologies

Course Description

Course information provided by the 2025-2026 Catalog.

This course introduces students to ethical thinking about digital systems. It focuses not only on how technology may be used for good or for ill, but how to take ethics, systematically, into consideration in analyzing, designing and developing it. Through lectures and discussion, the course introduces ethical concepts, such as privacy, fairness, and safety, and demonstrates their relevance to past and contemporary systems. In small groups, students will apply what they learn to in-class exercises and will be guided toward a final project in which they demonstrate learned concepts in concrete systems of their choosing. Although the course is designed to accommodate a wide range of educational backgrounds, it expects students to complete a common set of readings and participate actively in classroom discussions.

Prerequisites Prior coursework in ethical thinking, or permission of instructor.

Last 4 Terms Offered 2025FA

Learning Outcomes

• Demonstrate basic concepts and competing perspectives in the philosophy of technology and the subfield of ethics and technology.
• Identify key social and political issues surrounding contemporary digital information systems, including, fairness, privacy, freedom of speech, and autonomy.
• Recognize how and to what extent ethical values may be embedded in technical systems, intentionally or otherwise and the role that designers and developers may (or may not) play in promoting ethical values in technical systems.
• Examine values embedded in particular systems or devices so as to recognize alternative designs with differing values implications.
• Demonstrate conceptually or by prototype the values implications of particular design choices in particular systems.

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