My goal as a teacher is to invite students into the practice of philosophy in a way that makes this type of systematic reflection relevant to students’ lives. I try to show students how to use the philosophical theories we study as actionable tools for grappling with the challenges they face as citizens and professionals. To do so, I strive to meet two objectives in each course. First, I encourage students to consider how the questions we study connect to issues that matter to them beyond the classroom. I use a range of traditional and creative methods to help students build bridges between the theories we study, diverse perspectives, and the world. I also incorporate Ethics in Action challenges designed to help students learn to use philosophy as a tool for making progress on contemporary challenges. Second, my courses are designed to cultivate students’ critical thinking skills. I incorporate writing workshops, close reading exercises, and structured discussions of the texts into each course. In discussions, I encourage students to engage the points their classmates raise and to situate their own position in response to both their peers and the texts we are studying. Learning how to charitably interpret and respond to a diverse range of positions is one of the most important skills I hope students can take out of my classroom and into their broader lives.

In addition to teaching regular philosophy courses, I also led Ethics Lab’s work integrating ethics into courses across the University, from computer science to international policy and foreign service. Rather than offer a guest lecture on ethics, we collaborate with partner faculty to activate the values embedded in specific skills learned within the course, by helping students discern the values at stake and cultivate responsible agency. Building on this work, and supported by a grant from the Mozilla Foundation, I headed the Lab’s efforts to embed ethics into Georgetown’s computer science curriculum.

Embedding Ethics into Computer Science

Georgetown is a recipient of a Mozilla Responsible CS Challenge grant for the project “Ethics, Bit by Bit.” This grant is a collaboration between Ethics Lab and the Computer Science Department at Georgetown, and involves redesigning courses at each level of the curriculum to build and assess a variety of creative techniques to embed ethics into the traditional CS curriculum. I was the lead ethicist responsible for the design of the overall curriculum and lead the ethics discussions in each course.

Embedded Ethics across the Georgetown Curriculum

I led the establishment of Ethics Lab’s embedded ethics program, which seeks to infuse ethics into courses across the university, from the sciences to public policy to foreign service. A report on the first year’s efforts can be found here (where I was the sole ethicist responsible for the program, alongside Ethics Lab’s design team). More recent efforts can be found here.