Teaching

I teach philosophy and ethics to engineering students — people who will build the systems the rest of these pages are about.

My aim in teaching is not to hand students a decision procedure for ethical problems. It is to make them able to notice that a problem is ethical at all, and then to reason about it with the same seriousness they bring to a technical constraint. Engineering education is very good at teaching students to optimise; it is less good at teaching them to ask what is being optimised, for whom, and at whose expense. That question is where my teaching starts.

In practice this means working with concrete cases from students' own disciplines rather than abstract dilemmas, taking disagreement in the classroom as material to work with, and treating ethics as something internal to good engineering rather than a compliance step appended to it. I also work with staff on how ethics is taught across a curriculum, not only within single courses.

Courses

Course listing to follow.