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Reading Aristotle with Engineers
Since I switched to problem-based learning in my ethics classes, I’ve been experimenting with different ways of introducing my students to ethical theory as such and helping them to develop a working knowledge of a small handful of particular theories. Part of my struggle in the past has been with trying to have them start… Continue reading
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From the Archive: Self-Sufficiency
I’m re-reading Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, this week, while my engineering ethics students work their way through parts of it and into some kind of understanding of virtue ethics. I was struck again by the contrast between Aristotle’s thinking the thinking of most of my students – and most Americans – on the question of what… Continue reading
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Greeting
Recent posts have turned my attention back to the role in ethical experience of recognition between people, and from this has emerged a new theme I’d like to explore: How we greet one another. The possible importance of greeting came out in the story of the toddler in the farmers market: “I’m here! I’m here!”… Continue reading
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Saving St. Aldo
There is a long-running debate in the field of environmental ethics between Bryan Norton and J. Baird Callicott over the meaning and the legacy of the works of Aldo Leopold. I have been a near observer of one side of this debate, as Bryan’s office was, until his retirement last year, just around the corner… Continue reading
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I’m Here!
In the teeming checkout area of the DeKalb Farmers Market on a Sunday Morning, a curly-headed toddler galloped through the crowd, calling out: “I’m here! I’m here!” A man I took to be her father, amused and slightly harried, followed a few steps behind. “I’m here!” I supposed she was on her way to –… Continue reading
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On Helping My Daughter Learn to Drive
I’ve noted already that things I learn in private life sometimes converge with what I’m thinking about in my professional life, and this morning brought an especially complex tangle of such convergences. (I am a practical ethicist, though, so I suppose some spill-over is inevitable. In fact, I used to observe that it’s very hard… Continue reading
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Death By Robot
“Death by robot is an undignified death, Peter Asaro, an affiliate scholar at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, said in a speech in May at a United Nations conference on conventional weapons in Geneva. A machine ‘is not capable of considering the value of those human lives’ that it is… Continue reading
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Noticing, Responding, Thinking
In the first days of classes, this week, I provided students something of a gloss on the learning objectives of my courses in practical ethics, which are stated formally in the syllabus of each. I told them the aim of the course is for each of them to cultivate a richer moral imagination, which comes… Continue reading
