Solving The Tech Industry's Ethics Problem Could Start In The Classroom; NPR, May 31, 2019

Zeninjor Enwemeka, NPR; Solving The Tech Industry's Ethics Problem Could Start In The Classroom

"Ethics is something the world's largest tech companies are being forced to reckon with. Facebook has been criticized for failing to quickly remove toxic content, including the livestream of the New Zealand mosque shooting. YouTube had to disable comments on videos of minors after pedophiles flocked to its platform.

Some companies have hired ethicists to help them spot some of these issues. But philosophy professor Abby Everett Jaques of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says that's not enough. It's crucial for future engineers and computer scientists to understand the pitfalls of tech, she says. So she created a class at MIT called Ethics of Technology."

What Students Gain From Learning Ethics in School; KQED, May 24, 2019

Linda Flanagan, KQED; What Students Gain From Learning Ethics in School


"Children at Kent Place are introduced to ethics in fifth grade, during what would otherwise be a health and wellness class. Rezach engages the students in simple case studies and invites them to consider the various points of view. She also acquaints them with the concept of right vs. right—the idea that ethical dilemmas often involve a contest between valid but conflicting values. “It’s really, really, really elementary,” she said.

In middle and upper school, the training is more structured and challenging. At the core of this education is a simple framework for ethical decision-making that Rezach underscores with all her classes, and which is captured on a poster board inside school. Paired with this framework is a collection of values that students are encouraged to study and explore. The values and framework for decision-making are the foundation of their ethics training."

Daniel Callahan, 88, Dies; Bioethics Pioneer Weighed ‘Human Finitude’; The New York Times, July 23, 2019

Katharine Q. Seelye, The New York Times; Daniel Callahan, 88, Dies; Bioethics Pioneer Weighed ‘Human Finitude’

“The scope of his interests was impressively wide, as the Hastings Center said in an appreciation of him, “beginning with Catholic thought and proceeding to the morality of abortion, the nature of the doctor-patient relationship, the promise and peril of new technologies, the scourge of high health care costs, the goals of medicine, the medical and social challenges of aging, dilemmas raised by decision-making near the end of life, and the meaning of death.”...

Among his most important books was “Setting Limits: Medical Goals in an Aging Society” (1987), which argued for rationing the health care dollars spent on older Americans.”…

“He urged his peers and the public to look beyond narrow issues in law and medicine to broader questions of what it means to live a worthwhile life,” Dr. Appel said by email.”…

While at Harvard, Mr. Callahan became disillusioned with philosophy, finding it irrelevant to the real world. At one point, he wandered over to the Harvard Divinity School to see if theology might suit him better. As he wrote in his memoir, “In Search of the Good: A Life in Bioethics” (2012), he concluded that theologians asked interesting questions but did not work with useful methodologies, and that philosophers had useful methodologies but asked uninteresting questions.”