– Winter Term 1 2025, Online-Synchronous.
This course explored the moral dimensions and implications of science. It focused on the tight relation between science and our lived experience of the social world. On the one hand, it explored how science is shaped by the social world insofar as scientific practice mirrors and amplifies social values. On the other hand, it explored how science and technology restructure the social world by shaping our shared sense of reality and agency. By understanding this tight relation between science and the social world, the course provided some tools for thinking critically about how science reflects, reinforces, and reshapes social values, thereby transforming the collective arena for moral action. The course began by investigating the interrelation between science and values. It encouraged students to make explicit and critically evaluate what usually remains implicit, namely, the subtle influence of values on scientific reasoning, representation, explanation, modelling practices, and data interpretation. It explored the role that values play in determining what gets researched, how we research it, what counts as sufficient evidence, and what counts as a satisfactory scientific account of any given phenomenon.
The course then explored the nature of scientists’ responsibilities towards human and animal research subjects, as well as towards the cultural groups they study. It explored how scientific research can be steered to curb or contribute to the spread of injustice. It also explored how we can remedy existing injustices by incorporating communities in the research process and engaging with indigenous research ethics norms. The course applied these theoretical tools to a variety of case studies, including research on vulnerable groups and climate science. It concluded with an extended case study exploring the responsibilities of researchers involved in the development of information technology and AI, given that such tools transform the very conditions of epistemic and moral agency. It explored some of the ethical risks and benefits of contributing to the creation of an algorithmically-mediated social environment which alters our understanding of what it means to be an agent, what counts as value and knowledge, and what it means for something to be real.