Unit 1: Ethical Theories

Week 1

Week 1 Slides (or as a PDF)

• Monday, August 24, 2026 🟦 Forest Park 🟦
  • Warm-up: 🔗 Conocimiento
• Wednesday, August 26, 2026 🟦 Oak Park 🟦
  • Introduction to Virtue Ethics
  • Source materials

    • Virtue Ethics, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
    • After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre
    • List of Moral Virtues, Wikipedia
    • Adventures from the Book of Virtues, IMDB
      • Some episodes available online, e.g. Generosity

Week 2

Week 2 Slides (or as a PDF)

• Monday, August 31, 2026 🟦 Cicero 🟦
  • Introduction to Deontological Ethics
  • Source materials

    • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Deontological Ethics
• Wednesday, September 2, 2026 🟦 Western 🟦
  • Introduction to Utilitarian Ethics
  • Source materials

    • Journal Article by Margery Bedford Naylor, The Moral of the Trolley Problem
    • Journal Article by Michael Clark, Sacrificing One to Save Many
    • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, History of Utilitarianism
    • Blog Post by S. Matthiew Liao, The Transplant Case in Real Life
    • Trolley Problem(s) images by Jesse Prinz
    • Trolley Problem(s) text by Chad Vance
    • “Absurd Trolley Problems” curated by Neal Agarwal
    • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Prisoner’s Dilemma

Week 3

Week 3 Slides (or as a PDF)

• Monday, September 7, 2026
  • Labor Day holiday. No classes.
• Wednesday, September 9, 2026 🟦 Illinois Medical District 🟦
  • Introduction to Care Ethics
  • Source materials

    • The Porcupine and the Moles
    • The Heinz Dilemma
    • Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Care Ethics
    • Encyclopedia Britannica, Carol Gilligan
    • From “a different voice” to “a human voice”
    • Kohlberg’s theory of moral development
    • More about Carol Gilligan

Week 4

Week 4 Slides (or as a PDF)

• Monday, September 14, 2026 🟦 Racine 🟦
  • Review theories of ethics
  • Source materials

    • (2016) Illinois Panhandling Laws Face Renewed Legal Challenges
    • (2023) Rockford mayor responds after anti-panhandling billboard campaign gets mixed reviews
    • Caleb Williams responds to a trolley problem
    • Discussing Anthropic’s 80-page “Constitution” document with Amanda Askell
      • The constitution in full
• Wednesday, September 16, 2026 🟦 UIC-Halsted 🟦
  • Ethics in Algorithmic Feeds
    • Values in Ranking
    • Content Moderation
  • Source materials

    • Nick Hopkins, Facebook’s internal rulebook on sex, terrorism and violence (2017)
    • NOVA, Search Engine Breakdown (21 minutes) — two researchers investigate racial bias built into widely used search engines
    • UChicago Online Content Moderation Policies from 43 Platforms
    • Schaffner et al., “Community Guidelines Make this the Best Party on the Internet”: An In-Depth Study of Online Platforms’ Content Moderation Policies

Unit 2: Stories

Week 5

Week 5 Slides (or as a PDF)

• Monday, September 21, 2026 🟦 Clinton 🟦
  • Algorithmic Feeds and Content Moderation, Continued
  • Intro to Privacy
  • Preview short story (“Here and Now”)
  • Source materials

    • Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media
    • Tarleton Gillespie, Content Moderation, AI, and the Question of Scale
    • Meta’s Community Standards
    • Meta’s exceptions for newsworthy content
    • Reddit’s Platform-wide Rules
• Wednesday, September 23, 2026 🟦 LaSalle 🟦
  • Privacy, Continued
  • Discuss short story (“Here and Now”)
  • Preview short story (“Message in a Bottle”)
    • PDF available in Canvas
  • Source materials

    • Nathan Malkin, Contextual Integrity, Explained: A More Usable Privacy Definition

Week 6

Week 6 Slides (or as a PDF)

• Monday, September 28, 2026 🟦 Jackson 🟦
  • Privacy in data, Continued
  • Virtue ethics through fiction: discuss short story (“Message in a Bottle”)
  • Preview short story (“Dolly” by Elizabeth Bear)
    • 34-minute audio version via StarShipSofa episode 204
  • Source materials

    • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Virtue Ethics (revisit from Week 1)
• Wednesday, September 30, 2026 🟦 Washington 🟦
  • Inequality and Justice
  • Deontology through fiction: discuss short story (“Dolly”)
  • Preview short story (“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin)
    • Alternate PDF here
  • Source materials

    • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Deontological Ethics (revisit from Week 2)
    • Elizabeth Bear’s “Dolly”, full text at Apex Magazine
      • Audio version via StarShipSofa episode 204 (34 minutes)
    • Wikipedia, “Dolly” (story)

Week 7

Week 7 Slides (or as a PDF)

• Monday, October 5, 2026 🟦 Clark/Lake 🟦
  • Asynchronous class day Read “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”
• Wednesday, October 7, 2026 🟦 Grand 🟦
  • Asynchronous class day. No class meeting.
  • Read “If an Algorithm Can Cast a Shadow”
    • 34-minute audio version of “If an Algorithm Can Cast a Shadow” here
  • Work time for the online account scrap doll exercise

Week 8

Week 8 Slides (or as a PDF)

• Monday, October 12, 2026 🟦 Chicago 🟦
  • Computing and War
  • Utilitarianism through fiction: discuss short story (“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”)
  • Also discuss short story (“Codename Delphi”)
  • Source materials

    • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, History of Utilitarianism (revisit from Week 2)
    • Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (PDF hosted by the U.S. Naval Academy’s Core Ethics program)
    • Joseph Weizenbaum’s speech “Not Without Us”
    • Ross Andersen, “Inside Anthropic’s Killer-Robot Dispute With the Pentagon”
    • Keach Hagey, “Altman Says OpenAI Is Working on Pentagon Deal Amid Anthropic Standoff”
    • Ed Pilkington, “US military reportedly used Claude in Iran strikes despite Trump’s ban”
    • Edward Ongweso Jr, “Big Tech Has Made Billions Off the 20-Year War on Terror”
    • Pavel Aksenov, “Stanislav Petrov: The man who may have saved the world”
    • Stavroula Pabst, “How the Pentagon Built Silicon Valley”
    • Roberto J. González, “How Big Tech and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Military-Industrial Complex”
    • Eric P.S. Baumer and M. Six Silberman “When the implication is not to design (technology)”
    • Juan Pablo Hourcade, “Give peace a chance: a call to design technologies for peace”
• Wednesday, October 14, 2026 🟦 Division 🟦
  • Medical and health technologies
  • Intro to CyberSecurity
  • Care ethics through fiction: discuss short story (“If an Algorithm Can Cast a Shadow”)
  • Discuss Speculative Fiction Exercise
  • Source materials

    • Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Care Ethics (revisit from Week 3)
    • Reuters, As AI enters the operating room, reports arise of botched surgeries and misidentified body parts
    • California Healthline, Death By 1,000 Clicks: Where Electronic Health Records Went Wrong
      • “Botched Operaion” YouTube Series about electronic health records:
        • Part 1
        • Part 2
        • Part 3
        • Part 4

Unit 3: Contemporary Issues

Week 9

Week 9 Slides (or as a PDF)

• Monday, October 19, 2026 🟦 Damen 🟦
  • Intro to Ethical Challenges from LLMs
  • Source materials

    • The Wall Street Journal, Artificial - The OpenAI Story
    • Bender and Gebru et al. On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots - Can Language Models Be Too Big?
      • List of Dirty, Naughty, Obscene, and Otherwise Bad Words
    • Chiang and Zheng et al. An Open Platform for Evaluating LLMs by Human Preference
      • LMArena / About
    • ELIZA Archaeology
    • Rumman Chowdhury, Debates over AI consciousness are a trap (MIT Technology Review, 2026)
    • Open to Debate, Andrew Yang and Chris Hughes Debate: “Will AI Make Work Obsolete?”
    • Casey Newton, Grammarly turned me into an AI editor against my will and I hate it
    • Financial Times, Amazon service was taken down by AI coding bot
    • Wall Street Journal, OpenAI Employees Raised Alarms About Canada Shooting Suspect Months Ago
      • Laura Cress (BBC), Family of child injured in Canada school shooting sues OpenAI
    • Futurism, New AI Agent Logs Directly Into College Platform Canvas to Do Your Homework for You
      • Sonel Cutler (Chronicle), ‘Einstein’ May Have Been a Prank. But the Agentic AI Tool Put Higher Ed on Notice.
      • Matthew Gault, What’s the Point of School When AI Can Do Your Homework?
• Wednesday, October 21, 2026 🟦 Western 🟦
  • Intellectual property
  • Source materials

    • Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), Section 1202: Integrity of copyright management information
    • Ashley Belanger, OpenAI offers 20 million user chats in ChatGPT lawsuit. NYT wants 120 million.
    • Matt O’Brien, Anthropic to pay authors $1.5 billion to settle lawsuit over pirated books used to train AI chatbots
    • The New York Times’s Complaint against Microsoft and OpenAI, Exhibit J on Memorized Content in GPT-4

Week 10

Week 10 Slides (or as a PDF)

• Monday, October 26, 2026 🟦 California 🟦
  • Intellectual property
• Wednesday, October 28, 2026 🟦 Logan Square 🟦
  • “Hooks” and “Nudges” in Design
  • Presentation Tips
  • Source materials

    • BJ Fogg, Persuasive Computers - Perspectives and Research Directions
    • Behavior Design Lab
    • Nir Eyal, Hooked - How to Build Habit-Forming Products
    • Yasmin Samrai, How Stanford Profits Off Addiction
    • Thomas Mildner, Cheat Sheet of Dark Design Patterns
    • ASCI Academy, Gallery of “Conscious” Design patterns

Week 11

Week 11 Slides (or as a PDF)

• Monday, November 2, 2026 🟦 Belmont 🟦
  • Guest lecture (remote, synchronous). Join the live session online.
• Wednesday, November 4, 2026 🟦 Addison 🟦
  • Algorithmic Fairness
  • Faces and Fairness
  • Overview of Fairness Definitions Exercise
  • Book Presentations begin
  • Source materials

    • “Gender Shades” study
    • John Oliver’s Segment on Facial Recognition (21 minutes)
    • Joy Buolamwini’s TED Talk (9 minutes)
    • Report by Algorithmic Justice League, Facial Recognition Technologies: A Primer
    • New York Times, Meta Plans to Add Facial Recognition Technology to Its Smart Glasses
    • NOVA, Search Engine Breakdown (21 minutes) — two researchers investigate racial bias built into widely used search engines

Week 12

• Monday, November 9, 2026 🟦 Irving Park 🟦
  • Book Presentations
• Wednesday, November 11, 2026 🟦 Montrose 🟦
  • Book Presentations

Week 13

• Monday, November 16, 2026 🟦 Jefferson Park 🟦
  • Book Presentations
• Wednesday, November 18, 2026 🟦 Harlem 🟦
  • Book Presentations

Week 14

• Monday, November 23, 2026 🟦 Cumberland 🟦
  • Book Presentations
• Wednesday, November 25, 2026
  • Student Wellness Day. No classes.

Week 15

• Monday, November 30, 2026 🟦 Rosemont 🟦
  • Synthesis and conclusions
• Wednesday, December 2, 2026 🟦 O'Hare 🟦
  • Synthesis and conclusions