Week 5

Lecture Notes

• Ethics and morals are rules of right and wrong that one defines and then sees the world through.

• Utilitarianism is a philosophy that is basically described as "the outcome of your choices are the only thing that matters"; purely goal-focused philosophy.

• The trolley problem and the Moral Machine are examples of a test of utilitarianism.

• The flaw of utilitarinism is it relies entirely on complete logic, and cannot predict the future. E.g. if you save the one person in the trolley problem, utilitarianism cannot predict that one person killing themselves later.

• Deontology is based on "don't think of your action as being good or bad, think of it as a duty to uphold a set of rules and principles."

• The flaw of deontology is that it does not care about context—it only cares about the absolute objective.

• Someone who believes in the law is deontological.

• Virtue ethics basically says "you should treat virtue and character as the primary subjects of ethics; if you believe what you did/decided was a good thing, if you're a good person and hurting people makes you feel sad, it was probably a good thing."

• The flaw with virtue ethics is not everyone is an ideal human; virtue ethics requires self-awareness. 

• Moral relativism basically just says "I can't hold other religions (for example) to the same ethic standards as me due to the circumstances, therefore I have to treat them differently."

• The flaw of moral relativism is it allows you to justify bad actions because it was okay in the past.

• Dark patterns are any sort of trick that an app/website makes you do things you didn't intend to do or make it difficult to do things you want to do.

Notes for Project

• Topics for the ethics report (ideally 250 words per section):

  • The monetisation system - what is it and how you will use it

  • The pros of the system

  • The cons of the system

  • What you'll do in response to the ethics of the system