Ethics and Epistemology

As prospective managers of technology, you will have to make difficult decisions regarding the development and deployment of innovation. You will increasingly rely on a data-oriented decision-making approach in doing so. That means that you will need to be able to answer two crucial questions: What can you really conclude from data? And what should you or your company be allowed to do with that data? This course will provide you with an advanced introduction to theories and concepts from the philosophy of science and moral philosophy (ethics) to help you answer these questions and, ultimately, become more informed and reflected about the management of technology. In short: The main aim of the course is to enable you to recognise and understand the normative dimension of gathering and using data in the management of technology.

Part 1: Philosophy of Science

You want to base your decisions on data. But what does the data really tell you about the world? How do you distinguish good from bad arguments? And what is a reasonable criterion for reliable, scientific claims? The first part of the course will provide an introduction to core topics in the philosophy of science that help you answer these questions. We will focus on this guiding question: What should we conclude from data? We discuss the following topics:

- The basics of natural language argumentation.

- Commonfallacies that make arguments misleading

- Translating natural language arguments to propositional calculus.

- Testing the validity of arguments using truth tables.

- Falsificationism en verificationism in the philosophy of science.

- The difference between inductive en deductive inference.

- Evaluatingscientific models from the perspective of realism en antirealism.

- Limitations of what scientific data and data from business analytics can teach about the world.

Part 2: Ethics

Companies do and must make increasing use of the data available to them, using a variety of data-sources, from purchasing histories to to the usage of services (location, behaviour etc). Naturally, companies use these data to improve their services and attract more customers, but there is a pressing issue with the ethics of gathering and using data to influence people. After learning, in the first part, what you can learn from data, we will discuss in the second part of the course what you should be ethically allowed to do with data. You will be introduced to fundamental concepts and theories in moral philosophy. Specifically, we will discuss the following topics:

- A selection of fundamental ethical theories en perspectives on the objectivity of ethicss.

- Reasoning and argumentation about morality.

- Answering moral questions through normative reasoning.

- Ethical implications of data gathering during non-traditional experiments (such as A/B Testing en field experiments).

- Understanding important concepts like privacy, autonomy, consent, and manipulation.

- The ethical implications of behavioural change technology.