AI Ethics: The Obligation to Design for Safety When architects design buildings or engineers design planes, they have a moral obligation to protect humans from harm. Think of the Hyatt Regency Walkway collapse in Kansas City or the Boeing 737 MAX crashes. Or think about Ford Motor Company which was in a race to match Japanese imports and beat domestic competitors General Motors […] View
AI and the Energy Issue Most scientists believe that climate change threatens mankind’s future and that human activity contributes mightily to that change, especially as it involves fossil fuels. A November 2024 update on climate progress found much reason for pessimism, particularly because fossil fuel subsidies are at an all-time high and funding for fossil fuel-prolonging projects quadrupled from 2021 […] View
Doctored: A Behavioral Explanation of Research Fraud and Alzheimer’s It is sobering for anyone teaching ethics that it can be just so darned hard for even well-meaning people to act as they know they ought. Even academics and scientists. For example, we have written before about Francesca Gino, a behavioral ethics scholar at Harvard who has come out on the bad end of an […] View
Ethical AI: Moral Judgments Swamped by Competitive Forces Many of us have watched enough movies on the topic–“2001: A Space Odyssey,” “War Games,” “Terminator,” “Blade Runner,” “Ex Machina,” “The Matrix,” and the like– to be viscerally concerned about today’s rapid-fire development of artificial intelligence (AI). And this concern is not unwarranted, for many of the most-knowledgeable experts are themselves very apprehensive. In March […] View
Techno-Optimist or AI Doomer? Consequentialism and the Ethics of AI As our glossary video on the term indicates, “[u]tilitarianism is an ethical theory that determines right from wrong by focusing on outcomes. It is a form of consequentialism.” A famous limitation of any form of consequentialism, as the video also indicates, is this: “because we cannot predict the future, it’s difficult to know with certainty […] View
AI Ethics: “Just the Facts, Ma’am” In 2024, top language algorithms could “read” 2.6 billion words in just a couple of hours. This gives them a fighting chance of keeping up with the innumerable books and articles being written about the ethical implications of various aspects and impacts of artificial intelligence (AI). In 2025, we here at Ethics Unwrapped intend to […] View
Judging the Seven Deadly Sins Consonant with the Fundamental Attribution Error, people tend to believe that other people’s actions are manifestations of their moral character. If someone drives past us on the highway at a rapid rate of speed, we tend to quickly conclude that the driver is a reckless jerk. Of course, we are good people and when we […] View
Framed: An Analysis of Wrongful Convictions We have enjoyed our collaboration with the good folks at the Illinois Innocence Project to create our video “Implicit Bias & Wrongful Conviction”. Their admirable work and the poor moral decision making on display in many wrongful conviction cases has caught our attention before in this blog (Ex: ‘He looks like a criminal to me’: […] View
A Geologic Ethics Lesson to Take to the Polls According to psychology professor Keith Payne in his new book Good Reasonable People: The Psychology behind America’s Dangerous Divide, during the Cretaceous Period’s 80-million-year run, microscopic plankton called coccoliths floated in the ocean by the trillions. As they died and settled, their calcium shells slowly added huge layers of chalk to the ocean floor. As […] View
Swindling the Poor in Mississippi We at Ethics Unwrapped often say that most white-collar criminals don’t begin by getting up one morning and saying to themselves: “Today’s the day I start my life of crime.” But some do. Witness the Mississippi welfare scandal chronicled in the new book Mississippi Swindle: Brett Favre and the Welfare Scandal that Shocked America by […] View