Nicolas Tanchuk

ABSTRACT This article documents the adaptation, piloting and validation of a measure of teachers’ ethical sensitivity. To create the test, we modified a measure from dentistry drawing on literature in teacher professional ethics and drew on the expertise of professional ethics scholars and practitioners. Based on the results of Rasch analysis combined with traditional approaches to psychometric validation, the instrument was found to be a valid and reliable means of discerning levels of ethical sensitivity within the group of participants. However, participants’ lack of ethical sensitivity as revealed by overall low scores, we contend, lends credence to concerns that teacher education programs may not be adequately preparing future teachers to meet expectations in connection with the ethical dimensions of the profession. In conclusion, we call for further research on pre- and in-service teachers’ capacity to perceive, reason about and react appropriately to ethical situations encountered at work.

Artificial intelligence companies and researchers are currently working to create Artificial Superintelligence (ASI): AI systems that significantly exceed human problem-solving speed, power, and precision across the full range of human solvable problems. Some have claimed that achieving ASI — for better or worse — would be the most significant event in human history and the last problem humanity would need to solve. In this essay Nicolas Tanchuk argues that current AI literacy frameworks and educational practices are inadequate for equipping the democratic public to deliberate about ASI design and to assess the existential risks of such technologies. He proposes that a systematic educational effort toward what he calls “Deep ASI Literacy” is needed to democratically evaluate possible ASI futures. Deep ASI Literacy integrates traditional AI literacy approaches with a deeper analysis of the axiological, epistemic, and ontological questions that are endemic to defining and risk-assessing pathways to ASI. Tanchuk concludes by recommending research aimed at identifying the assets and needs of educators across educational systems to advance Deep ASI Literacy.

AI tutors are promised to expand access to personalized learning, improving student achievement and addressing disparities in resources available to students across socioeconomic contexts. The rapid development and introduction of AI tutors raises fundamental questions of epistemic trust in education. What criteria should guide students' critical assessments of the epistemic trustworthiness of these new technologies? And furthermore, how should these technologies and the environments in which they are situated be designed to improve their epistemic trustworthiness? In this article, Nicolas Tanchuk and Rebecca Taylor argue for a shared responsibility model of epistemic trust that includes a duty to collaboratively improve the epistemic environment. Building off prior frameworks, the model they advance identifies five higher-order criteria to assess the epistemic credibility of individuals, tools, and institutions and to guide the co-creation of the epistemic environment: (1) epistemic motivation, (2) epistemic inclusivity, (3) epistemic accountability, (4) epistemic accuracy, and (5) reciprocal epistemic transparency.

A central problem for phronetic case-based approaches to the ethics of teaching lies in the proper determination of normative ethical problems. Judgments about the character of normative ethical problems depend in part on background beliefs about what is (or is not) of ethical value. Thus, to distinguish genuinely normative ethical problems, teachers seem to first require knowledge of what is of ethical value, which practical problems themselves cannot generate. To resolve this practical and theoretical problem, Nicolas Tanchuk and Alyssa Emery argue for a Deweyan approach to teacher ethics that asserts two central theses: First, negatively, that inductive evidence warrants skepticism about any normative theory grounded in external reasons — (purported) reasons that are actually or possibly disconnected from an agent's motivational set of beliefs, desires, and dispositions. Second, that a cognitive and affective orientation toward solving problems through learning survives skepticism about external ethical reasons, grounding the commitments of many anti-oppressive teacher educators.

In this paper, we advance a novel conception of normative ethics and draw out its implications within the domain of professional ethics. We argue that all moral agents, and thus professionals, share a fundamental and constitutive normative interest in correctly conceiving of their ends. All professionals, we claim, by virtue of their positions of social power, have special role responsibilities in cultivating and sustaining societies oriented by this shared ideal of practically oriented ethical understanding. We defend this conception against a familiar opponent of a philosophical approach to professional ethics: the morally skeptical student. By taking the skeptic’s challenge seriously, we clarify the conditions for a sound account of normative ethics and then provide a response that meets this test. Against this type of skeptic, we claim that a fundamental commitment to the ideal of understanding our ends ought to be included within any curriculum of professional et...