I am the Sue G. and Harry E. Bovay, Jr., '36 Assistant Teaching Professor and Director of the History and Ethics of Professional Engineering in the College of Engineering, and a Senior Lecturer (by courtesy) in the Sage School of Philosophy, at Cornell University.
The majority of my work is in service to the mission of the Bovay Program's endowment: to be a "catalyst for consideration of ethical issues in engineering." To that end, I teach courses and guest sessions on ethics across the College of Engineering, consult with faculty on ethics and social impact in the engineering curriculum, and organize events for faculty and students on the history and ethics of engineering.
I have three overlapping clusters of research interests. The first is issues at the intersection of ethics and social epistemology, especially with regard to justice and responsibility. The second is the ethics of information technology and artificial intelligence. The third is the philosophy and practice of interdisciplinary ethics education.
I completed my Ph.D. at the University of Sheffield in 2018. My thesis, supervised by Miranda Fricker and Paul Faulkner, argued that we can be blameworthy for using morally defective concepts of the social world, and for being ignorant of apt concepts developed by marginalized groups. From 2019–2021, I was a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in Philosophy at Dalhousie University, where I also taught Social, Ethical, and Professional Issues in Computer Science. In summer 2021, I co-designed an AI Ethics micro-credential course series for Athabasca University. From 2021–23, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow of Embedded EthiCS™ at Harvard University, where I taught and developed ethics lessons delivered in computer science classes, and acted as the first point of contact for the program's outreach and collaboration efforts. I joined Cornell's College of Engineering in July 2023 and shortly thereafter received a courtesy appointment in the Sage School of Philosophy.
I also design games. Sometimes this finds its way into my teaching.
Follow me on Mastodon @ErrantCanadian@zirk.us or on BlueSky @errantcanadian.com
I will happily take any pronouns you give me, but these days I prefer they/them/theirs.
My surname is pronounced /gets/.
Cover image: The Joseph N. Pew sundial on the Engineering Quad with Duffield Hall in the background, at dusk. Photographer: Robert Barker. © Cornell University.
Portrait by Roger William Theise.
