The exam inspection will take place on Friday, October 25th, 9:00 to 11:00. It will be for both, inspecting your exam and asking questions about the correction of your essay. The room will be announced in due time. The inspection will take place in E1.3, room 528.

Speaking of your essay, this is also a friendly reminder that the essays are due today at 23:59.

Our main exam will take place today in HS I in E2 5, from 14.00 to 16.00. We will take the full 120 minutes, so please be there at least five minutes early. You are allowed to take one handwritten DIN-A4 sheet (both sides) with you. No other resources are allowed. Please also make sure to bring you student ID card.

Upon your requests, we uploaded another set of solutions that shows you how to solve an exercise that asks you for an application of our simplified form of Scanlon's contractualism. You can find it under S06-E2 Deontology.

A few additional remarks on Scanlon:

Firstly, as I said during the practices, we do not expect you to be able to apply Scanlon’s contracutalism in a way that Scanlon himself would. What you were presented with in the lecture is a simplified version of Scanlon that leaves some room for interpretation. What we want you to do is to apply the theory reasonably and sensibly fill in the gaps if you come across a case where the theory from the lecture leaves open some details. So, what you are to do is not to apply the theory in every detail as it is presented in What We Owe To Each Other, but you are to show that you can reasonably apply and extrapolate the theory that was given to you. (This, however, does not mean that you should deviate from the given theory, but you only should fill in gaps.)

Secondly, a way that often works for showing that ϕing is wrong for an agent is by proof of contradiction:

1. Assume that there is a set of principles that nobody can reasonably reject that allows ϕing.
2. Single out the person P on whom the set places the greatest burden, i.e. the person that is most negatively affected by the agent’s ϕing.
3. Show that there is nobody else who has a greater burden than P if P rejects the set, i.e. that nobody is more negatively affected if the agent does not ϕ.
4. You showed that P can reasonably reject all principles that allow the agent to ϕ and you therefore can conclude that ϕing is wrong for the agent.

And, thirdly: The theory is about whether someone can reasonably reject a set of principles. This is not the same as whether

• someone does reasonably reject a set of principles,
• someone can reject a set of principles, or
• someone can reasonably reject a principle.

Have a good exam preparation and do not despair over Scanlon's contractualism! :)

PS: As said during the lecture, the forum is unmoderated. It is only meant as an easy way to communicate with your fellow students, but no team members are present there. If you have any questions, please write me an email. (If you want to share my answer with your fellow students, please feel free to post it in the forum!)

Tomorrow, we will have a regular lecture in the morning, followed by a mock exam. In the afternoon, we will have a rather short wrap-up lecture followed by a Q&A. So, be prepared to ask questions during the Q&A. I will stay as long as you still have questions, but there will be no practice afterwards. If you have questions specific to you, e.g. concerning your essay, then stay until after the Q&A and ask me or Nikolai in a one-to-one conversation. The Q&A will not be recorded, as it would unnecessarily slow down the process if I had to repeat every question for the recording (which I always forget to do anyways – sorry for that!). The short lecture before that, however, will be recorded.

Yet again, there won’t be any busses tomorrow. In order to compensate for that, you can send in questions until 13:45 that I will answer while still recording, if the amount of questions I receive will be manageable.

Also, we have our course evaluation tomorrow, so it would be great if plenty of you showed up such that we can get plenty of feedback.

We are going to have the guest lecture by Dr. Anthony Milligan from Kings College, London, about the ethics of space exploration.
It will take place tomorrow at 2:00pm sharp in the Günter Hotz lecture hall (building E2 2), and we will join the people from the Space Informatics lecture.
This guest lecture is relevant for the exam and will most likely not be recorded.

Please note that, unfortunately, the strike of our local bus drivers presumably continues tomorrow. Be prepared that there might be no bus service at all. If you cannot make it to our regular lecture at 9:00, that's fine. We will exclude tomorrow's Superintelligence lecture from the exam relevant topics. But please make sure that you come to the guest lecture if this is in any way possible for you.

I hope to see many of you tomorrow!

The schedule of the upcoming week differs from the weeks before. Please note the following important dates:

First and foremost, we are going to have a guest lecture by Dr Anthony Milligan from Kings College, London, about the ethics of space exploration. It will take place on Wednesday, 25^th September at 2pm, and we will join the people from the Space Informatics lecture. This guest lecture is relevant for the exam, but there will be neither a recording of the lecture, nor will there be lecture slides. So you will need to be present and take notes in order to know what Anthony Milligan is talking about and to prepare for the exam.

Besides this, we have some other changes:

1. There will be no lectures or practices on Tuesday in order to give you some time to work on your essay before the contact hours of the course come to an end.
2. Instead of a regular practice, we will have an essay Q&A during the first practice slot on Wednesday, where you can ask questions that you came across on Tuesday.
3. Instead of a regular practice, we will have a mock exam on Thursday morning.

We will have another Nerd Night tomorrow. You can drop by, chat and discuss with your fellow students, ask questions of any kind and maybe have some pizza, too. This Nerd Night is dedicated towards your essays: feel free to pick your topic, and start crafting your arguments and drafts. In a group, a blank page is a lot less scary and you have plenty of help if you get stuck.
The Nerd Night will take place on Thursday, 19.08., 7pm in room 407 in E1.1.

Also note that the afternoon practice on Thursday, 19.08. will not take place in 407, but in our usual lecture hall in E1.3.

As you may have noticed, we had a visitor from the Deutschlandfunk a couple of days ago, when she interviewed a few of you.

You can hear the result here (in German):
https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/informatik-studium-was-it-nerds-von-philosophen-lernen.680.de.html?dram:article_id=459040

Thanks for being so open and talking to the reporter. You did very well!
 

This is just a quick reminder that there is going to be a Nerd Night tonight starting at 7:00 pm in E1.1, room 407.
To clear up the confusion around the purpose of the Nerd Night: we just sit together, discuss (philosophy or any other topic), and if you want to, you can get some work done and finish your assignments and quizzes, or ask general questions.

Everybody who attended the lecture knows the pizza secret that resolves around the Nerd Night.

Dear participants,

Welcome to Ethics for Nerds! This is a friendly reminder that you are enrolled in the course and that it will start on Monday.

If you are enrolled by mistake or changed your mind about taking the course, you can deregister here. If you are still reading and have not deregistered yet, I assume that you still want to take the course, about which we are more than happy.

We will start on Monday, September 9^th. Usually, we will start at 9 s.t. (that means 9:00 am sharp). On the first day, however, we will start at 9:15 in order to compensate for s.t./c.t.-confusions. The full timetable is available here. We know that this schedule is rather packed and tight. In order to make up for this, all lectures will be recorded and made available for download every day such that you can watch them at your leisure. (Nevertheless, I very much encourage you to show up for as many contact hours as you can and actively participate as much as possible!)

We are very much looking forward to meeting all of you.

See you on Monday!
Sarah & the team