The Philosopher Crossover: Benefits of Collaboration when Developing a Data Science Ethics Course

Oregon Convention Center 

While undergraduate and graduate programs in statistics, biostatistics, data science, and related areas provide students ample opportunity to develop the skills necessary for data driven work post-graduation, many have recognized the need and the responsibility for these programs to incorporate ethical thinking into their curriculum. While some programs still lack coursework related to such topics, many are either developing their own data ethics courses or requiring already existent ethics courses offered from philosophy departments. In this presentation, we focus on a philosopher-statistician partnership and the resulting collaborative development of a data ethics course at one major institution. We illustrate how such a course can be developed, we describe the course itself, and, in particular, we discuss the benefits of partnering with philosophers when developing data ethics courses and how this philosopher crossover has helped students (and faculty) delve deeper into contextualized data ethics considerations than would have been possible without the collaborative effort.