I have a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan and Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Toronto. I taught philosophy and computer science at York University before coming the UBC in 1990 to help start the Centre for Applied Ethics. I am a member of UBC’s Institute for Computing, Information, and Cognitive Systems.

My field is best described as computational ethics.  My more theoretical research project, Artificial Morality, models how different kinds of agents, more or less ethical, interact, using the tools of agent-based computer modeling and models based on evolutionary game theory. 

My more practical research project aims to support better ethical decision, using computer-mediated communication to apply and test models based on decision science, social choice theory, and  deliberative democracy. We are  building better "moral barometers" and other moral instrumentation to gather new data, and then constructing better ways for people to made choices based on this data. We hope to replace applied ethics mysterious moral "intuitions" with transparent democratic tools.

Practically, I focus on the ethics of technological change. New technologies obviously bring new opportunities for good and bad. More subtly they change us in many ways as well: where, how well and how long we live, who we relate to and how we relate to them, how we get and exchange information. The NERD research group constructs interactive web-based surveys to gather data  on these issues and experimentally test hypotheses about ethical decision making.  We aim to construct new tools to help people make better ethical decisions about technology, ranging from genetic testing, to genomic research for health, food, and environment, to the ethics of robots.

My research in interdisciplinary, drawing on:

• the normative disciplines of philosophical ethics, rational choice and game theory (from economics) and deliberative democracy (from political science), and
  
• using tools from computer and cognitive science to run
  
• experiments drawing on experimental social science (psychology and sociology).

Our research group welcomes students from any discipline who are interested in building tools for "better ethics through technology"

Research Projects

• Norms Evolving in Response to Dilemmas (NERD)
  
• Evolving Artificial Moral Ecologies
  
• Artificial Morality

Recent Research Funding

Teaching

• Cognitive Systems 300: Understanding & Designing Cognitive Systems. Terms I & II. My contribution focuses on the design side.  

For 2009-10 we'll design

1. Some moral robots (for the course lab) and
2. An ethical machine (to help us with (1). Try it out here.