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English 226 Article

INTRODUCTION

Yet another reminder for those who need it: The second half of this course is where you apply all the knowledge/skills you acquired in the first half of this course. Specifically, you’ll apply your new knowledge/skill set in creating a single story, OR a collection of poetry.

The story or the poetry collection you develop comes out of the material you developed in Workshop 1( ThestoryofGreatwallofChian), which came out of everything you learned and wrote in the first half of the course. You’ll continue developing the same story OR the same poetry collection throughout the rest of this course.

For both workshops 2 and 3, you’ll have the opportunity to submit more fully-developed drafts of the fiction OR the poetry that you shared in Workshop 1, and you’ll provide feedback on your group members’ drafts, just as you did in Workshop 1. For Workshop 3, you’ll also have the option of submitting a rough draft of your Final Portfolio reflective essay.

WHAT TO DO

The “Workshop 2 and 3” document below includes the instructions and requirements you’ll need to complete this assignment. 

Please keep in mind that your creative process should involve:

  • following through on the discoveries, insights, and decisions that came out of your Workshop 1 experience and other activities in this course.
  • making alterations with the craft elements we’ve learning about in order to make your work more complete, well-rounded, and nearly finished.
  • experimenting with craft — taking a calculated risk with a craft element to see how the change will impact your work. (Remember, risk-taking is encouraged in this class, and “mistakes” are OK, provided you learn something valuable from them in the end!)
  • submitting work to your group members that they will clearly and immediately see as markedly different from your previous draft.

Self-driving cars prompt:

Self-driving cars prompt: 

You are a corporate ethicist for Tesla, a company working to produce self-driving cars.  Your boss comes to you one day and says that she needs help in understanding how she should program these cars when they are facing moral decisions.  Self-driving cars, just like human drivers, can face complicated moral situations.  It is possible that the car could malfunction, or somebody might not be following the rules of the road, and sometimes unavoidable accidents occur, and when this happens the car’s program must make the kind of moral decision that humans usually make.  This is not a small matter, because, in a way, the company itself is making these moral decisions, by deciding in what way to program the car.  The programmers themselves are bogged down with details about how to make the cars work, and they aren’t experts in ethics, so they are looking for you for guidance.  

You, as an ethicist, want the car to really be the most morally good car it can possibly be.  As such, you want to propose what you think is really the morally right answer.  Then you will look to the marketing team to figure out a way to market your morally good car to consumers. 

Since you took Social and Ethical Issues in Computing when you were an undergrad, you know three helpful starting points (the three moral theories from class: Utilitarianism, Kantian Moral Theory, and Care Ethics) for an algorithm that you might use in programming such a car.  Examine each of these possibilities and explain which one you think is the best one to use at the starting point in programming morality into these new self-driving cars. 

You know that once you make this proposal, the engineering team may come back and explain that there are certain limitations in their programming, but you are often surprised by the kinds of innovations this team of programmers can come up with.  As such, for your starting proposal, you will imagine that the engineering team will be able to follow the ethical theory perfectly. 

So, in your paper, make sure that you do these things: Clearly lay out all three Ethical Theories: Utilitarianism, Kantian Moral Theory, and Care Ethics.  Make an argument for which you think is the best one to use in programming this car.  Make sure you lay out possible objections to using the theory you chose.  Try to reply to these objections, but it’s okay if you don’t have full replies to these objections yet.  This is just meant to give a starting point to the engineering team. 

Opinion Paper

Read the article “Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being”.  A copy of the article is attached.  Provide an opinion paper about this article.  Please elaborate and substantiate your opinion. Limit the response to a minimum of 1 page and a maximum of 2 pages, single-spaced font size 11.