Teaching

As a postdoctoral fellow, I teach technology ethics modules embedded within the Harvard computer science curriculum. I have designed and taught classes on topics including the ethics of emotion recognition, organizational pressures in human-AI interaction, and the ethics of open source software. 

As a PhD student, I designed and taught a medical ethics course called Morality & Medicine and was a teaching assistant for two philosophy of science courses, Mind & Medicine and Introduction to Philosophy of Science. As an undergraduate, I was a teaching assistant for a course on Data Structures & Algorithms and three Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming courses.

Pruss - Morality and Medicine Syllabus Summer 2022.docx

Morality and Medicine, Summer 2022

Clinical medicine and public health are contexts in which disagreements about the right way to make decisions are common and where the stakes for ethical decision-making are especially high. This course is intended to help you make these decisions by giving you the philosophical toolkit to reason through a given situation. We will examine ethical issues that arise in the context of clinical medicine and public health, including informed consent; abortion; transgender medical care; AI in medicine; medical experimentation; industry bias; disability; health inequities; race and medicine; the opioid crisis; and the distribution of health resources. Throughout the course, we will examine what the details of a particular case might tell us about which morally relevant facts and distinctions are important, and whether a particular ethical framework is well-suited to the task at hand. To do this, we will investigate the scientific, medical, legal, and historical details that might inform our thinking about these questions. We will establish and follow community norms for discussing these topics, many of which may be sensitive or deeply personal.