Course 3 · Tier 3
Ethical Play and Moral Imagination
Moral reasoning under uncertainty, value pluralism, and the limits of rule-based ethics. This course develops the capacity for ethical judgment that cannot be reduced to optimization or alignment — the gap between structural analysis and felt moral weight.
Ethical Frameworks as Game Mechanics
Ethical Play treats moral frameworks — deontology, consequentialism, virtue ethics, care ethics — not as competing doctrines but as game mechanics. Each framework defines a different set of rules for navigating a moral situation. Students learn to play within each framework fluently before stepping back to ask which game they should be playing.
This is the core pedagogical move: ethical reasoning is not about choosing the right framework and applying it. It's about developing the judgment to know which considerations matter most in a given context, and being honest about the tradeoffs.
- Deontological constraints as hard rules — what you must never do
- Consequentialist calculation as optimization — what produces the best outcome
- Virtue ethics as character formation — what kind of person this decision makes you
- Care ethics as relational attention — who is affected and how
The AI Ethical Auditor Session
The centerpiece of the course is the AI Ethical Auditor session. Students present an AI system — real or hypothetical — and submit it to structured ethical audit. The auditor applies each framework in turn, identifies conflicts, and produces a judgment.
The critical insight emerges in the debrief: AI can perform the structural analysis. It can identify stakeholders, enumerate consequences, flag rule violations. What it cannot do is feel the moral weight of a decision. The gap between "this analysis identifies a harm" and "this matters" is irreducibly human.
Structural Analysis
AI can enumerate stakeholders, map consequences, and flag inconsistencies with stated principles. This is useful. But it is the beginning of moral reasoning, not the end.
Felt Moral Weight
The experience of a decision mattering — of stakes being real, of consequences falling on actual people — is what converts analysis into judgment. This is what makes ethical reasoning irreducibly human.