Meg Leta Jones, Maggie Little, and Jonathan Healey
In conversation: ethics for a rapidly changing world
Profound changes in technology are reshaping society at an unprecedented rate. Challenges to the environment are as complex as they are urgent. Advances in healthcare are radically transforming its practice around the globe. Confronting these challenges requires a deep understanding of the ethical issues at stake. It also requires an agile skill set for navigating them and moving beyond criticism to action.
Georgetown’s Ethics Lab is a team of philosophers and designers using new methods to help students and practitioners meet the ethical challenges of an increasingly complex world.
Profiles
Meg Leta Jones (moderator) is a Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor in the Communication, Culture & Technology program at Georgetown University, where she researches rules and technological change with a focus on privacy and automation. She’s also a core faculty member of the Science, Technology, and International Affairs program in Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, a faculty affiliate with the Institute for Technology Law & Policy at Georgetown Law Center, and a faculty fellow at the Georgetown Ethics Lab.
Meg’s research covers comparative information and communication technology law, critical information and data studies, governance of emerging technologies, and the legal history of technology. Ctrl+Z: The Right to be Forgotten, Meg’s first book, is about the social, legal, and technical issues surrounding digital oblivion. Her second book project, The Character of Consent: The History of Cookies and Future of Technology Policy, tells the transatlantic history of digital consent through the lens of a familiar technical object. She is also editing a volume with Amanda Levendowski called Feminist Cyberlaw that explores how gender, race, sexuality and disability shape cyberspace and the laws that govern it. More details about her work can be found at MegLeta.com.
Professor Maggie Little is founder and Director of Ethics Lab, as well as McNamara Chair of Philosophy and Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. She is also a founding co-chair of the Tech and Society Initiative at Georgetown. Little oversees the growth of Ethics Lab’s work on campus, as well as among partners — from nonprofits to corporations to other academic institutions. She guides the focus of the Lab’s coursework on an annual basis, pushing her colleagues—and, by extension, students—to examine the world’s most pressing, complex problems.
Her research interests include issues in reproduction, clinical research ethics, data ethics, and the structure of moral theory. A Rhodes Scholar and fellow of the Hastings Center, she has twice served as Visiting Scholar in residence at the National Institutes of Health Department of Bioethics, and was appointed to the Ethics Committee of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology. She is co-founder of The Second Wave Initiative, which works to promote responsible research into the health needs of pregnant women.
In her previous role as Director of the Kennedy Institute, Little oversaw a time of transformative development, including the launch of the world’s first Introduction to Bioethics MOOC in April 2014; the inauguration of Conversations in Bioethics, an annual campus-wide event focused on a critical issue in bioethics; the deployment of a series of experimental undergraduate courses utilizing project-based learning and design studio methods. Maggie has a B.Phil. from Oxford and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.
Jonathan Healey is a Designer at Georgetown University and serves as an Assistant Professor of Practice and Assistant Director of Ethics Lab. His teaching and professional work focuses on the capacity of design methods to support transdisciplinary engagement, particularly in service to emerging issues of complex moral significance.
Prior to joining Ethics Lab, he developed digital products concerning identity and access for the commercial security industry, and was a member of the faculty at the Corcoran College of Art + Design. He holds a Master of Architecture (2008) from the University of Maryland.
