fritz allhoff

This summer, I’ve been doing an externship at the Southwest Michigan Land Conservancy.  Most of my research has been on conservation easement templates, and I wanted to make some of that available.  One facet has to do with language regarding mining and extraction provisions, and that’s compiled here.  A more important facet had to do with building a database of template models, and that’s available in a spreadsheet or directory.  Please get in touch if you have any questions about this research!

Some colleagues and I just had an essay come out in Communications of the ACM, which is a publication of the Association for Computing Machinery.  In the esay, we talk about ethical issues pertaining to cyberweapons; have a read and let me know what you think!

Update:  A version of this essay was just published in The Atlantic.

And it’s out:

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo12274697.html

If anyone would like a complimentary review copy for potential course adoption, please contact Ryo Yamaguchi (ryamaguchi@press.uchicago.edu).  Comments are certainly welcome!

Next semester, I’m teaching biomedical ethics online, which I have been doing for some years now.  But I’m also excited about a course I haven’t taught before, which is PHIL 6320:  Ethical Theory.  I just finished taking a course on torts law that was fantastic, so I set up this course to explore ethical theory through tort law.  Here’s the syllabus and course description:

Course Description: This course will explore ethical theory through tort law.  We will investigate:  intentional torts, privileges, negligence, causation in fact, proximate cause, defenses, and damages.  In these investigations, our focus will be less on what the law is, than why it is what it is and whether it should be as it is.  Furthermore, we shall consider case-based approaches to moral methodology, as opposed to principle-based approaches or alternatives (e.g., reflective equilibrium).  To put this another way, torts doctrine is largely constructed from the common law, and we can query the advantages and disadvantages of this method.