Exploring the Ethical Issue of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Local Policing

Narrowing the focus of your ethical issue presentation for a more substantive video project

Your presentation of the ethical issue in the video should be narrow enough so that you can explore it in the time allowed. The narrower your discussion of the issue, the more substantive your video project is likely to be. So, for example, you will be able to produce a better (more substantive, more interesting) video on “The Consequentialist Ethics of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Local Policing,” than you will a video about “The Ethics of Drones.” If you are looking for a topic for your video project, consider looking in the “Supplemental Materials” link in our course menu on Brightspace. There you will find many articles and videos on different subjects dealing with ethics and technologies, one of which may inspire you to do more digging into the topic.

To make sure that your approach to presenting the ethical issue is manageable, and that you have enough time to work on it, you are required to have a tentative topic submitted to the instructor for approval via Brightspace (in the “Video Project Topic Submission” assignment link) 
by the end of the day (11:59) on Friday, July 16. While it will not be necessary to have a fully formed thesis or argument to get your topic approved, you should already be thinking about how to narrow the focus of your topic to make it into a more manageable project. The topic 
submission itself only needs to be a sentence or two, but you can write more, if you would like. Be sure to keep in mind that your video should deal explicitly with some ethical issue related to the technology you have chosen. You will want to be as explicit as possible about why this 
technology presents a specifically ethical concern. This will require you to demonstrate an understanding of what ethics is and how it relates to the technology you have chosen to present. Feel free to consult the readings and videos we have looked at this semester as a way 
of identifying the specifically ethical nature of the technology to be analyzed in your video. Our readings by Curtler and Law, along with the lecture/videos may be especially useful here in thinking about what ethics is and is not and how it relates to questions of technology. 
The video should include an analysis of the ethical issue or issues presented by the technology what they are, why they exist, what is at stake in the ethical choices and/or dilemmas presented. You may also want to include your own opinion regarding how these ethical issues should be handled/resolved, although this is not necessary. Try not to do too much or cover too many of these issues. Always remember that the narrower the focus of your project, the better it is likely to be.