William B Cochran

I am an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Wake Forest University. I am also an Affiliate with the Program for Leadership & Character.

 

Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Philosophy with the Embedded EthiCS Program @ Harvard. I am currently applying that experience at Wake Forest, with seven ethics modules embedded into the CS curriculum to date.  

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I received my Ph.D. in Philosophy from Northwestern University in 2020, specializing in Aristotle’s theory of moral education. My dissertation reconstructs Aristotle’s notion of teaching and uses it to settle debates in Aristotle’s ethics, specifically concerning the development of the virtues of character and practical wisdom, and to solve a problem for Neo-Aristotelian educational theory. I now aim to bring lessons from Aristotelian moral education to bear on the ethics of technology. How can we live well with emerging technologies? How can we best prepare tomorrow’s computer scientists to be ethical leaders in their field?  

 

To relax, I enjoy watching movies with my family. On weekends, we like to seek out new trails to hike in North Carolina with our dog, Winston.