Biography:
Thomas M. Powers is the founding director of the Center for Science, Ethics, and Public Policy (SEPP) at the University of Delaware. He is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and in the School of Public Policy, and a faculty research fellow of the Delaware Biotechnology Institute. His research concerns ethics and emerging technologies, environmental ethics, and the responsible conduct of scientific research.
Dr. Powers has been principal investigator or co-principal investigator on several federal and state grants. These grants include NSF-RAISE, an educational program in research ethics for science and engineering graduate students, which is ongoing at UD.
Powers received a Ph.D. in philosophy (University of Texas at Austin), and an undergraduate degree in philosophy (College of William and Mary). He has been a DAAD-Fulbright dissertation-year fellow at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, and a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Virginia.
Selected Publications
Powers, TM (forthcoming). Ethics for Robots, in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Digital Ethics, eds. L Floridi and M Taddeo, Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, West Sussex, UK.
Powers, TM, and Ganascia, JG, (2020). The Ethics of the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, in Oxford Handbook of Ethics of AI, eds. M Dubber, F Pasquale, and S Das, Oxford University Press.
Tolmeijer, S, A Weiss, M Hanheide, F Lindner, TM Powers, C Dixon, and M Tielman (2020). Taxonomy of Trust-Relevant Failures and Mitigation Strategies, in Proceedings of Human Robot Interaction 2020 (HRI ’20), ACM, New York, NY, USA.
Powers, TM and Shah, SI (2017). Technological Ethics in Context: The Case of Nanotechnology, in Philosophy: Technology, ed. AF Beavers, Gale Cengage: Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks.
Powers, TM (2013). “On the Moral Agency of Computers” Topoi: An International Review of Philosophy.
Powers, TM (2011). Prospects for a Kantian Machine, in Machine Ethics, eds. M. Anderson and S. Anderson, Cambridge University Press [reprint of 2006 IEEE Intelligent Systems 21 (4)].
Powers, TM (2008). Environmental Holism and Nanotechnology, in Nanotechnology and Society: Current and Emerging Ethical Issues, eds. F. Allhoff and P. Lin, Springer Publishing
Powers, TM (2004). Real Wrongs in Virtual Communities, in Ethics and Information Technology 5 (4), Kluwer Publishing.
Websites:
https://www.udel.edu/faculty-staff/experts/thomas-powers/http://sepp.udel.edu