William Cochran

Dr. William Cochran is Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Wake Forest University. He is also an Affiliate with the  Program for Leadership & Character.

Prior to joining Wake Forest, Dr. Cochran was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Philosophy with the Embedded EthiCS Program @ Harvard University.  

Dr. Cochran received his PhD in Philosophy from Northwestern University in 2020, specializing in Aristotle’s theory of moral education. His 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. He now aims 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? These are questions that currently animate his thinking.

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Teaching

Classes taught:

• CSC 191 – Special Topics: Ethics of Emerging Technologies
• CSC 391 – Selected Topics: Ethical Computer Science

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Research

• Ancient Greek Philosophy
• Ethics of Emerging Technologies
• Moral Education
• Computer Ethics