Ethical Statistics and Statistical Ethics: the Experience of Creating an Interdisciplinary Module

This article describes an innovative curriculum module the author created on the two-way exchange between ethics and statistics. Part of an undergraduate interdisciplinary ethics course, the module builds upon a prior introduction to basic philosophical ethics, but has no particular mathematical prerequisites beyond high school algebra. Its emphasis on conceptual and critical thinking makes it easily adaptable to high school classrooms as well as readily expandable for more mathematically sophisticated audiences. Through media examples and in-class explorations, the module made connections to contemporary topics such as the death penalty, drug testing, salary equity, and profiling. This article shares resources, strategies and lessons learned for instructors wishing to develop their own modules of various lengths.