AI is taking over all aspects of the digital world, shaping how we go through our daily lives. As a response, URI has begun developing new courses discussing the effects of AI in a variety of departments. Philosophy professor Prasasti Pandit has helped develop one of these courses: “AI and Ethics”, which will be offered as early as the spring 2026 semester and will be a certification course designed for business professionals.

With the continuous emergence of AI, unprecedented scenarios are emerging with moral and cognitive concerns. Throughout this course, Pandit will teach the module “Ethics and Responsible AI,” which will focus on bias and discrimination.

“I am thinking about how AI is so indispensable in our lives,” said Pandit. “My focus is on the bias and discrimination that creeps into machine programming and how that can harm others. We are just focusing on how we can make very effective, significant usage of AI in a morally responsible way.”

The relevance of developing technology and how to use it ethically is integrated into introductory courses as well, such as PHL 212: Big Ethics, which is coordinated and taught by Pandit. The class holds a capacity of 270 students and functions as a dual structure, dedicating sections of the semester to lectures and recitations of specific topics. 

“I just want to see how ethics comes alive,” Pandit said. “It’s not just grasping the ideas and theories, but how students can understand that it is a process of knowing one’s own self and the surrounding words, how they can interact with other people, their moral responsibility, compassionate, empathetic feeling.”

The course is tailored to aid students in their given field as well. Students studying nursing are able to choose to focus on medical ethics during recitations sections, giving them the skills to make more professionally more decisions that they may not develop during other required courses.

“I wanted to make a classroom that will be intellectually rigorous but very emotionally safe,” said Pandit. “I wanted to make sure that, even in the furthest corner of the gallery, every student can hear the voices and every student can feel that they are being seen.”

Joining the philosophy department in 2023, Pandit’s research focuses on finding converging points of deontology and virtue ethics to propose a more credible form of beneficence. Her recent research looks at the moral significance of emotions following Indian ethical tradition and Western tradition. Through this research, Pandit has developed another new course to introduce the philosophy curriculum. “East meets West”will compare western theories and Indian ethical principles to foster an environment that will give students a cross-cultural understanding.

Growing up in India, Pandit was inspired by the works of Dharma, Karmavāda, and Ahimsa, as they emphasized principles on duty, moral responsibility, compassion, the virtue of compassion and empathy. When conducting research for her PhD on Western tradition, she was surprised by how well these concepts fit within Western ethics.

“I feel like this kind of challenge has a beautiful reward that they will come to explore something different,” Pandit said. “[Students] will see how this Indian wisdom and ethical theories have so many things to offer, so many things to see, to analyze, to the problems we are facing in our real world.”