News

Prof. Dr. Laura Crompton from Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt will give a talk as part of the Philosophy Research Forum on July 7, 2026, from 4:15 to 5:45 p.m. in S 72 (NW II) on the topic “Mapping the Human Factor: Lessons from the Sullenberger Case.”

Abstract: On 15 January 2009, a US Airways plane made an emergency landing on the Hudson River. Thanks to the actions of the experienced pilot, Chesley Sullenberger, all passengers and crew survived. Following the incident, the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) ran several simulations to analyse and evaluate Sullenberger's decision-making process. They used computational outputs as evidence of how the situation could and should have been handled differently. The 2016 film based on these events highlights an issue that the NTSB report itself leaves unresolved: when Sullenberger responds to the simulation-based evaluation by saying, 'You forgot the human factor,' he is pointing to something that the computational analysis could not account for. This paper addresses this objection from an ethical perspective. Using the Sullenberger case as a reference point, I examine the ethical issues that arise when simulations and digital twins (DTs) are used to evaluate human decision-making processes. I argue that these technologies suffer from an 'objectivity fallacy'; the misconception that their outputs represent objective truths rather than probabilistic approximations shaped by human value judgements. I also argue that this fallacy is exacerbated by epistemic blind spots that may be structural rather than merely technical. One of the most significant of these blind spots is what I refer to as the 'human factor': the practical wisdom, embodied expertise, and experiential understanding that human agents contribute to complex, high-stakes decisions, and which cannot be captured by data.