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Comment by zombieprocesses | Hacker News Reader

We already have ethics in the philosophy department. I'm was CS major and I took ethics and liked it so much I double majored in CS and philosophy.

Ethics has no place in CS, nor more than ethics is required in biology or physics or algebra.

If universities want students to learn about ethics, then make ethics 101 a "required elective".

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Your comparisons are rather odd, given that most universities do have ethics requirements for the sciences, focused on examples from the field in question.

Biology: Do not repeat the Tuskegee experiements. Do not be the next Andrew Wakefield.

Physics: Do not falsify data. Do not plagiarize results. Do not play fast and loose with statistics.

I can definitely see corresponding examples being made for issues that affect CS.

CS: Do not collect customer information that is not needed for the task at hand. Do not describe your machine-learning model as being free of bias based on race/sex, if you was trained with real-world data that may be biased.

Chemical engineering: If you don't know what you're doing, your reactor will blow up and kill people. Here are some cases where people didn't know what they were doing. Don't be like them.

The examples from other fields offered here relate purely to the academic field, while one of your CS examples is very much related to software as a business.

Biology as a business: don't try to patent the world's food supply.

Physics as a business: consider whether your client is building a weapon out of your work and whom they might use it against.

Many natural science programs actually have classes in ethics, sometimes mandatory, sometimes as an elective.

The Technical University here in Berlin, Germany, has one of the most respected departments of philosophy in the country. The reason: After WW2, the British mandated that "hard" sciences should never again be taught without ethics.

There are many elements of ethics unique to software developers, that should be taught outside of a basic ethics course

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