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Comment by lawnchair_larry | Hacker News Reader

Do you think that teaching an unethical person about ethics makes them ethical? I never understood the point of ethics classes.

It’s hard to imaging that people working on emissions cheating would have been less likely to work on this, had they only taken the CS ethics class.

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It's not about making an evil person not-evil. You don't have to be evil to make evil things. The point of ethics classes is to learn how to think ethically. How did old and modern philosophers think about ethics? If you're an evil person, then law enforcement should be there to discourage you not to be evil and hopefully penalties are high enough to stop you. But if you're not an evil person, and the law gives you certain freedom on ethically sensitive issues, then an ethics class will help you how to reason in such situations. When I don't debug my code properly sometimes I feel terrible because a bug can significantly change a person's day or maybe even injure them (I work in telematic industry). Being a competent engineer requires one to understand the implications of one's job and act accordingly which may be debugging properly etc...

Certainly not. But they can help sway people who are on the border to the ethical side of things. Ethics classes can also provide tools and mental models for dealing with gray areas which aren't as cut and dry as cheating on an emissions test.

Yes, and the the thing is that most people are "on the border" - that is to say, little more than a product of their environment (speaking of their actions/attitudes, not their worth as people). If you teach an entire population ethics (assuming it's done well and everything that comes with that), you will still have your 5-10% of rotten apples, just as you'd have 5-10% who would seek out ethics on their own. The big difference will be in the 80-90%.

Like most classes, the point is to educate people about something they don't know about, broaden their horizons and perhaps cast new light on apparently familiar topics.

I've never understood the point of computer science, I can produce a perfectly functional BASIC program.

Ethics has its own vocabulary, history, and arguments in ethics are common and often don't have a resolution other than compromise. It's predicated on making logical arguments and has ties to epistemology: how do we know what we know?

So saying you don't understand the point of ethics classes, as if people are ethical or are unethical, is like saying you don't understand the point of teaching logic or debate as if people either pop out of childhood with an innate conformance or resistance to one kind of logic or debate, no other kinds exist and there are no arguments.

If you took an ethics class and don't understand the point of it, then I'd argue it wasn't a good ethics class.

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