Engineers who behave unethically without asking questions aren't good engineers--at least, they're not the sort of engineers we want to be creating.
Ethical behaviour is - or should be - learned and refined over a lifetime, via parents, peers, all levels of education, employers, wider society and one's own contemplation.
I'm suspicious of the inclusion of ethics classes in MBA courses, given the kind of work many MBAs end up doing. I suspect it can create a mindset in which anything you convince yourself is OK according to what you learned in your ethics class is acceptable, which is a very weak and inconsistent standard.
To be clear, I'm fully supportive of the idea that engineers and everyone else in tech companies should behave ethically. I'm just not sure ethics classes will achieve that outcome.
If engineers, or any employees, are behaving unethically, it's because there's a misalignment between the employee's own short-term incentives (i.e., keeping their job, getting a promotion/raise), and societally-beneficial objectives. It'll take more than an ethics class to fix that.
College is about not only learning deliberately but allowing serendipity to open your mind to the unexpected. In my experience, budding engineers are among the last of us to become aware of social costs vs benefits and alternative perspectives. Without a required course to open their eyes, it's likely that many young techies will leap into life's choices before they look.
IMO, college is exactly the right time for all students to confront the cost of living an unexamined life.
Absolutely. But, what if someone's parents, peers, etc have never really introduced the foundational ideas? I mean, most people are taught ethical rules, but they're often taught as rules and not ideology that should be applied broadly. Also, most parents aren't equipped to teach some of the ethical dilemmas that we face with social media and big data. Having a course on some of these things should be another building block for many, but also a backstop for those who have never given it any thought at all.
For example, I used to contract to the US military in the DC area. That work invited many of the same concerns that SV does -- privacy, security, freedom of speech, acting preserve and defend the Constitution's principles. Today I work for a big pharmaceutical. Comparable concerns apply here too -- honesty, doing no harm, serving people in need, improving and extending their lives.
Ethics are universal, no matter where you live or what you do.
An ethics curriculum would help you with that task.
To understand this you have to also take on board that ethics is difficult. The media often gives us simplified versions of situations after the fact and we can't help but feel the "right" choice was always obvious. But in reality, as an ethical conflict develops those involved often feel helpless as the problem continues to grow. No one risks stopping it precisely because they don't have the intellectual framework to deal with or understand the developing complex ethical dilemma until it is too large for a single individual to take on.
I get where you are coming from though. I'm just saying that some people aren't lucky enough to have come from that place. Education does often make the difference for well meaning people not otherwise exposed to a good moral foundation.
BUT, I bet if you look at the data, things like DARE and driver's ed and sex ed v abstinance education have measurable, statistical impacts on what people believe and how they act.
ALSO, there are plenty of jobs out there for technical work. Each of us decides what people and organizations we are comfortable supporting with our labor. It's not a perfectly free decision, and there are plenty of individual trade-offs to make, but we're hardly passive players.
The content of the ethics class is different than you may think though. There isn't really an engineering version of the Hippocratic Oath, and the instructor normally realizes that he or she isn't going to instill a sense of ethics into a bunch of bored 20-somethings in three months if they haven't developed one already. Instead, the class tends to focus on choices you might face as an engineer, why they are hard, and the outcomes for both you and society at large.
In my experience - the overwhelming majority of students just wanted to pass the module, had no intention of contributing. I asked a friend in the same class what he thought of it, and he responded:
"What does it matter? I'm going to be working for a company, and they'll have rich lawyers. Any problem can be made to go away with enough money. All I need to care about is my pay cheque."
Last time I looked at LinkedIn he was working at one of the FAANG companies.
Point of my comment: you can teach this all you like, but it won't do any good unless you can break people out of the "I only care about the size of my pay cheque" mindset.
The money-chasing mentality is probably partly to blame for the mess we're in...
US government was afraid to break up Microsoft. They were afraid to fine Facebook higher as well.
I also do know that people have been discussing AI, ethics and consequences in that same class now as I know the teacher. I don't now the outcome but I think people at least recognize the potential problems.
However, code of ethics do exist in software and other engineering:
Ethics is the study of what one ought to do. It purports to lift some values over other and define morality, meanings, and legitimate goals.
These two - positive versus normative - are fundamentally different types of discussion and knowledge.
Just consider: A physics course in Nazi Germany or Communist Russia would likely teach the same thing as a physics course in Stanford. An ethics course absolutely would not. Consider why and what that means.
This is a superficial understanding. Once you start digging deeply, the difference between the hard and moral sciences is more tenuous, and less "fundamental". Sure, "calculus, physics" etc largely attempt to describe what "is", but these fields are motivated by the belief that nature "ought" to make sense. There would be no calculus or physics without a desire to make sense of the world, an "ought".
And "ought" does not just motivate hard science, it's an integral part of it. When following the scientific method, the first thing you do is form a hypothesis. A hypothesis, but its very definition, is not necessarily true, i.e., it's an "ought" not an "is". Scientists therefore have to embrace and believe in "normative" knowledge to advance just like other endeavors. The types of hypothesis and endeavors hard scientists engage in are subject to the prevailing social norms.
To reference your example, Nazi Germany did all sorts of ghastly experiments on twins and other prisoners, all in the name of science. Something that would not be done elsewhere. Even today, research on areas like stem cells and global warming are largely influenced by social norms and "ought".
Accordingly, while I agree there is a fundamental difference between "is" and "ought", that difference does not so clearly differentiate hard and soft sciences.
Deutsche Physik rejected relativity and quantum mechanics, aka “Jewish physics”:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik
Lyshenkoism killed millions through famine by espousing nonsense biology and ignoring genetics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
Philosophy, including ethics, is foundational to everything we do, and unfamiliarity with the rules of the normative allows the unscrupulous to corrupt the positive.
"unfamiliarity with the rules of the normative allows the unscrupulous to corrupt the positive. "
Which rules of the positive are you talking about? Your rules? My rules? Trump's rules? Hitler's rules? Confucius' rules? Jesus' rules? Mohammed's rules?
The point is that the normative doesn't have rules in the same way as the positive. You can do a science experiment to objectively show Lysenkoism is wrong. You can't do a science experiment to objectively show that slavery is wrong.
Given that there are so many systems of rules of the positive, there's no way you can teach one as the rules the way you can teach physics.
My fear with such courses is that they just end up as moral propaganda for whoever is in power - empowering the powerful.
I'm talking about the ones that explain how to think about concepts, how point-of-view and experience affect what we perceive, how discourse can be used to further or detract from truth, etc. Basically, epistemology. Otherwise, how do you even presume to tell me that your physics is right? Because rockets fly? I think they fly because if you put fuel and make an offering of electricity to the gods of the ether, they will send it upwards—on what basis do you convince me, when I can rephrase everything you say to me as "the gods of the ether will it so"?
What has happened is that the Western world has created a shared epistemology and has done a very good job of laying it down and universally teaching it. So most of the time, we don't need to worry about right and wrong because the decision has been made for us long ago (and what does that say about us?)
Now, though, new questions are coming up—ethics in software engineering, bias in machine learning, etc.— where the universal model hasn't yet caught up and been agreed on, or where it is being challenged. And if we are not familiar with the process by which such things are agreed on, we are essentially letting other people make the decisions for us.
I totally understand the reluctance to empower the powerful, but I think education doesn't have to be brainwashing.
You know, this sounds like a good topic for an ethics course.
Even if the spec specifies unethical behavior? Sounds like passing the buck.
Or what if the spec itself isn't well defined, and leaves many undefined states and holes that the developer has to fill in themselves?
If a lawyer submitted a brilliant and conforming but racist or unethical argument to a court, the lawyer can still be found to be unethical. Just because you're following the rules, doesn't mean that you're doing the ethical thing.
Get the job done, get the money, get out.
If you want to waste precious time of your life wondering whether something is wrong - be my guest. But don't impose it on people with better things to do.
But once again the problem was in the customers. They should have said optimize for a, while keeping discrimination in check, not just optimize for a
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