Comment by BoiledCabbage | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BoiledCabbage | Hacker News Reader

I think the most important take-away from this essay is that questionably ethical items won't have a big flashing red siren go off when they happen, there won't be any forewarning. Your company won't have a long internal debate on the ethics of it.

It will be passed as just routine and a normal part of the process. It'll be "just the way things are done". It'll still be up to you to understand and appreciate the ethical consequences of you choices.

In this case he was "lucky" enough to become aware of it due to heavy news coverage and then a follow up of an immediate family member being directly impacted. It almost never will be that blatant.

That's the lesson to take away from this. As part of your profession, you need to understand the consequences of the code you write and choices you make - and represent for and protect the people who won't be in the room, but who will be the recipients of the consequences.

Your day will be a subtle milgram experiment, and you need to be the one to say something.

One of the reasons I was thankful to go to university where I was provided a broad spectrum of courses and curriculum. Among them were a healthy dose of ethics courses including ethical computing.

I was really thankful that I had the same opportunity, and I personally loved my CS ethics course - unfortunately, it seemed like the value and necessity of such a course was lost on a fair number of classmates, who vigorously argued that the CS ethics course shouldn't be required.

My university had one, but it seemed more like a cover-your-ass move by the university than something that'd actually get people to think about these issues if/when they occur in their career.

I think the awkward thing about ethics courses and training is that they are effectively initial state only in the pipeline. They are to be "overridden" by incentives and selection when possible. It seems to be a "trade" of slower start up time due to inculturation to undo it to unethical standards in exchange for ass covering. Even if they had say yearly ethics course requirements the actual incentives dominate in practice.

You don't solve persistent corruption by ethics courses you do it by removing conflicts of interests, changing incentives, and enforcement. They may not be easy to do, free of costs or even within capability to change.

Ethics could still be useful of course but the institutions need to care about it and the incentives need to be changeable accordingly for it to be more than just a figleaf.

Some occupations - usually professions such as medicine and engineering - seem to have a relatively strong ethical tradition. Perhaps it comes from the self-regulatory aspect of being a member of a profession. These ethics courses in software education are an attempt to move towards that goal. I think ultimately you can’t bootstrap ethics into a population unless that population feels like they owe something to one another. The computing field is just too broad for that.

In my case, the ethics course we had to take was the same one engineers take.

I was shocked at the number of classmates I had in mine who had no prior understanding of the ethics involved in software. It was clearest when it came to presentations and things; people would take clearly grey areas and try and present them as black and white (so something like DRM wasn't "it's complicated, and companies should weigh the pros and cons carefully, as at best it will inconvenience their users while only delaying a release, and at worst will lead to the pirates having the best experience, and drive their own customers to third party patches to remove it", it was "it's a necessary evil that all companies should use")

My CS ethics course consisted almost entirely of things I already knew, or exploring scenarios where there was an obvious correct choice. At the time, I thought anyone who didn't already have a grasp of ethics would ignore it, and anyone who did would have a better moral compass than the course could provide.

Today, I'm not so sure. People do tend to completely ignore ethics when there's social pressure to do so, but maybe the author of this essay could have benefited from it.

My university is a mixed bag. We had an ethics discussion in a 101 course that seemed beneficial. However, the other "ethics requirements" seem like a way to shove political propaganda down the throats of students who would have otherwise avoided it by their choice of major.

Requiring CS, CoE, and EE majors to take courses on the humanities - without making any statement about the merits of those courses - the sort of thing that the university decides based on its political and financial goals, not based on its desire to create stronger CS professionals. A course with a title like "CS Ethics" sounds much more relevant and beneficial than "African American Womyn's Studies", which is the sort of thing I would have to take to satisfy my university's ethics requirement if I hadn't satisfied it with AP testing.

Paper investigating whether ethicists are more ethical:

http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/BehEth-14...

Could you maybe state the point you are trying to make and the position you personally hold? Do you have to be "more ethical" to argue that ethics are necessary and a good thing to teach?

I feel that if a career teaching ethics doesn't make someone more ethical, then a class is unlikely to do so.

Personally - I haven't taken any classes. I once wrote a template mailer that financial institutions used to mass mail customers, which I felt icky about, but I still did it to the best of my ability.

1/2 way through my career, I took a pay cut to leave finance and work in cancer research, mostly for the interesting work, but I do feel better about it as it's more positive sum for the world.

I would not begrudge someone doing something dodgy but legal to feed their families. Maybe they should feel a bit bad and look for other jobs, but I can understand.

The ACM has an "Ask an Ethicist" blog analyzing ethnical case studies. They're fictitious but still illustrative of the gray ethnical areas in real product development. Unfortunately, it hasn't been updated for a long time. I would love to see more case studies.

https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics/case-studies

But the example in the article is clearly unethical based on the client's requirements alone - it doesn't take an ethicist to see that.

In fact, a world where companies are so very ethical it takes a professional ethicist to spot unethical practices sounds nearly like a utopia.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23965787

> you need to be the one to say something

This implies a moral duty to learn rhetoric.

I'm ok with that.

Sure, but it is a moral duty with so few resources to learn how to meet it.

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