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Comment by not_wyoming | Hacker News Reader

This entire thread is such a strong case for why all undergrad CS programs should have a core requirement of at least one ethics course.

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Every business school and MBA program has ethics course requirements. Does it really make a difference? Maybe it does, and things would be even worse than they are otherwise. But I'm not sure.

I think the purpose isn't to make people more ethical, which is impossible, but to make ethical people more effective.

It ideally makes people better at identifying when something bad is happening and gives them tools to handle it. If they're amoral in the first place though a course isn't going to change that.

I think of it like so:

All the great people in history who would be regarded as ethical never took an ethics course.

Its hard to know whether an ethics course makes people behave ethically, but its clearly not a necessary requirement to ethical behaviour

Many of them were probably religious though, which is basically ethics with a lot of supernatural trappings.

Although lot of terrible people in history were likely at least outwardly religious, so not sure that proves anything one way or the other.

I'm curious why you think an ethics course would actually change minds. In my experience in undergrad, we had a CS ethics course, and it went in in-one-ear-and-out-the-other for 99% of students, probably myself included. I know it was a thorough course but I promptly forgot all of it, and so did everyone else.

Ethical stance is not something you can teach in one course. If you don't have this disposition by the time you're in college, I think you're likely not learning it.

My original comment was more about the quality of discourse in this thread being...somewhat lacking. I'd hope that an ethics course would at least equip CS grads to have a more substantive debate about these sorts of topics. I agree that many students would dial it in for an ethics course (just like they do for many required courses), but I also think there's likely some value in exposure, and it's difficult to argue that ethics are irrelevant to software engineering given the frequency of discussions like this one.

(And, to be fair, it's a discussion board on the Internet, so maybe my expectations are just out of whack.)

Don't ethics courses make people less ethical because they teach people how to come up with ethical justifications for straightforwardly bad things?

Interesting. I don't know. Do you have specific sources you're thinking of?

One of my favourite tweets, which unfortunately I can't find again was:

"My ethics teacher has gotten his sons girlfriend pregnant. I think about this often"

Reply: "To be fair, you have to be really good a ethics to get away with that"

A course is nothing. I've long felt that Software Engineering should follow suit of many other engineering disciplines and push responsibility down to engineers. Like how when a bridge falls, an engineer has to answer for it.

I don't know exactly how that looks, and yes there are many issues with it, but we're living in the age of cowboy coding.

I agree. Software engineers are approaching a level of societal impact that it would be appropriate to start thinking about professional ethics systems similar to Canada's Iron Ring (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring).

I also think there's a long, long way between here and there, especially in the US. Requiring ethics in CS programs seems more immediately attainable to me, but I agree that it isn't a standalone fix.

The iron ring is symbolic, just like that ethics course.

A Professional Engineer license and the passing down of liability to the individual is what's needed IMO

Even better!

Especially if it has concrete historical examples of technology intended for good and how it was later used for evil, rather than something more generally-philosophical.

We had an ethics course, it was a requirement for graduation if I remember correctly.

It was entirely performative. You can teach a curriculum of ethics, but that won't make a person empathetic. These are courses for credit hours, not firmware updates.

And a person with empathy can always find or be given reasons to not apply his empathy to a person or a group of people.

You really think taking an ethics COURSE will do anything?

How are you supposed to 'learn' ethics?

Never understood the point of those. My university had over 4 for the cyber students and over half the grads went on to work for the MIC contributing to blowing up brown children in the middle east anyway.

Clearly, our problem must have been that they didn't have 5 mandatory time-waster ethics courses. That surely would have solved the matter. Add in a few extra "racism is bad" and "don't be a meanie" courses to round out the collection, just for good measure.

If you think an ethics course is about "racism is bad" or "don't be a meanie" then you weren't paying attention. The ethics class i took in college focused on the philosophical models of ethics from Kant and Aristotle and Nietzsche, utilitarianism and consequentialism and all of that. It's about deriving whether you're doing a "good thing" from first principles, and not some later moral model.

> My university had over 4 for the cyber students

What program? Or if you'd rather stay anonymous, can you share the curriculum somehow? I'm very curious about what a CS program of study looks like with that many ethics courses.

In the US, many undergrad programs award a minor with 15-18 hours of study in the subject (or 5-6 standard courses). Four ethics courses would basically get you to a philosophy minor.

At least I had 6 humanities courses telling me why communism is good

Edit: To make this comment have a little substance, what I'm getting at is, universities are already way too biased and one-sided on humanities issues to be teaching ethics. Students notice it too. I've gotten As on some insanely bad papers just cause I knew what they wanted to hear.

It's good in theory, I wonder if they talk about the practice..

They said in practice Cuban communism was good. Fastest P/NP in the west.

Yup, it was a utopia... until the Soviet subsidies ended.

The problem is not a lack of ethics courses. Many CS programs have those ethics courses.

The problem is all the techbros who take those ethics courses and laugh at them as easy and pointless and don't care about them.

There's a lot of very unserious people right now.

Whose ethics?

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