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Comment by randomwalker | Hacker News Reader

I'm a CS researcher and educator (details in profile). Software engineering ethics has been a passion of mine lately. I teamed up with a philosophy prof to write an essay on why it's important to teach ethics in CS classes [1]. (It's an invited column for CACM.)

My coauthor has released a self-contained module with some theory and various hypotheticals that educators can use in classes [2].

I've been trying to crowdsource a set of real-world case studies with a broad coverage of various types of ethical issues [3]. I'm also gradually trying to incorporate this in my own teaching.

We'd appreciate feedback and suggestions.

[1] https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/131764/web/sw_engg_ethic...

[2] http://www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/focusareas/technology/s...

[3] https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/randomwalker/ethical-dile...

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I don't think that ethics should be taught as part of all CS classes, and I don't think the essay you wrote made a convincing case for this.

All you have really shown is that ethical issues arise in CS. While this is true, I don't see any benefit to formally teaching thinking about ethics. It's not as if an engineer is never going to consider the ethical implications of their work just because they never took a course. It does make sense to discuss ethics when they are directly relevant, e.g. topics of privacy and security.

EDIT: rewrote to correct an error in understanding the article.

That's really interesting for me. I did a CS and EE dual degree and we have a required ethics course as part of the engineering program (it's a requirement from Engineers Canada for an engineering accreditation). In the CS program, things like this were only discussed in context (e.g. privacy and security were discussed in the elective security class I took).

Comparing the two, I did find the formal discussion in the Ethics class to be really interesting. It was a simple pass/fail course, we weren't really graded on things, other than being required to show up and talk about the kinds of issues we might encounter in the field. Some as mundane as a manager pushing you to shrink estimates and cut corners (ahem, software), some as serious as failing to do proper load analysis and having a shopping mall roof collapse after a heavy snowfall.

I imagine you might get a fair amount of interest in this kind of material, not least because ABET[1] is now requiring accredited C.S. programs to include it.

So if you're looking to put together something that others will use, my suggestion is to keep track of ABET's requirements (which are currently on the vague side in this area -- but they change every year).

[1] http://www.abet.org/

Like to hear your thoughts on the ethics of contributing to building the 1000 year Reich of Machine Assisted Police State.

That comment probably needs some fleshing out.

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