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Comment by diablerouge | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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