Non-Apologetic Computer Ethics Education - Teaching Analysis Skills - The Research Center on Computing & Society

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Non-Apologetic Computer Ethics Education:
A Strategy for Integrating Social Impact and Ethics into the Computer Science Curriculum

C. Dianne Martin and Hilary J. Holz

2.1.2 Teaching Analysis Skills

The first three lectures focus on the history of computing, metaphysical frameworks, and professional codes of conduct. The history of computing lecture provides a political and ethical perspective on the history of computing and presents the contributions of Liebniz, Lovelace, Turing, and others in the context of their times. The metaphysical framework taught is based on a set of classnotes developed by Robert Barger (1989). Barger divides metaphysical theories into four camps: idealist, realist, pragmatist, and existentialist. We present these four theories within a Cartesean coordinate space in which the student is asked to determine where his or her values fit (see Figure 2). The framework is presented to help students understand that metaphysical theories differ by person and culture and to enable students to identify how their viewpoint relates to the viewpoints of others, particularly the other members of their discussion group.

Cartesian Ethics Space

Figure 2: Cartesian Ethics Space

Four professional codes of conduct are taught: ACM (Weiss, 1982), IEEE (1979, 1981), ICCP (1983), and DPMA (1989). The four codes are taught using a paper (Martin & Martin, 1990) that analyzes the four codes for similarities, differences, and efficacy and presents the major themes present in all of the codes. The four ethics theories are then combined with the common themes in the codes of conduct to establish a connection between personal, theoretical and professional considerations (Figure 3).

Relating Personal, Theoretical and Practical Ethical Considerations

Figure 3: Relating Personal, Theoretical and Practical Ethical Considerations

The ultimate goal is to provide a personalized metaframework (Figure 4) for each student to analyze ethical questions. Students are taught to use the framework in a systematic way to answer the five questions in ethics suggested by bioethicist Robert Veatch (1977), that when asked collectively and in sequence, form a methodology for addressing and providing justification for moral dilemmas: (1) What makes right acts right? (2) To whom is moral duty owed? (3) What kinds of acts are right? (4) How do rules apply to a specific situation? (5) What ought to be done in specific cases? (Veatch, 1977, p. 2). This framework can be updated as the ethics codes are updated in the future.

Developing a Meta-Framework for Ethical Decision-Making

Figure 4: Developing a Meta-Framework for Ethical Decision-Making

The discussion groups tie the subjects together by focusing on the first assignment, which is an evaluation of a scenario picked from a subset of the scenarios (Parker, et al, 1988; Weiss, 1982). A scenario evaluation has three parts: first, an evaluation of the choices made within the scenario based on the student’s own ethical framework; second, a similar evaluation based on one of the professional codes of conduct; and third, a comparison of the conclusions reached in the previous two sections. The students talk through a scenario evaluation in discussion groups and then complete an evaluation of a different scenario on their own. The scenario evaluation establishes the philosophical framework of the course: helping the students identify their own ethical positions relative to a theoretical framework, to each other and to the professional ethics codes of the field. This theme is revisited each time an ethical issue is raised in the second half of the course. Students are encouraged to keep ethical diaries, recording the change in their positions within this framework and using their diaries as an aid in writing their term paper.

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