> Yes it should be semester 1 in every single CS and SE course.

to, what, make sure it is forgotten by the time you graduate?

is there even any evidence that making somebody take a class on ethics will make them more ethical? most college courses are grading you on your ability to write about a subject, not on how much you care about it, or decide to alter your future behavior.

> to, what, make sure it is forgotten by the time you graduate?

That seems a little dismissive. Did you forget everything you were ever taught? I doubt it. Maybe let's be charitable toward others.

> is there even any evidence that making somebody take a class on ethics will make them more ethical?

Yes of course. Same as there's evidence that teaching cookery makes better chefs and people who take a driving lesson crash their cars less. Education is a real, actual thing, as you well know.

> most college courses are grading you on your ability to write about a subject, not on how much you care about it, or decide to alter your future behaviour.

Most college courses are rubbish. They're training camps there to take your money and give you a piece of paper to boost your fragile ego. I know that because I'm a university professor. You can read what I think about the current state of education the Times HE.

Maybe one in five students actually take anything meaningful from school. They're the ones who care about stuff and focus on their future behaviour as successful individuals and members of society rather than on ephemeral "knowledge" or getting grades. Don't fall for the certificate scam and don't let schooling get in the way of your education.

> making somebody take a class

Now, that's a telling word you use. Not wishing to psychologise, but are you maybe afraid of someone making you take a class in this useless subject?

If so I agree with you. "Ethics" is widely abused as a stand-in for whimsical "policy" that can't be backed up rationally, or to conceal hidden political agendas. Many classes are tedious finger-wagging checklists and plenty of "ethics boards" are sham kangaroo-courts run by cardigan wearing Kevins and Karens [1] who sit down with tea and biscuits to decide the future of a department of PhD's based on how they "feel" about some keywords in a checklist (I've sat in those meetings).

You should be afraid of "ethics" when someone else co-opts it as way to tell you how to think.

That's not what my project is about. If you're sceptical about ethics in tech you'd probably like it. It's about ethics empowering you as a decision maker - to back that up with 8000 years of human wisdom - to be wholeheartedly motivated by projects that can make the world a better place, and confidently, courageously say no to tedious dehumanising schemes of extraction and surveillance that passes for computing these days.

[1] sorry actual Kevin and Karen

I know it certainly was covered in mine, it shared half a module with academic writing.

But I think by the time of starting third level education, something like this is too late to change someone's moral decision making, so I don't really think it had any effect on anyone in that course.

> by the time of starting third level education, something like this is too late to change someone's moral decision making

That's an interesting reflection. It depends on whether you see ethics as rational and actively learned, or formative conditioning.

It's why such a project is harder than I imagined, and also why I tried (only somewhat successfully) to avoid prescriptive narratives. The overlap between psychology (behaviour, which can be changed) and moral feelings is complex.

I think the best we can do is lay bare some uncomfortable truths; how people have seen things historically, what the likely outcomes of our behaviours will be, and how we delude ourselves otherwise.

What I see in tech is that there's a lot of "moral armour" - comfortable things we tell ourselves, distorted rationalisations, fallacies, short-term economic justifications - that kind of thing can be improved, unlearned and replaced by a better framework by appeal to the rational adult mind.

I think this forum in particular often considers self-interest as the only rational option, and so appealing to the rationality of such people as a way for ethical outcomes is a fool's errand. It's why "but it's legal" is often offered up here as a defense for companies criticised for unethical behaviour.

My best guess as to why people are so willing to act as if ethical criticisms are not valid is that the commenters self interest sees themselves as a potential future benefactor of similar actions and so they see the rational behaviour as being to defend it in case they could benefit from doing the same.

I'm not saying that people cannot ever be convinced to change their outlook here, but that doing so for an adult is a way more involved, individual process that requires input from people the person in question respects, which is way more than a university ethics course can hope to achieve.

Just setting aside time for it in the curriculum would be a huge improvement. Even a single class session of student driven discussion and debate, anything. We don't have to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

There's actually an entire chapter on that subject; the difference between morals, ethics, norms, laws and best practices, throughout history and in "post-modern relativist" times. You'll either love it or hate it, depending on how open your mind is.

> the difference between morals, ethics

That one's especially easy. They are exactly the same thing; mos is the Latin word, and ethos is the Greek one.

> That one's especially easy.

It troubles me when someone proclaims such glib ease. I read maybe 10 different sources, philosophy books, old and modern, and numerous debates on the subject precisely because some people think "oh that's easy" - a symptom of our deflationary society which itself is an interesting predicament.

What do those Greek and Latin words mean? Mos comes from "mores and customs" whereas ethics (from Ethikos) means character in the mind of an individual. That sets a distinction between normative and subjective standpoints. However "Western" sense this is reversed. We are comfortable talking about "your morals"my morality" as subjective, relative positions, but reserve the word ethics for something supposedly more objective, scientific, and therefore presumably more widely agreed.

And that's just the surface of it. Resolving the actual documented uses of "morality" versus "ethics" in case studies reveals a whole lot more. Some distinctions assign the qualities of rightness and wrongness to morality, but the terms goodness and badness to ethics. And then the are are the entirely subtle but profound distinctions Plato and Emmanuel Kant make about the mental/spiritual realm of ethics versus Aristotle's primary focus on how actual people might behave. Or a modern moral philosopher like Jonathan Haight's distinctions between morals and ethics.

The bottom line is it's not that important so long as you're consistent. However it is useful to have different concepts and to set them out as philosophical tools. So "especially easy" - I don't think so :)

> ethics (from Ethikos)

I gave you the correct source. The -ic- in ethikos forms an adjective from the noun, just like the Latin form -alis that you see in "morals". There is of course zero semantic distinction between a noun and its own adjectival form.

If you look up "moralis" in Lewis and Short, you'll see a citation noting that the word was coined by Cicero as part of a protest against the idea that Latin was unsuited to the purpose of discussing philosophy (popular opinion at the time being that you had to use Greek for that purpose). It begins by noting that "mores [are what] the Greeks call ethe".

The Greek and Latin words are translations of each other, and both refer to habits and norms. It is true that in modern English norms are a distinct concept from ethics. (Not true in Greek!) But it is not true that in modern English morals and ethics are distinct from each other.

Interesting. Thanks for your viewpointm and giving me even more knowledge to add to the already fascinating distinctions being explored. respects

I would think have it near the end, as grads to be work on their final projects.

Make the end push to graduate require ethics classes to book end all the technical detail they spent the prior years absorbing.