Data breaches, algorithmic bias, digital rights management, surveillance technology, facial recognition, Cambridge Analytica, online misinformation, job automation, the singularity – these are just some of the computer ethics issues that have dominated public discussion over the last five to ten years. Given the importance of these topics, one might expect there to be a large number of philosophers, technologists, and policy makers working actively on computer ethics education, policy, and research. But until very recently, this hasn’t been the case.
Dalhousie University has been ahead of the curve for the last 15 years. Since joining the department, Darren Abramson has taught Social, Ethical, and Professional Issues in Computer Science. It’s a required course for all computer science majors (part of the programme’s accreditation by the Canadian Information Processing Society), with 150–200 students per section, only 10% of whom are students from other majors taking the course as an elective.
I joined the department for my Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship at the same time that Darren was going on sabbatical and needed someone to cover the course for a year. At the time, I agreed because it sounded interesting, seemed like a good course to have in my portfolio, and connected to some research I was doing on intellectual accountability online.
In the end, I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that the course saved my career, and reinvigorated my love of philosophy.
In the most recent iteration of the course that I taught, using Darren’s syllabus as a template, we open with a general introduction to computer ethics, discussing how new technologies make new kinds of behavior possible, creating new social, ethical, and political problems. We also talk about the socio-technical systems perspective, an approach from science, technology, and society studies wherein we conceive of technologies not as independent artifacts, but as objects whose production, maintenance, and use are embedded in social structures and value systems.
Next, we turn to a discussion of professional ethics in the technology sector. Starting from a discussion of ethical failures past and recent – from the Therac-25 computer-controlled radiotherapy machine to Cambridge Analytica – students then learn the Association for Computing Machinery’s Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct and how to apply it to case studies.
Then comes a crash course in moral theories: utilitarianism, Kantianism, virtue theory, and rights theories. Why go to philosophical ethics at all? As I explain to the students, codes of conduct and legal regulations don’t always have the answers. Sometimes principles of a code will conflict. Regulations are often incomplete or absent. More to the point, merely complying with the law or the code does not entail that one is doing the right thing. So, it’s important to have some familiarity with more general ethical principles, how to apply them, and how to make arguments to justify one’s convictions.
The remaining half of the course is devoted to specific issues. We discuss the philosophy of intellectual property and how computing technologies have complicated intellectual property law, as well as copyleft and its origins in the Free and Open Source Software movement. We talk about the value of privacy, the threats posed to it by government and corporate surveillance, the ethics of hacking, and privacy regulations like the GDPR and PIPEDA. We learn about the social impacts of technology, including digital divides, algorithmic bias, changes to socio-economic classes, and the possibility that too much information is bad for us. Finally, we close with a mini-unit on the ethics of artificial intelligence and machine learning, looking at robot rights and morally significant decisions that are increasingly being made by machine learning systems.
I’ve taught the course two ways. Initially, I taught face-to-face, and experimented with a pedagogical approach called Team-Based Learning (TBL), which allows for deeper discussion and collaboration than is typically possible in a large class. To oversimplify, the basic approach is to put students into permanent teams who take pre-reading quizzes and complete discussion exercises together. I think TBL is an exciting alternative teaching method – and most of my students agreed! – but it deserves its own blog post to go into fully.
Unfortunately, because of COVID-19, I wasn’t able to continue using TBL for the second time I taught the course. In the move online, I tried some new things, some of which worked and some of which didn’t. I freely admit that I fell into the trap of adding too many small assignments, which ended up being a bit overwhelming. Things that worked well included the reading quizzes, which had exactly the spread of grades I expected, despite my refusing to use any digital proctoring.
Applied ethics courses get a bad rap for being giant classes filled with thankless, disengaged students, but that hasn’t been my experience. Sure, there are some students who are only there to get the credit, but I’m consistently impressed by how many of them are engaged by the material. And even if only a few of them learn how to be more ethical technologists, I think it’s worth it.
Getting into computer ethics has also been highly productive for my career beyond teaching. In winter 2021 I had just been through a difficult cycle on the philosophy job market and was feeling increasingly despondent about continuing in academia. (I’m still on the fence, for what it’s worth.) Since teaching the course, I’ve started connecting my existing interests in responsibility and epistemic injustice to computer ethics, launched interdisciplinary projects with colleagues at Dalhousie, started doing a little consulting work in AI ethics, and even learned a bit of programming.
Finally, this fall I will be starting a postdoc at Harvard University in their Embedded EthiCS programme, which integrates ethics lessons taught by philosophers into computer science courses. My role is to be a bridge between Harvard’s programme and other institutions who are interested in developing similar offerings, so please reach out if you would like to discuss!
The Syllabus Showcase of the APA Blog is designed to share insights into the syllabi of philosophy educators. We include syllabi in their original, unedited format that showcase a wide variety of philosophy classes. We would love for you to be a part of this project. Please contact Series Editor, Dr. Matt Deaton via MattDeaton.com or Editor of the Teaching Beat, Dr. Sabrina D. MisirHiralall via sabrinamisirhiralall@apaonline.org with potential submissions.
In-Person Syllabus:
All-Online Syllabus:
Trystan Goetze
Trystan S. Goetze (he/they/she) is a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Dalhousie University. He completed his PhD in 2018 at the University of Sheffield. His areas of specialization are epistemic injustice, moral responsibility, and computer ethics. This fall, he will take up a new postdoc in Harvard University’s Embedded EthiCS programme. In his spare time, he plays and designs tabletop roleplaying games.
