This entire thread is such a strong case for why all undergrad CS programs should have a core requirement of at least one ethics course.

Every business school and MBA program has ethics course requirements. Does it really make a difference? Maybe it does, and things would be even worse than they are otherwise. But I'm not sure.

I'm curious why you think an ethics course would actually change minds. In my experience in undergrad, we had a CS ethics course, and it went in in-one-ear-and-out-the-other for 99% of students, probably myself included. I know it was a thorough course but I promptly forgot all of it, and so did everyone else.

Ethical stance is not something you can teach in one course. If you don't have this disposition by the time you're in college, I think you're likely not learning it.

Don't ethics courses make people less ethical because they teach people how to come up with ethical justifications for straightforwardly bad things?

A course is nothing. I've long felt that Software Engineering should follow suit of many other engineering disciplines and push responsibility down to engineers. Like how when a bridge falls, an engineer has to answer for it.

I don't know exactly how that looks, and yes there are many issues with it, but we're living in the age of cowboy coding.

Especially if it has concrete historical examples of technology intended for good and how it was later used for evil, rather than something more generally-philosophical.

You really think taking an ethics COURSE will do anything?

How are you supposed to 'learn' ethics?

Never understood the point of those. My university had over 4 for the cyber students and over half the grads went on to work for the MIC contributing to blowing up brown children in the middle east anyway.

Clearly, our problem must have been that they didn't have 5 mandatory time-waster ethics courses. That surely would have solved the matter. Add in a few extra "racism is bad" and "don't be a meanie" courses to round out the collection, just for good measure.

At least I had 6 humanities courses telling me why communism is good

Edit: To make this comment have a little substance, what I'm getting at is, universities are already way too biased and one-sided on humanities issues to be teaching ethics. Students notice it too. I've gotten As on some insanely bad papers just cause I knew what they wanted to hear.

Whose ethics?

We had an ethics course, it was a requirement for graduation if I remember correctly.

It was entirely performative. You can teach a curriculum of ethics, but that won't make a person empathetic. These are courses for credit hours, not firmware updates.

And a person with empathy can always find or be given reasons to not apply his empathy to a person or a group of people.

The problem is not a lack of ethics courses. Many CS programs have those ethics courses.

The problem is all the techbros who take those ethics courses and laugh at them as easy and pointless and don't care about them.

There's a lot of very unserious people right now.