Communications of the ACM

come more thoughtful and better informed about their work and its long-term effects.

As in other areas of thought, this viewpoint diversity is a strength when it can be harnessed toward a productive exchange of ideas and perspectives. An example of such an exchange is the ongoing debate within the artificial intelligence research community about the appropriate value systems on which to build artificial intelligence systems. The goal of teaching ethics is to foster the debates and equip practitioners to participate productively. It does so, not by imposing a value system on students, but by informing them about the range of ethical descriptive and evaluative tools available to them.

At the same time, educators should make students and professionals aware of the social ramifications of their work, that research, development, and implementation can be carried out in a variety of ways and for a variety of ends. Computer science educators should dedicate significant time to ethics education, helping enable students to make informed, thoughtful, ethical choices about technology and its applications and implications.

What is ethics? Ethics can be understood as the task of answering “What should I do?” which is never a simple matter. Ethics includes both thought and practice, an organized and intentional reflection on morality and the effort to live in ways that are good, just, and/or right. Although many people use the words morality and ethics interchangeably, many ethicists understand them to be different. One common way of drawing the distinction is to define “morality” as a set of values or a worldview and “ethics” as the practice of reflecting on those values and their foundations and applications. 4, 22

There are many different, often con-
flicting, ways to understand how to be
moral. The clashes are sometimes be-
tween people who share the same funda-
mental premises and method of inquiry
into how to be moral but disagree about
conclusions. Other times, the clashes
are between people whose basic ideas of
how to answer the question of how to be
moral conflict with one another. Most
approaches to morality can be under-
stood in terms of the three major tradi-
tions of ethical thought—deontological
ethics, virtue ethics, and utilitarian-
ism—with each growing out of different
core questions and ways of seeing the
world.

Ethics is typically understood to be normative; that is, it is aimed at establishing norms of thought, values, or conduct. This assumption is especially prevalent in professional ethics courses that are typically used as a means to steer students’ future behavior toward a set of professionally agreed-upon values (such as professionalism and honesty). 26 But ethics is also a tool for description, furnishing decision makers with a critical framework that enables them to understand what is happening in a given situation and what is at stake in any action they might take. The boundary between normative and descriptive functions is sometimes fuzzy; for example, it is often the case that different details of a situation will appear salient depending on which ethical approach one adopts. This malleability of relevant details can make ethics itself seem murky or imprecise. However, teaching students to appreciate this difference, understand the modes of reasoning that they or others might employ in making an ethical decision, and move between these reasoning structures themselves is the goal of a good ethics course.

Educating students in the descriptive functions of ethics is as important as communicating to them the professional norms of computer science. Computer science is a field in which everyday practice and problem solving takes place in a context that could barely be imagined the decade before. Educators cannot predict the ethical quandaries their students will face. With an education in ethical description, the students will be better able to engage in subtle and substantive ethical reasoning when new and challenging problems confront them.

Practical challenges of teaching ethics. Ethics education is a notable challenge for two reasons. First, in the absence of any ideal universal ethics program, students must be taught how to approach problems as distinct from being led to particular pre-ordained conclusions that might narrow their vision and exclude important elements of a given problem. Second is how to achieve this goal while overcoming the biases students often bring to the classroom.

how to choose. Callahan10 also endorses the idea of helping “ ... students develop a means and a process for achieving their own moral judgments” when confronted with challenging situations.

It is essential that open ethical debates between well-informed practitioners take place. Computer science does not take place in a vacuum; to an ever-increasing degree, the IT systems and platforms, from search engines to smartphones, that are built by computer scientists and engineers are creating and redefining the social, political, and individual contexts in which human beings understand themselves. 21 Whatever principles and norms are adopted by computer scientists, and reinforced through the design and deployment of their systems, will have profound ethical and societal implications. Teachers and leaders in the field have a responsibility to drive the discussion about the effects of their own work and the work of their students. Indeed, Boyer6 argued that academics have a responsibility to engage students and the public with their research.