Spring 2018 Syllabus.
Week 1. Using ethical language; in-class discussion
Read Isaac Asimov’s short story “The Dead Past”
Week 2. Professional ethics
Read the ACM’s and the IEEE’s codes of ethics
Week 3. Utilitarianism
Read Harlan Ellison’s short story “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman”
Ethical description exercise #1 due in class
Week 4. Deontology
Read Elizabeth Bear’s short story “Dolly”
Ethical description exercise #2 due in class
Week 5. Virtue ethics
Read E.M. Forster’s short story “The Machine Stops”
Ethical description exercise #3 due in class
. . .
Week 6. Selfhood and technological mediation
Read James Patrick Kelly’s short story “Itsy Bitsy Spider” and
Tom Sorell’s and Heather Draper’s paper “Robot Carers, Ethics, and Older People”
Ethical description exercise #4 due in class
. . .
Week 9. Privacy
Read Ken Liu’s short story “Here-and-Now” and
Articles: Helen Nissenbaum’s “Privacy as Contextual Integrity,”
Manan Kakkar’s “A Case Against Online Privacy,” and Adam D. Moore’s “Privacy, Speech and
Values: What We Have No Business Knowing”
. . .
Week 14. What is ethical warfare?
Read Linda Nagata’s short story “Codename: Delphi,” Ronald C. Arkin’s essay “Ethical Robots
in Warfare,” Jean Elshtain’s paper “The Problem of Dirty Hands,” and Emerson T. Brooking’s
and Peter Singer’s “War Goes Viral”
Ethical argument assignment #3 due in class
Last week. Professional ethics, the importance of integrity
Read E. Saxey’s short story “Not Smart, Not Clever”
Ethical argument assignment #4 due in class
Reread Asimov’s “The Dead Past”
suited to teaching computer ethics. As
Alec Nevala-Lee31 says, “Science fiction
has been closely entwined with military
and technological development from
the very beginning. The first true science
fiction pulp magazine, Amazing Stories,
was founded by editor Hugo Gernsback
expressly as a vehicle for educating its
readers about future technology.” Our
project builds on this long-recognized
insight—that science fiction is, in key re-
spects, better able than “realistic” fic-
tion to reflect the near future (or possi-
ble futures) in which computer
professionals work. Science fiction thus
permits a curricular design that hews
more closely to the concerns and quan-
daries of computer-related fields of
study and work. A successful ethics
course will reframe the task of ethical
engagement so students understand the
ongoing responsibility to ask ethical
questions of themselves and their work;
and further, that they are equipped to
perceive, describe, and understand the
challenges as they arise. We find that sci-
ence fiction makes the key ethical ques-
tions of technology development and
use more vivid and engaging and the
critical resources for addressing ethical
questions more intelligible.
We take science fiction in its broadest
sense, as the fantastical worlds or even
the futuristic technology gives us a start-
ing platform for discussion. The catego-
ry of science fiction was first described
by Hugo Gernsback, for whom the pres-
tigious Hugo Prize is named, in the edi-
torial of the first issue of Amazing Stories
in 1926 as, “ ... I mean the Jules Verne,
H.G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of
story—a charming romance intermin-
workers with robots. They may focus on
the happiness of the factory owners,
shareholders, and those who will pay
less for manufactured goods, without
considering the utility of the human
factory workers and those whose jobs
depend on factory workers having mon-
ey to spend; or even the more high-level
question about whether or not it is rea-
sonable to consider human beings and
machines as interchangeable. Indeed,
the three approaches can be comple-
mentary, or even mutually informative;
for example, recent theorists have ar-
gued that virtue ethics is best seen as
part of successful deontology. 27
Why fiction to teach ethics? Stories—
literature, plays, poetry, and other narrative forms—have always been a way to
talk about the world as it is, telling us
what it is like and what effect our choices
will have. Whether they are transmitted
in print or through other media, stories
play a potent role in shaping the
thoughts and ideas of individuals, as
well as the cultural norms of the societies in which they live.
Scholars of ethics have, in the past
several decades, embraced fiction as an
ideal way to think about and teach ethics,
because, as philosopher Martha Nussbaum32 writes, fiction “ … frequently
places us in a position that is both like
and unlike the position we occupy in
life; like, in that we are emotionally involved with the characters, active with
them, and aware of our incompleteness;
unlike, in that we are free of the sources
of distortion that frequently impede our
real-life deliberations.” By offering the
reader both immersion and distance, an
ethics course based in fiction helps students perceive the degree to which ethical quandaries are tangled up in other
aspects of life while furnishing a context
that keeps them connected to abstract
principles and questions. As such, fic-tion-based ethics education helps them
cultivate the capacity to recognize ethically complex situations as they arise or
extract an ethical dilemma from a larger
context. This combination of qualities
also helps students develop the moral
imagination that is a key component of
successful ethics education. 10 The common alternative is to provide them with
a prepackaged case studies in which the
particular ethical dilemma under study
is cleanly identified for the student.
Science fiction is particularly well