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