to grips with the complexity of considering a problem in the context of the wider world where it takes place. These materials include both a story frame to introduce the stories to students and a pedagogy guide to help instructors. The stories we have collected for the course (and, no doubt, many others) are engaging enough to spark energetic debate about ethical questions on their own and reward sustained scrutiny along ethical lines with several layers of productive challenge beyond an initial encounter. Once the problems illustrated by the narrative are described and conceptualized, the full ethical implications and challenges can be understood by “re-embedding” the problem back into its narrative context. The students should then consider how the world of the story created the conditions for both the external problems and the internal struggles addressed by the related characters.

The story frame furnishes the students with light guidelines, preparing them to pay attention to particular issues without instructing them how to answer, or even ask, ethical questions. The story frame thus leaves room for the students to discover the questions for themselves and grapple with the challenge of identifying and naming the problems at hand. This choice not only helps preserve the excitement of discovery that comes with reading good fiction but also requires the students to undertake these tasks on their own. While their own initial attempts to frame, define, and address ethical problems are likely inadequate, their attempts to do so both individually and collectively are an essential part of the learning in an ethics course, as the real-world problems they encounter will not come with a set of pre-formulated guidelines to steer them toward the nominal best answer.

The pedagogy guide, in addition to offering generalized tips for stimulating and sustaining productive discussion about fiction and ethics, also points the instructor toward relevant themes, details, and patterns in the text. These details and patterns do not, by themselves, constitute an “answer” to any of the core ethical questions raised by the stories.

As a list of facts, they are not especially
helpful for students grappling with the
regulated gig economy that depends
so heavily on IT innovations. And Mi-
chael Burstein’s “Teleabsence” ex-
plores how technological innovations
designed to address social inequality
can in fact exacerbate it while raising
probing questions about the powers
and limits of how one might redefine
oneself on the Internet. Although the
reading list has changed with each it-
eration, these stories and others like
them have formed the backbone of
each version of the course.

In each such iteration, our students have emerged from the semester’s reading inspired, troubled, and invigorated by the new perspectives they have gained on their future work.

The assignments in the course help develop their capacity for attention and critical thought in a manner intended to serve them well throughout their professional lives. By working descriptively with three different ethical theories, they develop a rich critical vocabulary for recognizing ethically fraught situations as they arise. The questions given to the students for a particular story are deliberately open-ended, requiring them to identify and formulate the problem from the ground up, an approach that addresses a practical gap created when they are taught using only case studies. This open-endedness also fosters a wider range of responses than a more closely tailored set of questions, thus creating a more varied class discussion.

Through the multiple writing assignments, the students not only become aware of a range of potential ethical challenges in their work in computer science but also alert to the variety of ways these problems might initially emerge. They are thus able to identify potential ethical risks in a given technology or model or in a company’s and the public’s use of the technology or model. They are better prepared to articulate their arguments for why a given approach is the most (or least) ethical choice and see past incomplete or specious defenses of potentially unethical projects.

Example Story Materials

Here, we include an example of the pedagogical materials we have developed to capitalize on the lively accessibility of the fiction-reading experience while also helping the students come

Science fiction
makes the key
ethical questions
of technology
development and
use more vivid and
engaging and the
critical resources
for addressing
ethical questions
more intelligible.