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Emanuelle Burton ( [e-mail]) is a faculty member in the Computer Science Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA.

Judy Goldsmith ( [e-mail]) is a professor of computer science in the Computer Science Department at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA.

Nicholas Mattei ( [e-mail]) is a research staff member with the IBM Research AI-Reasoning Lab at the T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, USA.

Copyright held by the authors.

Publication rights licensed to ACM. $15.00

taken? Describe them, again using the language of your assigned theory. According to that theory, what might be a better course of action, and why?

Argument. What argument do you think the ending of the story intends to make? You are still describing, rather than arguing. Use the language of your assigned theory to describe Liu’s argument.

Students will bring these assignments to class on the day they are due. They are welcome to make notes on them, over the course of discussion, for their own edification and turn them in to the professor at the end of class.

Conclusion

Teaching ethics to computer science students is a pressing responsibility for computer science faculty but also a challenge. Using fiction as the basis for an ethics course offers several advantages beyond its immediate appeal to many students and some faculty. First, fiction offers students a way to engage with ethical questions that helps them cultivate their capacity for moral imagination; science fiction in particular can make the ethical stakes of blue-sky projects vivid, pressing, and immediate. Second, stories offer students the chance to develop their writing and verbal skills in ethical description. And finally, discussing ethics in the context of fiction can make it easier for instructors to adopt an open-ended approach required for a good ethics course. A course built around fiction enables instructors to incorporate the best and most useful aspects of a humanistic approach to ethics education while remaining close to the central technological concerns within computer science.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank John Fike, Cory Siler, and Sara-Jo Swiatek for proofreading and discussion to improve this article. The ideas here are based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1646887. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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Watch the authors discuss their work in this exclusive Communications video. https://cacm.acm.org/videos/how- to-teach-computer-ethics-with-science-fiction