Communications of the ACM

system but to encourage reflection and precision of thought among all computer professionals. Teaching this way will, we hope, lead to an openness and exchange of ideas about both core values and best practices.

The very idea of a universally applicable ethical doctrine has serious problems. As anthropologist Melville Herskovits wrote in protest of the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the declaration— although intended “to be applicable to all human beings ... [is] conceived only in terms of the values prevalent in countries of Western Europe and America.” 15 That is, any attempt to codify a universal definition of the “right” way to be human cannot, by definition, take account of the particular social and ethical context of individual cultures. Cultures that have historically been most oppressed would thus be the most likely to be ignored or dele-gitimized by a “universal” declaration.

Although the precise status and possibilities of human rights discourse continue to be debated, scholars in both ethics and anthropology agree there is no way to formulate universal precepts of this kind that do not, on some level, reinforce the very kinds of social inequality they are designed to combat. The idea that a single code of laws or duties would solve all problems, and that our responsibility as teachers is to transmit those laws to students, is appealing but ultimately false. As Callahan10 says, “No teacher of ethics can assume that he or she has such a solid grasp on the nature of morality as to pretend to know what finally counts as good moral conduct. No society can assume it has any better grasp of what so counts as to empower teachers to propagate it in colleges and universities. The premise of higher education is that students are at an age where they have to begin coming to their own conclusions and shaping their own view of the world. It is the time and place to teach them intellectual independence, and instill in them a spirit of critical inquiry.” 10

The responsibility of an ethics in-
structor is to train students to engage in
understanding and reasoning. The stu-
dents are thus prepared to navigate situ-
ations that offer no clean solutions and
engage other computer science practi-
tioners in discussion about what and
knowledge (such as medicine, engi-
neering, and the undergraduate levels
of many sciences) there is a tempta-
tion to teach solely through the trans-
mitting of facts, rather than encourag-
ing discussion and dissent. 11 This
approach, which many undergradu-
ates have seen, can condition them to
interpret what they learn in terms of
an authority-based view of “truth” that
in turn leaves them unequipped to rea-
son about situations involving no sin-
gle correct answer or think cogently
about ethical trade-offs. 23, 34 We want to
teach our students to move past this
authority-based view and find the best,
most efficient solution to technical
problems; we argue that the same
skills must be developed to engage
with ethical challenges that arise from
the substance of their work as well.

Many courses focused on both research and ethical considerations taught through fiction have been offered worldwide, including at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany,a and a version focused on legal issues at Stanford University.b, 1–3, 19, 20 Courses in other fields use literature (including science fiction) in non-majors courses as both a “hook” and a platform for exploring core ethical issues. 3, 13 Scholars in other humanistic disciplines (such as history and philosophy) have also argued that literature is an invaluable teaching tool for ethics and other topics; see Copp, 16 Davis, 17 and Pease. 35 The common observation is that a fic-tion-based approach makes it much easier to push beyond a review of best practices toward a more in-depth education in ethical reasoning; Nevala-Lee33 said: “[ ... ] fiction often removes the intellectual and emotional resistance some students might at first feel towards the subject of ethics.”

Ethics and Values in
Computer Science

Researchers in computing, as in all pro-
fessions, hold multiple and often con-
flicting sets of values, as well as differ-
ent ways to approach living up to one’s
values. It is important to be clear that
the purpose in teaching ethics is not to
unify the field around a particular value
a http://waste.informatik.hu-berlin.de/Lehre/
ws0910/dystopien/