of ethics and the solution is not a more-perfect code but rather IT professionals better prepared to engage in ethical reasoning, and thus to make use of professional codes.

The course then spends several weeks on in-depth study of each of the three major ethical theories— utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics— with one day for each on a critical reading assignment that introduces the theory in detail and another day analyzing and discussing a short story from within the perspective of that theory. To prepare for these discussions, students write “ethical description exercises,” answering guided questions about how the story world can be understood through that week’s ethical lens. Some of these stories, particularly Elizabeth Bear’s “Dolly,” which is used to teach deontology, and E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops,” which is used to teach virtue ethics, end up as touchstones for the course, resurfacing in student discussions about later subjects.

After helping build the students’ analytic competency in ethical theory, the course moves to a consideration of major ethical concerns in IT, including surveillance, the interrelationship between news and social media, and self-driving cars. On the strength of the assigned science fiction stories, students consider both immediate practical problems and deep underlying issues that recur in IT ethics past, present, and possibly future.

Each story touches on multiple core issues, enabling the students to appreciate, and grapple with, the interconnectedness of the various challenges they will confront. Stories like James Patrick Kelly’s “Itsy Bitsy Spider” and Paul Shoemaker’s “Today I Am Paul,” both focusing on carebots looking after aging parents with dementia, serve as the basis for a discussion of carebots in particular but also inspire broader discussions on how technological interventions can change the conditions in human relationships. Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The Gambler” helps frame a discussion of new media and the attention economy, highlighting the particular hurdles this new information environment creates for minority experience and positions.

Ken Liu’s “Here-and-Now” offers a
potent view of the personal and social
stakes of the post-privacy era, particu-
larly in the context of the mostly un-
gled with scientific fact and prophetic
vision.” Using this broad definition, al-
most any fiction dealing with sufficiently
advanced technology is science fiction.
Though the majority of the literary and
philosophical establishment has not,
until recently, seen science fiction as a
venue for serious ethical thinking, this
fact reflects longstanding biases in the
field rather than the merits or possibili-
ties of science fiction itself.

Fiction allows educators to reframe recognizable human situations and problems in terms of unfamiliar settings and technology. Hence, any fiction, and especially science fiction in the case of technology, can be an ideal medium for raising and exploring ethical concerns. By presenting a familiar problem (such as conflicts between different social groups or the invasion of privacy in unfamiliar terms and settings), a work of science fiction can mitigate a reader’s tendency to defend, reflexively, their own previously held views. As Nussbaum32 writes, “Since the story is not ours, we do not get caught up in the vulgar heat of our personal jealousies or angers or the sometimes blinding violence of our loves.” In this way, science fiction creates an opportunity for students to gain fresh insight into, and even empathy for, ethical positions and people whose real-world analogues are not embraced by their values or politics.

We thus advocate science fiction for
several reasons in addition to the ones
outlined here. First, the use of futuristic
or alien settings allows students to de-
tach from political preconceptions and
experience the dilemmas of plot and
characters as something fresh. Sec-
ond, it has so far proven popular and
effective with students. One student
wrote the following on a Spring 2017
anonymous course evaluation: “Go-
ing into this course, there were sever-
al times that I could acknowledge an
ethical situation and had my own
ideas as to whether it was ‘right’ or
‘wrong,’ but I couldn’t necessarily ar-
ticulate why. This course gave me the
tools to be able to have a meaningful
discussion about these topics. It was
also a productive way to get out of the
coding mindset, take a step back, and
consider what other results might
come from the technologies that we will
be making. Phenomenal course, and
phenomenal instructor.” Finally, some
of the science fiction we chose also pos-
its new science infrastructure and al-
lows students to think about doing re-
search and development outside the
fairly rigid industrial and academic
boxes, driven by something other than
current funding paradigms. This cre-
ative thinking about practical prob-
lems, according to some philoso-
phers29, 37 and educators, 14 is a crucial
component in developing the ethical
reasoning abilities of students. All these
reasons, along with the distance from
the material that can be created through
fiction, have led to a very successful
course taught more than eight times as
of August 2018 and that has won us mul-
tiple teaching awards.

The Course

The aim of the course is to prepare our students to recognize ethical problems in their present and future work as technologists, focusing on methods of applied ethical reasoning (for the future), as well as on particular current problems. During class discussion and in homework assignments, they analyze both science fiction stories and brief articles, using the major ethical theories not only as evaluative tools but as a descriptive apparatus to enable them to recognize problems and consider possible solutions from multiple perspectives. As we have seen, this focus on ethical theory as a descriptive tool, combined with the use of science fiction stories as an arena for ethical description and analysis, sharpens the students’ ability to perceive and describe ethical challenges and expands their capacity to address them with creativity and nuance. An abbreviated example syllabus is outlined in the figure here.

The class opens with a crash course on ethical theories and a review of the IEEE and the ACM codes of ethics. Students consider the different modes of ethical engagement invited by each code and discuss whether, and in what ways, either one is likely to affect their decision making. Although this discussion typically evinces varying opinions on the usefulness or relevance of either code, there is near-universal consensus that the codes are not, by themselves, sufficient to help an IT professional address the challenging problems that may arise. We, the instructors, stress this is a problem common to all codes