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I don't think that ethics should be taught as part of all CS classes, and I don't think the essay you wrote made a convincing case for this. All you have reall

I don't think that ethics should be taught as part of all CS classes, and I don't think the essay you wrote made a convincing case for this. All you have really shown is that ethical issues arise in CS. While this is true, I don't see any benefit to formally teaching thinking about ethics. It's not as if an engineer is never going to consider the ethical implications of their work just because they never took a course. It does make sense to discuss ethics when they are directly relevant, e.g. topics of privacy and security. EDIT: rewrote to correct an error in understanding the article.

tonyarkles 13y ago
That's really interesting for me. I did a CS and EE dual degree and we have a required ethics course as part of the engineering program (it's a requirement from Engineers Canada for an engineering accreditation). In the CS program, things like this were only discussed in context (e.g. privacy and security were discussed in the elective security class I took). Comparing the two, I did find the formal discussion in the Ethics class to be really interesting. It was a simple pass/fail course, we weren't really graded on things, other than being required to show up and talk about the kinds of issues we might encounter in the field. Some as mundane as a manager pushing you to shrink estimates and cut corners (ahem, software), some as serious as failing to do proper load analysis and having a shopping mall roof collapse after a heavy snowfall.