[subroutine]

Whenever I hear about these ethics courses I'm mainly curios about what non-obvious substantive content being taught (because there is apparently enough to fill a semester-long course). Anyone who has taken one of these courses care to share something they learned that, before the course, had never considered?

[lumberjack]

The philosophical aspect of ethics is not void of substance. There are many ways to think about the ethics of a situation. You learn different frameworks of ethical thought and you gain new perspectives. Some people who are very ideological will write this off as useless bullshit, but only because they are very invested in only one perspective and not open minded enough to consider the merits of other ethical frameworks.

To give you a programming analogy, it is as if you always programmed imperatively, using C, because you learned that organically as you grew up, and then you take this class and you learn about functional programming and object oriented programming and you learn how you can think of the same problem from a completely different perspective.

Except with the crucial difference, that the end result will not necessarily be the same and in fact there is not always a right answer. But when there is not always one right answer it is better to know many possible answers and why they are possible answers, than only one such answer.

[burkaman]

My school had a required Computer Ethics course for CS majors. It was a bi-weekly discussion section with readings and a final essay, so not really a full size course. We covered intellectual property, privacy (SOPA was in the news at the time), net neutrality, and free speech/social networks.

These are all obvious subjects, but the idea was to get people to read about them and debate them, rather than just have an uninformed opinion and never discuss it.

[oh_sigh]

I'm sure there is non-obvious substantive content, but it is more akin to navel gazing than real-world applicable knowledge.

https://aeon.co/essays/how-often-do-ethics-professors-call-t...

> Ethicists do not behave better. But neither, overall, do they seem to behave worse

[matt4077]

You can easily fill a semester just discussing the trolley problem.

The most important aspect of such classes is invariably to teach that technical decisions have ethical consequences. Just getting people to think about those would be a big win. Too many people still take a "it's the person that kills, not the gun" to their task of building a better gun.