Blending Philosophy and Computer Science for Ethical Development

Dr. Elizabeth Edenberg speaks with students at one of Dr. Ray Essick’s Advanced Programming classes. (Katherine Arcement)

A semester in, Ethics Lab’s Mozilla Responsible CS project has shown great promise in helping students deeply consider ethics and social responsibility in their computer science work. 

Ethics Lab and Georgetown’s Computer Science Department were awarded the grant by the Mozilla Foundation in spring 2019 for their proposal to build ethics directly into computer science classes. The project is supported for the 2019-2020 academic year.

“It's been a really exciting project and it's been fun to see the real buy-in from both the CS professors and students in the class,” said Dr. Elizabeth Edenberg, Senior Ethicist at Ethics Lab. “The collaborative design we've been using has helped us show the values and social responsibility at stake in particular technical skills, as students are learning them,” she said. 

Students in one of Dr. Ray Essick’s Advanced Programming classes. (Katherine Arcement)

In practice, this means including Ethics Lab team members in selected sessions of CS classes, debating broader questions like, “Is computer science value neutral?”, and targeting exercises designed to uncover the values embedded in specific techniques, such as optimizing algorithms or inclusive design for human-computer interaction. 

“Technical design is not the only kind of design consideration,” said Dr. Ray Essick, Professor of the two Advanced Programming spring semester classes that are part of the project. “We want to think about all sorts of other things that go into designing software and designing systems.”  

Dr. Cal Newport, Professor of the Introduction to Algorithms class this spring that’s participating in the project, noted that this intersection of ethics and technology is one of the more exciting fields in applied philosophy. 

“My early experience is that there's huge potential in this endeavor. The intersections between ethics and the technical topics taught in this course were richer than I had expected, and the students seem to be appreciating the ability to occasionally step back and better understand the broader context of their work as computer scientists,” he said.

Students seem to agree: in written feedback on the final exam for the fall semester’s Advanced Programming class, Dr. Essick mentioned that many of them highlighted the work on ethics and social responsibility that they had discussed over the semester. 

The first year of the project officially closes at the end of the spring semester, but there is great support from Georgetown’s Computer Science Department and the Ethics Lab to continue and expand these efforts going forward. Through this collaboration, the Mozilla grant team hopes to help students better locate their technical efforts into a broad social and ethical context.