English

Embedded EthiCS: Integrating Ethics Broadly Across Computer Science Education

Computers and Society 2018-08-20 v1

Abstract

Computing technologies have become pervasive in daily life, sometimes bringing unintended but harmful consequences. For students to learn to think not only about what technology they could create, but also about what technology they should create, computer science curricula must expand to include ethical reasoning about the societal value and impact of these technologies. This paper presents Embedded EthiCS, a novel approach to integrating ethics into computer science education that incorporates ethical reasoning throughout courses in the standard computer science curriculum. It thus changes existing courses rather than requiring wholly new courses. The paper describes a pilot Embedded EthiCS program that embeds philosophers teaching ethical reasoning directly into computer science courses. It discusses lessons learned and challenges to implementing such a program across different types of academic institutions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1808.05686,
  title  = {Embedded EthiCS: Integrating Ethics Broadly Across Computer Science Education},
  author = {Barbara J. Grosz and David Gray Grant and Kate Vredenburgh and Jeff Behrends and Lily Hu and Alison Simmons and Jim Waldo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.05686},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

Manuscript in submission

R2 v1 2026-06-23T03:36:20.811Z