I participated in a study on ethics and technology being run by the CS department at my alma mater, and as compensation, received an Amazon gift card.
I keep thinking about this study and about the broader idea of teaching "ethics in technology". And the only way I can think of to express my thoughts is: imagine you have a university department whose purpose is to train people to work in the puppy-kicking factory. What would teaching ethics in that department look like? I suppose what it would look like is to prepare students to be good little Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts who will blow the whistle when they spot any ethical digressions in the puppy-kicking industry -- and to reassure them that yes, absolutely, there's someone watching over the industry who cares very much about those ethical digressions. To make sure they leave the university believing that while the puppy-kicking factories have their excesses here and there, those are all due to deviant individuals and as long as you're not one of them, you are morally blameless. To make sure, above all, that students never ask "why do we have puppy-kicking factories to begin with?"
It's like, conservatives aren't wrong when they say that "ethics" instruction is ideological indoctrination. It's just that what they're wrong about is the type of ideology involved, which in reality is fundamentally conservative. It is fundamentally conservative to teach that capitalism is a good system for addressing human needs, whose catastrophes all originate from deviant individuals and not from its basic norms. Even if that precept is never named explicitly and only makes an appearance as the thing that needs to be accepted or else nothing makes any sense.






