Mozilla Challenges Educators To Integrate Ethics Into STEM (fastcompany.com)

Today, Mozilla, along with Omidyar Network, Schmidt Futures, and Craig Newmark Philanthropies, is launching a competition for professors and educators to effectively integrate ethics into computer science education at the undergraduate level. From a report: The context, called the Responsible Computer Science Challenge, will award up to $3.5 million over the next two years to proposals focused on how to make ethics relevant to young technologists. "You can't take an ethics course from 50 or even 25 years ago and drop it in the middle of a computer science program and expect it to grab people or be particularly applicable," Mitchell Baker, the founder and chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation, said. "We are looking to encourage ways of teaching ethics that make sense in a computer science program, that make sense today, and that make sense in understanding questions of data."

Comments

Who's Ethics?

[Archangel Michael]

Who's Ethics are we going to integrate into STEM?

Re:Who's Ethics?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully not MBA ethics.

Re:Who's Ethics?

[mi]

Who's Ethics are we going to integrate into STEM?

The teacher's, of course. And that of the teachers of teachers.

Rule #1: it is unethical to vote for RethugliKKKunt$...

Re:Who's Ethics?

[Noishkel]

Probably the same assholes that want to change 'STEM' to 'STEAM' with the addition of 'arts' to the STEM acronym. So basically talent-less arts majors that don't have any marketable skills.

Re:Who's Ethics?

[fbobraga]

Don't you mean "morals"? "Ethics" is another thing...

Re:Who's Ethics?

[sexconker]

Ethics are morals. The ONLY difference is that when people want to shame or punish your for not sharing their morals, they call them ethics instead.

Re:Who's Ethics?

[ShanghaiBill]

Ethics are morals.

Ethics are values set by a society or organization.

Morals are your own internal values.

You can be simultaneously ethical and immoral, or moral but unethical.

I have found that it is best to be flexible in both ethics and morality. Life is more fun that way.

Re:Who's Ethics?

[fbobraga]

Ethics are morals.

I strongly disagree from this: there's no "who" for ethics...

The ONLY difference is that when people want to shame or punish your for not sharing their morals, they call them ethics instead.

You realizes that you are doing exactly this, no?

Re:Who's Ethics?

[ShanghaiBill]

The Mozilla Foundation raises money from donors who believe they are funding free software development. Then Mozilla spends that money instead on this ideological crusade, and other nonsense such as sponsoring a surfing contest.

Is this money diversion and mission creep ethical?

My opinion:
1. Mozilla has way more money than they need for their core mission.
2. Mozilla should not be lecturing anyone on ethics.

Re:Who's Ethics?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty much what I came here to post

When I completed my MBA all focus was on Milton Friedman, who claimed that the only social responsibility of corporations is to increase its profits, while staying within "the rules of the game" .

Of course we have all seen how this played out over the past few decades where wealthy businesses have bought politicians to change the rules of the game (in their favor), eliminated any actual enforcement of remaining rules (Friedman said rules should be followed ONLY if the cost of breaking them was greater than the profit) and propagandized the public to believe that getting mugged by corporations is a good thing.

So, yeah if we had STEM following current business ethics then we should expect completely unethical behavior

Re:Who's Ethics?

[sexconker]

Ethics are morals.

Ethics are values set by a society or organization.

Morals are your own internal values.

That's the common bullshit. Look at what that really means, though. If YOUR values don't match up with society's, then it's nothing more than someone forcing their values on you, as society's values don't reflect your own. My statement above stands correct and true.

Re:Who's Ethics?

[sexconker]

I strongly disagree from this: there's no "who" for ethics...

Of course there is. They're a human construct and open to human interpretation.

You realizes that you are doing exactly this, no?

No, I'm not. I'm pointing out the fact that when someone cries about ethics they're really crying about their own morals (or worse, just their own interests) and how someone did something that doesn't align with them. I'm not making a judgment on anyone's morals. I'm merely pointing out that "ethics" are nothing more than widely established (even if not actually widely accepted or held) morals. The term itself is nothing but an abused proxy held up as some accepted paradigm.

Re:Who's Ethics?

[Archangel Michael]

I'm pretty sure a lot of people won't accept my ethical values. They might agree with some, and not others. I can assure you that my ethics and morals are relatively tame, but none the less, I'm pretty sure many wouldn't want me teaching my version of ethics to young adults.

It is much easier to scream about Racism, Sexism, Homophobia, Bigotry than it is to form a coherent code of ethics that has deliberative rational thought behind it (even if you disagree with my rationale).

The issue remains whose ethics are we talking about? I'm sure that plenty of people thought Nazism was ethical, or thinking socialism is ethical today. I happen to despise leftist ethics, because they are almost universally opposed to individual liberty in some degree. Lefitsts think they are ethical as they groupthink their way towards tyranny.

Re: Who's Ethics?

[Archangel Michael]

Thank you for not being a grammar Nazi. :-)

There can be global rules for ethics, the question is, is mandating them ethical? :-D

Re: Who's Ethics?

[hey!]

A foundation in ethics would necessarily include the critical study of a number of philosophical approaches to ethics (rights/duties, consequentialism, character-based ethics etc.) Although these approaches are fundamentally different, they each correspond in certain situations to common intuitive notions of right and wrong, and in other cases they may challenge our assumptions, which is actually a good thing if you don't enjoy being blindsided.

If you are looking for an oracle or a simple algorithm that gives you easy, pat answers to questions, look no farther than your personal prejudices and biases. We are never more sure of ourselves than when we're squarely in the center of whatever blind spot we have. But a study of ethics enriches our decisions with perspective.

I always felt that an interest in philosophical ethics and the social sciences gave me an advantage as a system designer. The reason is that when a node in dome UML diagram happens to be a person or group, there's a lot of complexity your model is missing.

People have rights and opinions and needs and attitudes. A study of ethics doesn't tell you necessarily the right things to do about that, but it does open your mind to some of that complexity. That's good, because unlike robots, people behave in unpredictable ways when they feel they've been treated unfairly, or that their needs have been ignored, or their dignity has been disrespected. We all understand this in relation to ourselves, but we forget when dealing with other people.

Which brings me to Kant's second formulation of the Categorical Imperative: always treat humanity, in yourself as a person or other people, as an end as well as a means to an end. My practical take on this is that when you're a designer everyone who plays a role in your system is on some level your client, not just an abstract worker bee or resource to be tapped.

Of course ethical design remains a choice, and this kind of knowledge can be used for harm and exploitation, like any other. For examples look no farther than social media, which despite highminded rhetoric about connecting people is in fact ruthlessly designed to exploit tribalism for profit.

Re: Who's Ethics?

[hey!]

There's nothing wrong with that approach to corporate ethics, as long as corporations don't participate in defining or enforcing the rules of the game. If they are, then in effect there are no rules.

Re:Who's Ethics?

[ShanghaiBill]

If YOUR values don't match up with society's, then it's nothing more than someone forcing their values on you

Correct. That is exactly what it is.

My statement above stands correct and true.

Wrong. Ethics and morals are not the same. Morals means following your heart. Ethics means following the rules.

Re:Who's Ethics?

[plopez]

I've never been aware of any ethics in IT/Software develoment. I also know of no board of ethics which can pull a programmer's or administrator's license to operate.

Re: Who's Ethics?

[UnknownSoldier]

> Ethics is 100% relative, but it can be taught critically and in a scientific way.

Uh, Science is amoral by definition

Re:Who's Ethics?

[hairyfeet]

Uhhh...have you seen the way US colleges are being run lately? Evergreen ring ANY bells?

If you don't think this will be used to push "wokeness" so hard left even Karl Marx would wince? I have a bridge you might be interested in, its in a high traffic area, good moneymaker!

Re:Who's Ethics?

[Aighearach]

Ethics implies that the rules were agreed on, either by society generally, or by some group you're a part of such as an industry, company, etc.

Following arbitrary or dictatorial rules are not a part of ethics, except when there is an ethical agreement to do so under certain conditions. For example, a lawyer might be ethically obligated to follow dictatorial rules during the process of challenging them, while a random person on the street might only be risking an imposed consequence, not any ethical failing.

Re:Who's Ethics?

[Aighearach]

I've never been aware of any ethics in IT/Software develoment. I also know of no board of ethics which can pull a programmer's or administrator's license to operate.

If you know you don't have access to the file, don't try to access the file.

Follow the intent of security procedures, don't try to bypass them just because there wasn't an electric fence keeping you out.

When your employment relationship ends, cease all access to company resources. Turn over passwords/keys. Destroy backups after verifying they are not needed. This all applies to clients accounts, too, not just employment.

Don't include software you didn't write in your work product without permission. Even if you 3 it.

Don't tell anybody outside the company anything, including what the cafeteria special is, unless you're sure that you're supposed to talk about it. Details happen at work, not on twitter. Be away from work when you leave work. Be at work when you arrive at work.

Ethics comes from having agreed standards of conduct, the idea is no premised on having an enforcer who takes away your license. In fact, it might not even be a violation of ethics that gets you fired, it might just be a lack of respect shown for ethics.

Personally, I want to be able to trust people a lot farther than just meeting the minimum ethical standards, so lack of respect is a major red flag that indicates substantial daylight between my minimum standards and their work practices.

Re:Who's Ethics?

[Aighearach]

Nobody starts with Socrates, everybody starts with Plato who uses a character named Socrates.

Socrates himself only got as far as knowing he didn't have any wisdom, and the discovery that neither did anybody else and most of them didn't even know it. Pretty much everything else that he is known to have said were various versions of "You're wrong!" If he bothered to elaborate, it was probably to point out that everybody else was wrong, too.

It is important, but doesn't really contribute much to ethics. Information theory, sure, philosophy generally, sure.

Re: Who's Ethics?

[astrofurter]

"Ethics" is just morality in a wig, dressed up for atheists who aren't honest enough and strong enough to embrace the nihilism that is the inescapable consequence of their faith.

Re: Who's Ethics?

[hey!]

You are talking about ethics like someone who's never actually studied it. Ethics is a subject is hard. You study it by examining dilemmas, many of which have no known unambiguously good solution.

The point isn't necessarily to shape students' beliefs, it is to sharpen their thinking. In a way it's a lot like math: if you believe certain things, then you must logically believe other things. This is actually about curtailing the effects of emotion on decision-making.

Feelings as a guide to behavior work fine for an individual, but as soon as you have two people who have to agree on what's right and wrong, you're screwed right from the start. But if we both agree on some ground rules, say that killing people is usually a bad thing but there are some exceptions to that rule, we can work out a large number of cases where we actually agree, even if we don't feel the same about the person in question.

Re:Who's Ethics?

[DaveV1.0]

Yes, let's talk about the ethics of politicians. We have politicians on the left who advocate basically destroying this country by removing all borders and all border protections so illegal aliens and drugs can flow in. Those are shitty ethics too.

Re:Who's Ethics?

[AmiMoJo]

Considering that Mozilla has a long history of supporting social/community projects and was in fact built on the idea of being an active member of the open source community, it seems unlikely that they are duping investors.

Re: Who's Ethics?

[AmiMoJo]

That's getting a little bit ahead of things. Most courses in engineering ethics focus on understanding how engineering affects people and the world. Just thinking about the wider implications beyond "hay we can do this" is the point.

An oft cited example is leaded petrol. The goal was to reduce engine knocking, and it worked. But it had some really bad consequences too. Consequences that were hard to predict at the time, and which some argue were worth accepting for the benefits we got in return. The goal of ethics in engineering courses is to teach people to think about the consequences beyond the mere chemistry, the fact that a substance is being introduced into the environment and people are being exposed to it, and that at the time the consequences were not clear.

Re:Who's Ethics?

[AmiMoJo]

It's very rare that a single person builds any kind of complex system and then promotes/sells it on their own. More likely there will be a team of people with somewhat diverse views on ethics, so at least there might be a debate.

It's much easier to scream about Leftists and groupthink, but in reality most things are a group effort and ethics are a matter for discussion.

Re:Who's Ethics?

[GonzoPhysicist]

I haven't heard of this attempted inclusion before. While it's seems bizarre to add the arts to that grouping, I strongly believe that those fields should include some arts education. Art is basically a form of communication or expression and that's a skill many STEM focused people could use more of.

Re: Who's Ethics?

[Uberbah]

"Ethics" is just morality in a wig, dressed up for atheists who aren't honest enough and strong enough to embrace the nihilism that is the inescapable consequence of their faith.

Riiiiight. You realize that anyone who uses this line of reasoning is saying the only thing that's keeping them from murdering, robbing and raping is a belief in invisible sky gods? And you think this speaks well of you?

Re: Who's Ethics?

[GonzoPhysicist]

That depends on your morals, I see willful ignorance and blind faith as very amoral. Science opposes those, so to me, the pursuit of science is a moral endeavor.

Re: Who's Ethics?

[UnknownSoldier]

> willful ignorance and blind faith as very amoral. Science opposes those,

Science progresses one funeral at a time -- Max Planck

Re: Who's Ethics?

[astrofurter]

Even putting aside your childish disparagement of traditional conceptions of deity - you seem to have missed the point. Many things may prevent a person from murdering, robbing, & raping. Faith in a God or gods is one of them. Faith in a false god like "science(tm)" or "ethics". Social instincts, social conformity. Fear of retaliation or fear of police. Laziness.

My point is simple and humble. It makes no claims about sociology or mass behavior. It is simply that there is no morality, no right & wrong, without a god. It is far from an original claim, having been made most famously by Nietzsche, and some would say by Maimonides long before that.

Re:Who's Ethics?

[HornWumpus]

It remains unethical to let a sucker keep his money.

Ethics?

[Anonymous Coward]

Like what happened to Brendan Eich?

Re:Ethics?

[cervesaebraciator]

On a related note, Aristotle held that the study of ethics was not useful for those who were not already habituated to behaving ethically.

Hence a young man is not a proper hearer of lectures on political science; for he is inexperienced in the actions that occur in life, but its discussions start from these and are about these; and, further, since he tends to follow his passions, his study will be vain and unprofitable, because the end aimed at is not knowledge but action. And it makes no difference whether he is young in years or youthful in character; the defect does not depend on time, but on his living, and pursuing each successive object, as passion directs. For to such persons, as to the incontinent, knowledge brings no profit; but to those who desire and act in accordance with a rational principle knowledge about such matters will be of great benefit. [Nichomachean Ethics I.3]

(Note that he considered the study of ethics to fall under what's termed 'political science' above. The Greek term is 'politikos.' You're just as well to read the above as 'ethics,' given the context.)

Aristotle did think the study of value to those who already normally behaved ethically, inasmuch as it would help them to determine difficult cases, reflect on the meaning of actions, attain happiness (eudaimonia), etc.

But, for what it's worth, the guy who invented the study of ethics would likely agree with your point.

P.s., post edit--What? Slashdot still won't let me write Greek characters? It's been in Unicode since, well, Unicode has been. Why hasn't this part of Slashdot caught up with 1991?

Re:Ethics?

[Tsolias]

Brendan supported the wrong ethics.

Re:Ethics?

[Tsolias]

no, the guy who lost his job because he had a different opinion.
It didn't have anything to do with his job, he just happened to have other likes and dislikes when he got home.
and to top that, we watch all day long those SJW idiots on twitter explicitly saying "opinions my own, not my employer's",
guess what, if your opinion doesn't fit their mentality, your opinion gets dragged into your work environment, either you like it or not.
The best part about this shit show is that mozzarella won't exist in a few years.

Re:Ethics?

[Crashmarik]

Brendan supported the wrong ethics.

Well not if you actually believe in evolution instead of just hating people that don't. Which is the problem with so much of the SJW agenda, it isn't positive or reasoned it's just people that have a desperate need to give the middle finger to anyone that resembles their parents.

Re:Ethics?

[Kjella]

If "ethics" courses worked, then why the hell is basically every major business scandal the result of managers... who already take ethics courses? #VWDidNothingWrong

Because we want things like money, power, sex and so on. You're stupid if you think an ethics course on corruption will end all corruption, it'll still happen if the benefits exceed the risk. Conversely when something is seen as having risk but no gain it's easy to avoid it, particularly if somebody is looking to set an example and show their zero tolerance policy. The course itself is mostly just awareness, this is the different forms and shapes it can take, this is our policy, these kinds of behaviors are not acceptable, these are the possible consequences. They rarely go down to the fundamentals on how we agree on what's ethical and not, they're basically dictating.

Re:Ethics?

[Your.Master]

I agree with most of what you say, but you can demand scientific evidence that ethics questions cause people to think about ethics and change their behaviour, as opposed to ethics classes causing people being better able to justify the behaviour they would have done anyway.

Re:Ethics?

[Anonymous Coward]

people don't want to associate with arseholes

Apparently the gays do.

Re: Ethics?

[Anonymous Coward]

Many, many people do not want to associate with the kind of degenerates who ganged up in a lynch mob against Mr Eich.

The pendulum is swinging. The assholes behind the recent witch hunts and purges may soon find themselves witch hunted and purged.

Re:Ethics?

[Uberbah]

Yes, getting rid of a bigoted POS was upholding ethics. Any more questions?

Re:Ethics?

[Uberbah]

Well not if you actually believe in evolution instead of just hating people that don't. Which is the problem with so much of the SJW agenda, it isn't positive or reasoned it's just people that have a desperate need to give the middle finger to anyone that resembles their parents.

So much willful, bigoted dumbfuckery.

Re:Ethics?

[Uberbah]

no, the guy who lost his job because he's a bigot who campaigned to oppress other people

FTBSFY

Re:Ethics?

[Crashmarik]

Well not if you actually believe in evolution instead of just hating people that don't. Which is the problem with so much of the SJW agenda, it isn't positive or reasoned it's just people that have a desperate need to give the middle finger to anyone that resembles their parents.

So much willful, bigoted dumbfuckery.

Thanks, my point was that SJWs didn't have a rational or reasoned approach to ethics, and you come here and show you don't have anything beyond name calling.

::Golf Clap:: Bravo.

Re:Ethics?

[Uberbah]

Problem with your storyline: I trash SJW's all the time. If only you could take your self and all your bigoted dumbfuck friends and move out to an island with SJW's, so you can righteously throw your own excrement at each other while engaging in delusions of moral superiority.

Re:Ethics?

[Crashmarik]

Problem with your storyline: I trash SJW's all the time. If only you could take your self and all your bigoted dumbfuck friends and move out to an island with SJW's, so you can righteously throw your own excrement at each other while engaging in delusions of moral superiority.

Unh hunh. You're pretty big on projection aren't you ?

So what?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

People are dying right now in the worst storm since Andrew and Camille and you are posting about some STEM nonsense.

So?

Talking about nerd stuff on a nerd board doesn't in any way prevent talking, or doing something, about such a storm and the people in harm's way.

Even on the same site.

Meanwhile, just because, for the people in the storm, everything else stops while they work on staying alive, doesn't mean that everything stops for everybody else. Quite the contrary: If we let it make everything else stop we've just massively increased the harm done by the storm.

Sure we help out where we can. But we don't drop everything else we do.

Re: So what?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

May the Lord have mercy on your soul

If one wants freedom one must ignore the petty totalitarians who would manipulate via social pressure.

My soul and The Lord's mercy on it are an issue between the two of us. Third parties need not bother meddling.

3.5M for something that already exists?

[Anonymous Coward]

I did this during my CS undergrad back in 2006. It was called "Legal, Ethical and Social Issues in computing". I thought it was interesting and definitely more useful to my career than "algorithms and data structures" ever was.

Everything Relative

[Etcetera]

The depressing thing about our current times, is that people are speaking past each other so much there's little that's agreed on.

Teaching (or at least reminding people of) ethics in technology is a noble goal... One of my favorite courses as an undergrad (despite the textbook itself being rather poorly written) was an Ethics in Computing course, and I'm sure there's a lot more to be said now.

"All science, no philosophy" leads to bad outcomes, I think we can agree. The problem is that I don't know that I trust any of Silicon Valley to do so in any sort of neutral manner.... Mozilla's Ethics are that Brendan Eich should have been fired. Can't say I agree with that.

Ethics isn't a fad

[Anonymous Coward]

In my program there were to ethics classes. One the typical intro, and the other applied ethics in technology focusing on lawful compliance. Once my initial degrees were completed I moved on to studying ethics in more depth.

My problem with this effort is an assumption that ethics from 25 years ago does not make sense. Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is still the most read ethical treatise and one of the oldest. Ethics does not change based on buzzwords, quarterly reports, or technologies. Ethics has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with the decisions humans make.

The fact that this group of people seem to treat ethics like a fad tells me everything I need to know. They want to integrate their ethic, their fad, and Baker doesn't understand what ethics is. Ethics tells us nothing on "understanding questions of data." Data is for science. Ethics is not a science and does not deal in data but ought, can, judgement, and dessert.

Important to point out that their "up to 3.5 million" includes zero, showing just how committed to ethics the Mozilla Foundation really are.

Rule 1: Don't Fire People for Political Donations

[Anonymous Coward]

Rule 2: Don't participate in mass censoring/tracking projects in totalitarian regimes.

Rule 3: Don't infringe on people's religious freedoms in your home country while doing business with oppressive religious states in the Middle East.

Rule 4: Don't replace your local workers with visa workers.

There's more, of course, but that seems like a good starting set.

Honesty, Openess, and Truthfulness

[Anonymous Coward]

Very simple rules on how to be ethical is to be
1) open (transparency)
2) honest (don't tell lies)
3) truthful ( actively making known all the full truth of a matter).

Following these simple and objective rules, you inform users of your software whether you plan on (or are reserving the potentiality of) exploiting them now and/or in the future. So for example, you can write exploitative software that mines users' data and then sell that data to the highest bidder, just so long as you inform your users about it. Informing them has to be open, honest and truthful. This knowledge empowers users.

Re:Honesty, Openess, and Truthfulness

[HornWumpus]

I can't play poker under those rules.

Life is more poker than chess. Accept it.

If software is free, you are not the customer, you are the product. Everybody knows that.

If you expect the things you ask for, you are a sucker.

Re:Honesty, Openess, and Truthfulness

[HornWumpus]

As far as life is concerned, everyone who plays knows up front that deception, manipulation, lying, and opaqueness are apart of the game.

Ethics?

[ckatko]

Because, you know, all those ethics courses managers take (the people who make all the decisions) are working out great!

That's one of the silliest things of today. Sexual harassment surveys. Domestic abuse billboards and NFL commercials. "Code of conduct" seminars.

It's GREAT to want to make the world a better place. However, what we're lacking is ANY SCIENTIFIC PROOF whatsoever that doing these things actually solves the problem they're trying to solve.

In fact, there WAS a study that showed the opposite. That women who were told of all the "unconscious" ways that men oppress women, the women were less likely to engage and integrate into the workplace because they were "primed" and constantly looking for harassment and were more likely to assume it was harassment even when it wasn't. Likewise, the men in the study after going to these seminars? Simply __stopped interacting with women__. [1]

Which is GREAT way to get women to powerful positions in STEM. Take all the guys currently in power, and make sure they never interact and see hardworking, intelligent women and give them raises.

You see how "feeling like your helping" doesn't actually equate to "helping"? Kind of like how like 90% of all the funds for Bono's 1985 Live Aid charity concert to help stop Ethopia famine, ended up FUNDING AN WARLORD'S ARMY.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us...
[2] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Li...

If "ethics" courses worked, then why the hell is basically every major business scandal the result of managers... who already take ethics courses? #VWDidNothingWrong

People keep challenging Mozilla

[quonset]

to put a web browser in their software, but we're still waiting all these years later.

You can talk all you want, but either someone understands ethics and ethical behavior, or they don't. If they do, you're wasting your breath. If they respond with some claptrap about how stealing music, videos, or software without compensating the owner/producer for their work is fine, or come up with excuse after excuse why ethics work on a sliding scale, you're wasting your breath.

Re:People keep challenging Mozilla

[Ol Olsoc]

to put a web browser in their software, but we're still waiting all these years later.

You can talk all you want, but either someone understands ethics and ethical behavior, or they don't. If they do, you're wasting your breath. If they respond with some claptrap about how stealing music, videos, or software without compensating the owner/producer for their work is fine, or come up with excuse after excuse why ethics work on a sliding scale, you're wasting your breath.

This should be at +5 insightful.

Ethics. How on earth can you teach ethics to adults?How on earth can people wish to have ethics when it is obvious that at the highest positions, sociopathy is apparently ethics?

But somehow, we are going to take one niche of STEM, and demand that they must act ethically.

I see. This seems like a training program to firmly seat the sociopaths that control these "ethical programmers".

In the big picture, ethics is simple. The golden rule. Or even Bill and Ted's "Be excellent to each other".

But let's face it. People in positions of power don't often have it. And if you don't "Have it" when taking your programming classes, you aren't going to ever get it.

And of course there is that nasty matter of definition. Give me 10 people, and I'll get 6 or 7 versions of what is or isn't ethical. I got much of my ethics from my mother, and much from an innate rationale that the golden rule makes good sense. But I also understand that there are people who will never be ethical, but are psychopathic.

And there are occasions that they get curb stomped, and it is right and just.

Engineering ethics vs Attorney ethics

[Latent Heat]

Engineering ethics demands that you sacrifice career, family, and livelihood to turn "whistleblower" if management ignores your pleas that their proposed cost-saving measure will threaten public safety and despoil the environment.

Attorney ethics demands that you refrain from stealing from your clients.

Actual Link?

[cervesaebraciator]

I think that this was meant to be the actual link. Or, better still, you could just go to the announcement.

Don't copy that floppy!

[Anonymous Coward]

You wouldn't steal a car would you?

Don't they put ethics in the dumbed down AP courses in the code camps for young un's?

Politics for tech workers

[AHuxley]

Wait for new workers to say they won't work on complex projects due to the political "ethics" that they learned in university adding politics to every level of education.
The time it takes US brand to sit down with its workers and work out how to start work again will allow global competitors to have the same project ready on time.
The next project is given to any english speaking global company that can do the same work for the same price on time.
Who is going to risk US workers if they stop work to request ethics and political reviews for every new complex project?

Teach workers the skills they need to be smarter than every other nation. Not how to stop work for political reasons.
Once US workers get a reputation as argumentative about project details then work will move to nations with workers who can get the work done.
With other nations currency weakness they can offer lower costs and skilled staff who are able to work on any project.
They have skilled workers who will not be stopping a project to talk about "ethics" while getting paid as they know they have a project to get ready on time.

Their branding and reputation will grow as US workers are seen as difficult and slow for the same work.

Linked article has nothing about the competition

[squidinkcalligraphy]

Here's a link with some actual info: https://foundation.mozilla.org...

Old joke

[Opportunist]

Back in Soviet times, every curriculum included a lot of Marxism/Leninism, leading to this joke:

Him: Ok, you've been trying to learn cooking for about a year now, how far did you get with your class?
Her: Well, about to the fifth Party Convention.

In other words, stop stuffing degrees with bullshit.

Re:It is *literally* psychopathy!

[hey!]

Well, it's not literally "psychopathy" because corporations aren't real people; that's just a legal fiction. But let's run with that analogy for a moment. It's not a perfect analogy because psychopaths are not very punishment sensitive. Corporations will avoid punishments if they're sufficiently large, which they seldom are, and sufficiently certain, which they seldom are.

There are promising treatment programs for young psychopaths that are predicated on the unique characteristics of psychopaths; they are unusually reward-oriented. Thus they are good candidates for operant conditioning, but poor candidates for avoidance conditioning. The idea is to teach them that playing within the rules is rewarding rather than that playing outside the rules is punishing.

Now getting back to my post, which you obviously didn't bother reading to the end, such a program isn't going to work if the inmates are running the asylum. Corporations are machines for generating profit that will run within the de facto (not necessarily the de jure) rules which punish or reward behavior. But if they get to make those rules, then you get regulatory capture where those rules are used to benefit some competitors and protect their position in the market, which is precisely what you'd expect from an amoral profit making machine.

A lathe will rip your arm off; that doesn't make it a psychopath, it makes it a dangerous tool that has to be controlled carefully.

Re:What the hell, Slashdot

[plopez]

SO why are you hanging out here instead of rushing to volunteer to help those in need? Seems your violating your ethics

Mozilla for Ethics? Right....

[flajann]

Since when does Mozilla, who has been indirectly supporting the violent Antifa, get off on pushing "ethics" to others??? How about they clean up their own house first?????

Whose ethics ?

[aepervius]

Science and technology do not have ethical value per see. At all. All they have are cold reality based equation. Whether you use that equation to save 100 lifes or you use it to make more profit in your "puppy & baby munching machine" is actually up to the person. But that is also TRUE for MBA and many other studies (is there even ethics teaching in arts?). So if you want to add ethic in STEM, then add it in MBA in at least the same proportion, and many other studies. Furthermore you can't live well with ethics alone, everybody should understand basic concept and a lot of what is unethical happening is because have no critical thinking so let us put also a bit of STEM into art and ethics. Furthermore before we even take that steps, we should get together and decide which ethics it should be. And then in about 200 million year when you all decided on a basic line on ethic which do not offend all religions/genders/sex/ethnicity out there, we can get that utterly washed down ethic and teach it to STEM. But start with teaching STEM to arts/ethicist/philo today. Maybe a bit of critical thinking will do them good.

Re:Whose ethics ?

[Torvac]

the same software i helped to develop 20y ago as a student to track cancer cells was later sold and used to track other "interesting" things. you sometimes dont know what youre working on until people in uniforms run around shaking your superiors hands. well, these days i help people in the adult entertainment sector getting richer, wasnt planned - thats just what our system can also do as an unintended feature. you can kill people with holy water you know ?

Re:Whose ethics ?

[TeknoHog]

Science and technology do not have ethical value per se

IMHO, the scientific method does have several elements which can be regarded as ethics:

• Sharing your results so that others can learn and verify them
• Focus on scientific content, not the the title/gender/color of the person who presented it

Of course, real science doesn't often work in this ideal way. And there's no ethics on how the results of science can be used. But these ideas go a long way when considering the bigger picture -- for example, science progresses better by international collaboration than by blowing each other to bits.

"Ethics" means "Bolshevism"

[Anonymous Coward]

i.e. being gay is 'normal', (sure, we believe you, that's why you have to put people in PRISON or sack them from their jobs, if they dare to talk about what gays actually DO to each other - which is, of course, disgusting to just about everybody...)
i.e. mass immigration is wonderful, and somehow white people, and ONLY white people, are expected to just give up our countries to millions of invaders who, for some strange reason, can't stand living around their OWN kind, and can't "get a better life" in their OWN countries, when surrounded by their OWN kind... gee... I wonder why that is? The weather, perhaps? Or perhaps they are standing on the wrong land mass, and white people got lucky and happened to be born on a 'magic' piece of land that makes us have better countries to live in.
i.e. women are eternal victims and are somehow being kept out of jobs that they are just as good at men at doing. Except for construction, slaughterhouse work, etc.etc. etc.

More sickening Left wing bollocks from the tyrants on the Left.

Google

[NewYork]

I think Mozilla should work on Search Engine similar to Google

STEEM?

[sabbede]

What a lousy acronym.

What about business?

[Gravitron 5000]

Wouldn't you get more out of ensuring that business professionals have ethics, rather than STEM. I would rather deal with a handful of radioactive supermonkeys, than another collapsing financial system.

Re:If software is free, you are not the customer..

[GonzoPhysicist]

I guess I'm a product of GCC then

he meant free as gratis not libre

Race to the bottom!

[bussdriver]

Shut up and perform, monkey.

US workers do not have the best reputation already; more of a last resort when higher level of skills are required. Higher ethics also helps but that is fading with time as well... Too high and you become too difficult too low and they can't afford to trust you. Actually, a level of ethics does exist which helps the employers... they only want ethics that HELPS THEM and none of the others. A perfect balance of hypocrisy. (So then don't really teach critical thinking! only problem solving.)

Doing work in the USA that is highly unethical is already a deterrent. Take blatant poisoning of locals and employees; even US companies outsourced that to corrupt 3rd world nations because uppity Americans won't tolerate that level of business thinking in their backyard.

The global economy has many bad aspects to it; it needs to be questioned far more. Sadly the only person doing that today is a moron.

Mozilla Management needs to change!

[bussdriver]

SJW have taken over. They put more effort into this crap than keeping users happy and then they'll do stuff like TV show promo add-ons we didn't ask for and removing old features instead of enhancing them because $$ is being wasted on this or further depreciating their browser. It's like the tech department just tries to stay out of their way and has gone a bit too far the other way. Sure Rust sounds good... but it was going extreme to attempt to re-invent the C programming language; that sounds like management wasn't paying attention. At least they are leaving the nerds alone to do some great things (like Rust) but they have to stop wasting $$$ on "UX" and other departments.