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+<HTML>
+<HEAD>
+<TITLE>Abstracts for Four Papers I'm Gonna Write Someday</TITLE>
+</HEAD>
+<BODY>
+<H1>Abstracts for Four Papers I'm Gonna Write Someday</H1>
+<CITE>Brian Harvey<BR>University of California, Berkeley</CITE>
+
+
+<P>Copyright (C) 1989 by Brian Harvey.  Permission is hereby granted to anyone
+to reproduce this paper, provided that it is reproduced in its entirety,
+without editing, and including this notice.
+
+
+<H2>I.  A Professional Ethics Course Wouldn't Have Helped Robert Morris</H2>
+
+<P>In recent months everyone with an axe to grind has been using the November
+Internet Worm as a grindstone.  Security freaks call for more security;
+freedom freaks call for less security; decentralists call for less reliance
+on computer systems; antimilitarists call for less military reliance on
+computers; manufacturers of security devices call for people to buy their
+products.  Regrettably, some people at CPSR meetings are jumping on the
+bandwagon and using this incident to argue for professional ethics classes.
+
+<P>I'm all for professional ethics classes.  But I don't think such a class at
+Cornell would have prevented this incident.  Such classes should, and
+generally do, examine issues that are morally difficult for professionals
+working in the field.  What would an ethics course for computer scientists
+be about?  Probably a major focus, for example, would be on the extent of
+military funding of computer science research.  This is a question of real
+importance not only for working professionals but for the graduate students
+who would be enrolled in the course, who may not like working on weapons
+research but who do want research assistantships.  If 80% of all computer
+science research is funded by the DoD, this poses a problem for antiwar
+computer scientists.
+
+<P>Would a computer science ethics course deal with privacy?  Probably, but
+I hope not at the level of simple exhortations to respect it.  If I were
+teaching such a course, I'd begin by calling the assumptions about
+privacy into question.  For example, let's say the police want to build
+a spiffy data base system to keep track of criminals.  What's so bad about
+that?  I do think it's bad, often, but I don't think it's obvious why.  I
+think that the answer requires a lot of specific historical knowledge about
+the political role of the police in the United States, and the recurring
+real abuses of police power.
+
+<P>If you asked Robert Morris whether computer professionals should respect
+people's privacy, I bet he'd say yes, sincerely.  He would then go on to
+say that the Internet worm wasn't an invasion of privacy, but "just a joke."
+I propose to take this claim seriously.  I argue that the relevant ethical
+issue is this:  Playing practical jokes on one's friends is different from
+playing practical jokes on strangers.  It's not that one is always okay and
+the other always not okay, but the standards are different.  Practical jokes
+are about trust and testing trust.  The degree of trust one can expect from
+friends is higher than the degree it's reasonable to expect from strangers.
+This would be a terrific issue to raise in an ethics class for 12-year-olds.
+(I'm not being sarcastic; when I was a 12-year-old I attended a school with
+required ethics classes.)  It's unlikely that a teacher of graduate students
+would think to raise it.
+
+<P>I believe it is a serious problem in our society that adolescence commonly
+lasts into the mid-20s and beyond.  The reasons have to do with a lack of
+serious adult values, the commercial glorification of youth, a tight economy
+in which adult life often truly is bleak and joyless, state-sponsored
+lotteries, and many other things.  Professional ethics classes, though, do
+not address this problem.
+
+
+<H2>II.  Moral Dilemmas are not Ethics</H2>
+
+<P>The model for professional ethics courses is medical ethics courses.  The
+latter often revolve around dilemmas, that is, around issues that are
+genuinely controversial among honest, well-motivated doctors.  Abortion,
+euthanasia, whether to offer an honest diagnosis if you think it'll hurt
+the patient's health: all of these questions in which life and death are
+literally at stake are no easier for ethical philosophers than for medical
+practitioners.
+
+<P>The purpose of a medical ethics course is not to encourage doctors to be
+ethical.  That is taken for granted, as a precondition of the course.
+Nor is the purpose of the course to call attention to obscure ethical
+questions.  Every medical student knows about these questions, as does
+everyone who reads newspapers.  The purpose of the course is to provide
+the students with knowledge of the range of arguments that have been made
+about the difficult questions, so that they do not begin their careers with
+one-sided views out of ignorance of alternatives.
+
+<P>In computer science our situation is not like that of the medical profession.
+Among our colleagues the very idea of social responsibility is open to
+question.  "First, do no harm" is not controversial among doctors, but
+some computer programmers are perfectly comfortable building the tools for
+arbitrageurs and other social parasites.  "Suppose your employer orders you
+to release a product known to have bugs because the deadline is approaching..."
+This is an ethical dilemma?  It wouldn't be, in a profession with a sense of
+ethics.
+
+<P>The medical ethics course is useful as an adjunct to the real ethical
+education of medical students, which happens in hospital wards.  Everyone
+involved understands that the course is an adjunct.  Everyone understands
+that ethics is about empathy, human respect, and courage more than it's
+about intellectual resolution of moral puzzles.
+
+<P>In computer science, solving puzzles is central to our work.  It is all too
+easy to see social responsibility as just another kind of puzzle, to be
+solved by the same techniques of formal reasoning we use with other puzzles.
+A dilemma-based computer ethics course too easily lets us off the hook.
+Instead our ethics courses must be about ethics!  That is, they must force
+students to confront the existence of good and evil, to choose between
+selfishness and community spirit.  Very few computer scientists explicitly
+choose evil, but many prefer to pretend that there is no choice to make.
+
+
+<H2>III.  There Is Nothing that Everyone Needs to Know about Computers</H2>
+
+<P>I have been arguing for several years with people who believe that to be
+employable, one must be "computer literate" -- skilled in some aspect or
+other of computer use.  In the context of social responsibility there
+seems to be a different argument, asserting that one cannot be an effective
+citizen in a democracy without a technical understanding of the political
+issues involving computers.  How will people know which way to vote on
+Star Wars, if they don't understand programming methodology?
+
+<P>This version of the "computer literacy" argument is also nonsense.  It's
+a losing battle.  Computers are not the only technology that comes to the
+attention of voters.  Freon, oil spills, nuclear power, genetic engineering,
+the prime interest rate, the use of standardized tests that may or may not
+discriminate against some group in college admissions, research on animals,
+potential AIDS drugs, biochemical versus psychodynamic approaches to mental
+illness, teaching foreign-born students in English or in their native
+languages, what the Founding Fathers really meant about bearing arms: are
+the voters to be "literate" about all of these?
+
+<P>How, in fact, do I decide to believe the scientists who tell me that people
+evolved from animals, and not the ones who tell me that nuclear power is
+safe?  I have no technical knowledge about either issue.  Supposing that I
+were forced to take "biology literacy" and "nuclear power literacy" courses;
+how would I decide whether or not to trust the teachers of those courses?
+The answer is that my beliefs are based on nontechnical aspects of the
+issues.  For example, I know that there is money to be made in nuclear power,
+but I don't see anyone profiting from the theory of evolution.  I know that
+the supposedly neutral Nuclear Regulatory Commission conspired with the
+plant owners to withhold information about the Three Mile Island failure;
+I don't know of any such scandal among evolution theorists.  I know that
+the nuclear power industry got Congress to pass a law exempting them from
+civil damage suits, and I understand what this means about their own
+confidence in their operations.  I know that the spokespeople for evolution
+include exemplary human beings like Stephen Jay Gould, who also finds time
+in his schedule to work against racism; those who speak for nuclear power
+are more likely to be sleazeballs who also argue for nuclear weapons.
+
+<P>What the voters need is "political literacy": knowing how to read the
+newspaper without technical knowledge of the subject under discussion.
+They need the intellectual weapon of class analysis.  They need the
+commitment to remember last year's scandals to help them understand
+this year's.  They need the sophistication to understand dialectical
+tension, in which two contradictory views can both be aspects of the
+truth, without dissolving into relativism, in which everything and nothing
+is true.
+
+
+<H2>IV.  Ethics is Learned in the Laboratory</H2>
+
+<P>What is the policy about game-playing at your school's computer lab?
+Some students want to play computer games.  Other students (perhaps the
+same students at another time) want to get their assigned work done.  Does
+some adult facility manager decide the rule?  (No games 8am to 11pm, let's
+say.)  Then, do paid adult staff members police the rule?  Or are students
+part of the process of setting the rule and enforcing it?
+
+<P>What happens when a student shows an interest in developing system
+software?  Is s/he encouraged?  Given access to source files?  Allowed
+to install the new version for general use?  Or informed that students
+can't be trusted to write software lest it be full of trapdoors?
+
+<P>Is the computer lab always open?  Is it closed at night because there's no
+money for staff to prevent equipment theft?  Is there a way students could
+organize cooperatively to staff the lab?  Are they encouraged to do so?
+
+<P>When one student complains about another student violating the privacy of
+his or her files, how is the issue resolved?  (What about faculty or staff
+violating the privacy of student files?  Is that an issue?)
+
+<P>The computer lab is the best place to begin professional education in
+social responsibility.  The crucial point is to build a sense of
+community.  Faculty should be part of this community also, but decisions
+about things like game policy should be truly democratic.  It's the students
+who face the consequences, and they can understand the issues.
+
+<P>(I guess I am arguing for Carol Gilligan's relationship-based view of
+moral development, as against Lawrence Kohlberg's rule-based view, which
+is embodied in the presentation of moral dilemmas in ethics classes.)
+
+<P><ADDRESS>
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