Keywords

1 Introduction

In recent years, computers and computer networks and its impact on society have been identified as a source for a new class of ethical and social issues since the early days of digital computers [1]. Today we are constantly faced with moral, ethical, social, legal, and political issues related to information technologies (ICT).

For example, the technological not-so-distant promise of Self Driving Cars raises complex questions in a lot of dimensions: (1) moral “If technology is proven statistically better at preventing deaths and accidents than the humans, should we use it? should we make it mandatory?”), (2) ethical “Can we delegate ethical decisions to machines whose behaviour we don’t fully understand?”, (3) social “Do we want a significant percentage of the labour force with automation?”, (4) political “How are we going to deal with the consequences and the loss of economic and political power of the ones laid off?”, (6) legal “How do we structure a legal framework to regulate self-driving cars?”, (7) security “How do we ensure the cyber-security of our cars and utilities?”. But these questions and even more complex ones appear again for almost any new technology: smartphones, drones, 3D printers, the internet of things, social networks, the web, face recognition technologies, big data, and every single application of (shallow) AI (artificial Intelligence).

But all of the cited technologies, their sophistication, capabilities, and impact are connected with exponential-like tendencies like the ones expressed by Moore's Law (the number of transistors per square inch in a processor doubles every 18 months), Metcalfe's Law (the potential utility of a network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes), and similar observations that strongly suggest that the curve of technological change is exponential. According to Kurzweil, the technological development we are going to experience during the 21st century will be equivalent to 20,000 years of progress at today’s pace [2]. So, we should at least pay attention to the technological singularity hypothesis: “The technological singularity—or simply the singularity—is a hypothetical point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization” [3].

Hence the introduction of engineering ethics into the curriculum makes a lot of sense. Besides computer engineer’s curriculum is centred in technical competencies. Nevertheless, transversal competencies such as team work, ethical analysis and communication skills are very important in the development of the profession.

The environmental, social, and ethical aspects of technology have been included in some undergraduate computer science curricula for over twenty years. For the purposes of this paper, we will focus on the study of ethics.

The term “computer ethics” was coined in 1978 by Walter Maner. Maner noticed that ethical decisions are much harder to make when computers are added to the problem, hence there was a need for a different branch of ethics for when it came to dealing with computers. Maner’s work generated a lot of interest in this new field in university circles in the late 1970s and 1980s [4]. The first textbook about computer ethics was written in the 1980s by Deborah Johnson [5].

It wasn’t until 1991 that the study of ethics was introduced into Computer Science curricula [6]. An ACM/IEEE joint committee was established and they created a new curriculum for computer science that included in it computer ethics.

It was also in 1991, that the first conference on Computing and Values founded by America’s National Science Foundation took place in the USA [4]. It was organized by Terell Byrum and Walter Maner. This multidisciplinary conference put in touch philosophers, scientists, computer engineers, business managers, and professionals.

In Europe, the Barcelona School of Informatics (Facultat d’Informàtica de Barcelona - FIB) at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) in 1991 included in the Informatics Engineering graduate program courses on “Social Impact and Professional Ethics of Informatics” [6] and “Informatics History” [7]. Another early initiative took place in 1995, the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility (CCSR) was founded at De Montfort University (United Kingdom) with Professors Simon Rogerson, Terry Ward Bynum, and Don Gotterbarn among the staff. Rogerson became Europe’s first Professor in Computer Ethics in 1998 and provided important contributions to the historical debate about the impact of strategic, managerial, and ethical issues of ICT within organizations [8].

There are many approaches on how to introduce the study of ethics in ICT curricula. Some are focused on the importance of the process of ethical decision making, which places an emphasis on the process it takes to reach conclusions about ethical dilemmas [9, 10].

Other researchers focus on professional practice considering that ethics education should focus on practical applications, on the ability to solve ethical problems morally or technically. For this purpose, they teach students how to apply codes of ethics [11]. The study and application of codes of ethics is becoming a requirement in ICT ethics education [12]. In this line of work, Johnson proposes ethics education as a set of activities that provides students with basic knowledge about “codes of ethics and standards of behaviour”, develops their skill at interpreting and applying these codes and standards, and increases the likelihood that the students will be prepared to handle ethical issues once they enter in their professional lives [13]. In this line of thought, Samson [14] states that codes of ethics provide valuable guidelines to achieve ethical behaviour and to assess moral responsibility in the profession.

Nygard [15] base their teaching strategy not only on ethics but also on the social implications that help students in ICT develop their ethical reasoning skills and an appreciation for the complex impact that technologies have on society. They work by exposing the students to as many of the cultural, social, legal, and ethical issues in the discipline of computing as possible in order to broaden their appreciation and understanding of complex issues. In an approach similar to the one taken by Barceló at UPC, and Gordon at the University of Hull [16].

Spiekerman focusses on the need for incorporating ethics into the research and development process itself, by integrating computer science with philosophy and management [17].

Patrignani in his Ph.D. thesis addresses how can universities prepare the next generation of computer professionals so that they are “ethically grounded”?. He uses the concept of Slow Tech as a baseline for the analysis. Patrigani states that the ICT supply chain should take into account three dimensions: social desirability, environmental sustainability, and ethical acceptability [18].

Other contributions present surveys of the growing collection of topics in ICT ethics [19, 20]. This last quantitative survey shows an increase in the number of publications in the area that indicates a trend toward growing awareness that underlines the increasing importance of the field. Nonetheless, the distribution of topics is broadly constant.

Despite the various experiences in the teaching ethical aspects of ICT and, even if there are now some common methods recognized for integrating these subjects in the computer science curriculum, it is very difficult to teach ethics of ICT to engineers. In particular in computer science, the challenge is even greater, due to the continued rapid evolution of technology.

In addition to technical skills, professional skills are also included in engineering education, and in computer science education in particular. ABET’s EC 2000 criteria contain a set of professional skills that include process and awareness skills [21].

Process skills include communication, teamwork, and understanding ethics and professionalism, while awareness skills include engineering within a global, economic, environmental and societal context, lifelong learning etc.

Starting with the study of ethics in engineering education, a brief examination of the methods used in engineering schools showed a six-stream approach: codes of ethics, case problems, moral theory, problem-solving heuristics, humanistic readings, and service-learning [22, 23].

Bowden proposed an ethics course based on case problems, ethical theory, acting in the public interest (or whistle-blowing), the study of codes of ethics, and the role of the professional society [24].

According to Gotterbarn, more than being required to learn ethical theory and philosophical argumentation, computer science students need to be taught that there are ethical issues relevant to their professional practice, to recognize these issues [24].

Johnson and Martin think that philosophers who have not had appropriate training in computer science are not capable of appreciating key technical issues and thus cannot effectively teach computer science courses [25].

2 Course, Didactical Resource and Methodology

2.1 Courses Description

The case study we proposed is applied in two courses. The first one is a mandatory course of the Master’s degree in Sustainability offered by the Sustainability Institute also at UPC. The course is called “Fundamentals of business ethics and innovation” (FEEI from now on) and is taught in English language to an audience of local and international students aged between 25 and 40 years old and they split evenly in genders. FEEI has two main topics related to ethics: 1) Ethics applied in the field of engineering and legal frameworks for the development of professional activity in engineering, 2) Corporate social responsibility and Ethics in companies and organizations.

The second course is an optional course taught at the Barcelona School of Informatics at the Computer Engineering Degree. This course is taught in Catalan, students are mainly locals aged between 20–21 years old. 75% of the students are male and the rest are females.

Our approach to teach ethics is the following. We have two types of lectures: traditional expository lectures and practical lectures. In the traditional lectures explained by the teachers, first, we cover the basics of ethics, morality, and culture, and how they are connected using traditional lectures. Then we present ethical theories as tools to make moral decisions. We go through a selection of ethical theories and we analyze how they work by working on examples and short cases. The chosen theories are Kantianism, Rule and Act Utilitarianism, Social Contract, and Virtue Ethics.

This part provides us with frameworks to identify and reason about moral dilemmas where the application of technology, specifically computers or computer software is involved. We can also make moral decisions about it and present and rebate arguments in favor or against it. With these two lectures we provide the basics of philosophical thinking.

Then, we have a final lecture about codes of ethics and acting in the public interest (whistle blowing).

Practical lectures are explained next. To put these lectures into practice we present three cases to the students. The first one is about identifying important moral values when reasoning about morals. We use them to do a role play case where students have to argue in favour or against certain moral issues.

The second case is usually something of high profile in the news, where technology is involved - and the nuances of understanding right the technology are important - and where we can find a moral dilemma. Again, the case is a role play where students have to use ethical theories to argue in favour or against certain moral issues.

The final assignment is also a case study where students have to apply codes of ethics to reason about professional practice.

In this paper we are going to focus in the cases we use to work ethical theories. We think that these kinds of assignments can be an interesting didactical resource for teachers that work the ethics topic in engineering degrees.

We think that technical knowledge cannot be separated from the reflection about its impact or how it affects society. No technology is neutral, usually the pros are presented as benefits for society as arguments in favour of its introduction, but often cons or negative side effects appear when the new technology is being used. So, engineers must have a critical spirit about new inventions and how they will affect society. To do so the philosophy, sociology and history are good tools as proposed in the framework of CTS (Science, Technology and Society).

2.2 Didactical Resource

Here is an example of a case study presented to the students in winter 2022. The case title is “Crowdfunding the war in Ukraine with Cryptocurrencies”.

Since the start of the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian army, a lot of reactions have ensued: From the almost unanimous condemnation of the UN to logistical aid to the Ukrainian defense forces not in the form of humanitarian supplies but also war vehicles, weapons, and ammunition.

The MAD doctrine (Mutually Assured Destruction) advises that countries with nuclear weapons should not engage directly. Hence NATO and EU countries have started to apply unprecedented economic sanctions, like the exclusion of Russian banks from the SWIFT international banking communications, the ban of imports and exports from and to Russia (not including oil and gas by the time being), and the direct seizing of actives owned by Russian oligarchs in western countries, including Switzerland and Monaco. Media associated with the Russian government (like Russia Today) have been canceled on platforms like Youtube, Twitter, and Facebook in several countries. And this is just the tip of the iceberg of the cyber-war that arguably was already ongoing.

In this scenario, thousands of citizens worldwide have started donating cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin and Ether) to wallets owned by the Ukrainian government. This constitutes an unprecedented fact in history: the crowdfunding of a war effort in a country by foreign citizens. The Ukrainian government has decided to take advantage of this situation and promised the airdrop of tokens to the Ethereum wallets that had donated until a given deadline. This caused a significant increase in donations, including hundreds of thousands of micro-donations not motivated by solidarity but as speculation.

2.3 Methodology

We use the role play technique when debating about ethical issues using ethical theories. This method allows students to argue in favour or against certain moral issues from a specific perspective, point of view or moral framework.

The students were grouped randomly in several groups. Each group had to prepare arguments in favour or against the actions described in the case. Each group was tasked to develop arguments in favour or against the case and using only arguments consistent with one or two specific ethical theories. The ethical theories we used where Kantianism, Virtue ethics, Social Contract Theory and Utilitarism. And for each theory one group had to give arguments in favour and another against it.

3 Results

In this section we are going to discuss the findings of the case study. The groups that work using the Kantianism provided with arguments in favor and against the donations using cryptocurrencies. The most voted argument in favor of the dotation was that if roles were reversed one would welcome the help. The second most voted argument was that the action springs from good intentions (not treating others as means to an end). Students identified three arguments to rebate the previous ones. The arguments are:1) Is it not self-interest? Isn’t the action done out of fear and using the Ukrainian land as a shield for the West?, 2) Good intentions should not lead to providing weapons, 3) This donation could backfire and make wars more gruesome (like Napoleonic wars after the French revolution, when all the people of the state got involved in the war effort) and it would certainly benefit and incentivize the weapons industry.

The groups using the utilitarian morals agreed that they had to minimize suffering. Those in favor of the donation argued that in the long term, stopping an authoritarian tyrant with a record of invading countries is necessary to prevent suffering. Ukrainians will suffer more under the Puttin's yolk than if they surrender.

Those against the crowdfunding argued that in the short term the best bet to stop suffering is to stop the war. Crowdfunding Ukrainian's defense only makes it worse, and what will come later is unknown. These two points are in heavy dispute with a slight majority on the side in favor.

The groups using the social contract theory in favor of the crowdfunding explained that the donation is an example of participatory democracy (vote with wallet). They also base their arguments using the United Nations Charter Preamble (first paragraph) that states: “We the people of the United Nations Determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small…”.

The groups that argued against the crowdfunding stated that a social contract for believers in the Christian religion states that you shall not kill.

An anonymous survey was conducted among the students of the FEEI course to gather their opinion about the case. They were presented with 4 questions to answer in the Likert scale from 1 to 5, being 1 not in agreement with the statement and 5 in total agreement with the statement. 13 students of 21 answered the questionnaire.

Question 1:

Fig. 1.
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Answers to the first question.

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The students agreed that the case was useful to learn how-to apply ethical theories in a debate. Only 15’4% of the respondents positioned themselves neutral, while the 84,6% were in agreement and 38,5% completely in agreement (Fig. 1).

Question 2:

Fig. 2.
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Answers to the second question.

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In the second question the 84’6% is still in agreement with the statement about the case helping with improving critical thinking. While we find a single student who slightly disagrees (Fig. 2).

Question 3:

Fig. 3.
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Responses to the third question.

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69’3% of students liked the roleplay format to improve the dynamic of the class. While 23’9 did not like the roleplay, specifically a student disliked it completely. We can only guess that the particular student is the same one who manifested in classroom that he/she would have liked to choose a side to his/her predisposition.

Question 4:

Fig. 4.
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Answers to question 4.

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A single student disagreed with the statement about the roleplay debate being a good format for critical thinking.

4 Discussion

The authors consider that the first and second questions where the key questions for the survey, since our main goal designing the learning activity was to facilitate the learning of how to apply the ethical theories in a debate and improve critical thinking. With this regard we can conclude the learning activity design to be a success and we shall continue conducting it.

However, the questions 3 and 4 about the format of the debate provide us with a bit of insight, that should be taken with a grain of salt since can be jus our own version of confirmation bias, but aligns with our speculations. Looking at Fig. 3 and 4 we see a student strongly disagreeing with the statements and the opinions of the rest of the class. We can only guess/speculate that the particular student is the same on both questions, and was the same person who manifested in classroom that would have liked to choose a side to his/her predisposition. In this case the authors feel that the discomfort was exactly what the student needed to learn critical thinking skills and as teachers we have to accept the disagreement of the student with our ways.

On personal conversations with the authors the students manifested that the debate, which lasted for 2 h, was cut short. And that the interventions of the professor summarizing the points and writing the arguments on the blackboard at some moments cut the energy of the debate. We shall consider other strategies to summarize the arguments like doing it on a computer while the debate takes place and doing a recap at the end of the debate or in low points.

Last but not least, several students expressed on conversations at the end of the lectures their discomfort with the strength, crudeness and reality of the case, but also expressed that it made it more intense, less of an academic (platonic) experience and where grateful that they got some perspective at the end of the debate to think more clearly and build nuanced opinions about it.

5 Conclusions

Our conclusion is that using roleplay debates in the classroom in the way presented is a good strategy to teach how to apply ethical theories and most importantly improve critical thinking among engineering students. Teachers have also a lot of fun doing it, and most of the class enjoys it also.

Using current and actual cases that present ethical dilemmas offer students the view that these dilemmas may arise during the development of their professional life. So, it is important to have frameworks that allows future engineers to deal with these dilemmas.

From the case example and the method propose we think that it is relatively simple to replicate similar experiments in other engineering contexts, so this experience may be useful for other teachers.

On next semesters we will work on new study cases and refine the methodology in line with the statements on the discussion.