I'm wondering how someone can even go about teaching ethics when they're a purely cultural artifacts.
Isn't it just subtle propaganda? Good, bad, just, unjust - what's ethical in China, for example, or Saudia Arabia is not the same as what's ethical in the US or even Europe.
Nevermind the thought of relatively centralized institutions acting as arbiters of ethics and, by extension, core aspects of culture.
How do you decide which brand of ethics to teach? Especially if your class is represented by a range of nationalities?
Look at this thread and how oblivious everyone is to the variability of the definition of ethics. We take the subject as some kind of absolute, but really we're just viewing the rest of the world through priveleged western lenses.
> How do you decide which brand of ethics to teach?
There's two common options chosen:
(1) broad multi-system survey rather than a single system or narrow set, and
(2) teach the system or systems most connected to the target legal system (for cases where ethics is being taught largely to create a safety buffer around legality and anticipate legality in adopting to address where legality had not yet settled.)
When you know why you want to teach ethics, it's fairly trivial to choose the approach.
Do you earnestly believe that Harvard University will be paralyzed by the choice between a modern western ethics system in which women have all the rights of men, or (to use your example) a Saudi ethics system in which women are property?
Most people in the real work are not so ridiculous that they allow themselves to be paralyzed by knowledge of ethical relativism.
This isn't some trivial difficulty with choosing a narrative. It's the implied cultural supremacy in arrogantly believing that YOUR perception of what is moral is so correct that it should be taught in university.
The same reason that government shouldn't be legislating religion. I went to college to learn science, mathematics, liberal arts, so that I could learn to make decisions for myself-not to be indoctrinated with someone else's idea of what is right and wrong.
Edit: imagine a Saudi funded institution in the U.S. offering courses on ethics. Would you be ok with that? Why are you even sure that the particular ethics courses in Harvard agree with your own cultural norms? When you mix subjectivity with education, you get propaganda. Sure, some of it is unnavoiable because ultimately there are only so many topics one has time to learn and all educators/authors are biased humans, but the topic of ethics does not even allow for the possibility of objective treatment. It does not belong in school.
It's a solved problem. Every major university teaches ethics. If your university CS program didn't have an ethics course, that is the exception rather than the rule, and your university did you a disservice.
The problem is that people treat and teach ethics as though they are absolute. Further, ethics as a field of study is unique because it is supposed to directly influence behavior. What no one seems to realize is that ethics lessons are a form of social conditioning with administrators deciding on the content.
Here's a quick illustrative example: what do you think passed for ethical to the average citizen at the height of Nazi Germany? Or Cold War era Soviet Union? To CCP members during the great leap forward? Supporters of Dutuerte? Liberals vs Conservatives in the U.S.?
So which brand is your University picking and choosing to offer in class? The whole idea is dangerous - colleges should not be in the business of teaching ethics, because in order to do so they must decide on what is ethical.
> Good, bad, just, unjust - what's ethical in China, for example, or Saudia Arabia is not the same as what's ethical in the US or even Europe.
That's bullshit. Just because some places have unethical norms, doesn't mean their norms are ethical. Just because some places have a norm to mistreat some people, doesn't mean those people suddenly don't feel mistreated.
