Agile Ethics: A Low Stakes, Skills-based Framework for Teaching CS Ethics

Computer Science educators widely agree that ethics is a vital and underdeveloped part of the CS curriculum. Attempts to increase ethics content within undergraduate CS programs have faced challenges integrating material into the current coursework. I present an ethical framework applicable to the core Computer Science activities of programming and software development, with potential for extension into other CS subfields. The application of this framework to a specific educational intervention is reserved for future work. In this paper, I focus on the framework itself and its theoretical justification. By shifting emphasis from hard ethical quandaries and advanced CS products to mundane challenges faced by a front line software developer, this framework may allow instructors to more easily and effectively integrate ethics material into introductory CS coursework. While instructors may continue to apply prepared scenarios, the framework de-emphasizes those in favor of scaffolding student coding practices that maximize the frequency of practice with ethical skills.