Teaching ethics and computer forensics

I claim that we teach Ethics in Information Assurance courses because we want to install the importance of ethical behavior right at the beginning of our students' professional career and because we need to give them tools to deal with newly arising situations, for example those that are not dealt with in codes of conduct or that straddle the lines. Since fact finding and evaluation of facts are important aspects of ethical decision making, part of ethics education needs to be done within technical courses with the goal of complementing the philosophical foundations or generic applied ethics discussions left best to the general education curriculum. Teaching ethics well is hard. A basic problem -- an instance of living in a post-modern world -- is the lack of a common foundation to make ethical judgments. In addition, gaining and maintaining technical expertise is a full-time job that an instructor might not want to supplement by gaining expertise in the challenging fields of business or applied ethics; thus, any method for teaching ethics needs to be simple.A group of philosophers at the Markkula Center for Ethics at Santa Clara University developed a simple framework for business ethics that distills various philosophical approaches towards Ethics in simple questions. The resulting procedure consists in "simply" answering these questions and thereby approaching a difficult situation from various perspectives. While the framework cannot solve certain thorny issues, it is quite successful at elucidating ethical problems and -- possibly more importantly -- it gives those exposed to it a common language. In my opinion, this framework allows us to teach ethics in Information Assurance classes in a manner that (1) is not biased by the personal views of the instructor, that (2) does not involve a large sacrifice of class room time, that is (3) reasonably culturally and gender neutral, that (4) is quite successful helping elucidating new ethical issues and (5) that allows someone with a technical background but no or limited philosophical background to successfully teach ethics.