Course Reader – ECS 188 – Ethics in an Age of Technology – Fall 2011
This ever-evolving course reader has been assembled by Prof. Phillip Rogaway for
exclusive use in UC Davis’ course ECS 188 — Ethics in an Age of Technology.
The materials may be used only for this class.
Many of the materials are password protected.
Please see the copyright notice at the bottom of the page.
Note: the contents and numbering differ from the hardcopy version of this reader.
A merged pdf file (8.5 GB, 337 pages) contains many of the readings below.
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A Brief Note to the Student by Phil Rogaway.
September 2011.
Sociological Perspectives
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Views of Technology
(scan)
by Ian Barbour.
From Chapter 1 of
Ethics in an Age of Technology (The Gifford Lectures, 1989–1991,
Volume 2), HarperCollins, 1993. Password protected.
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Do Machines Make History? (scan) by
Robert L Heilbroner.
Technology and Culture, vol. 8, pp. 335–345, July 1967.
Password protected.
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Do Artifacts have Politics? by
Langdon Winner.
From
The Whale and the Reactor, The University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Earlier version from Daedalus, Vol. 109, No. 1, Winter 1980.
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Do Politics have Artefacts? by
Bernward Joerges.
From Social Studies of Science, vol. 29, no. 3, pp. 411-431, 1999.
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Five Things we Need to Know About Technological Change by
Neil Postman.
Speech given in Denver, Colorado, USA. March 27, 1998.
- Technology and Happiness by James Surowiecki.
From Technology Review, 2005. Password protected.
For a broader discussion, see:
Happiness: has social
science a clue? By Richard Layard. Transcript of three lectures presented at the London School of Economics, March 3-5, 2003.
- Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior by
Paul Piff, Daniel Stancato, Stephane Cote, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltner. PNAS, 2012.
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McLuhan Interview with Marshal McLuhan.
From Playboy, 1969. Some helpful vocabulary for this reading.
Engineering Perspectives
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Technology and Social Justice by Freeman Dyson.
The fourth Louis Nizer Lecture on Public Policy, November 5, 1997.
- Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us by
Bill Joy.
Appeared in Wired, issue 8.04, April 2000.
- Promise and Peril by
Ray Kurzweil.
Appeared in Interactive Week, April 23, 2000.
Philosophical Perspectives
- Philosophical Ethics
(scan) by
Deborah Johnson.
Chapter 2 from
Computer Ethics, Prentice Hall, 2001.
Current edition (2009).
Password protected.
- The Altered Nature of Human Action
(scan)
by Hans Jonas. Chapter 1 from
The Imperative of Responsibility. University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Password protected. Some helpful vocabulary for this reading.
- The Question Concerning Technology (scan) by
Martin Heidegger (1954/1977).
For help, see Prof. John Zuern’s web pages on this essay.
- Technological Subversion by
David Strong.
From
Crazy Mountains: Learning from Wilderness to
Weigh Technology. State University of New York Press, 1995.
Password protected. Not yet OCR’d.
Historical Perspectives
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Industrial Society and Technological Systems
(scan) by
Ruth Schwartz Cowan.
From
A Social History of American Technology, pp. 149–172, 1997.
Password protected.
Economic Perspectives
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The Lexus and the Olive Tree
(scan) by
Thomas Friedman.
A selection (13 pages) from
Friedman’s book of the same title, including
portions of Chapters 1, 3, and 12. Anchor Books, Random House, 1999. Password protected.
- The Lexus and the Olive Tree Revisited (not yet OCR’d) by
Ha-Joon Chang.
Chapter 1 from
Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism.
Bloomsbury Press, 2008. Password protected.
- A Road Map for Natural Capitalism
(original) by
Amory B. Lovins,
L. Hunter Lovins, and
Paul Hawken,
Harvard Business Review, May-June, 1999.
Password protected.
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Moving Beyond Fast Food Nation (video),
with Peter Singer and
Eric Schlosser.
From a conference
on "Food, Ethics & the Environment", Princeton University,
November 2006.
Also: an interview with Michael Pollan by Marc Eisen
from The Progressive, November 2008.
The Environment
- The Tragedy of the Commons
(scan)
(text) by
Garrett Hardin.
Science, vol. 168, pp. 1243–1248, December 13, 1968. Password protected.
- The World as a Polder: What Does It All Mean
to Us Today? by Jared Diamond.
Chapter 16 from
Collapse: How Societies Chose to Fail or Succeed, Viking Penguin, 2005. Not yet OCR’d
- This was a Crime (scan) by
Mart Hersgaard.
Chapter 10
Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty
Years on Earth.
(Replacing:
We Haven’t Done a Damned Thing by Eric Pooley.
Chapter 1 from
The Climate Wars: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight to Save the Earth.
Hyperion, 2010.)
- A Brief History of Offshore Oil Drilling.
Staff Working Paper No. 1 of the commission on the
BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling.
Undated manuscript, retrieved 18 Sep 2010.
- Oldest Living Tree Tells All by M. Cohen.
Terrain.org: A Journal of the Build & Natural Environments.
No. 14, Winter/Spring 2004.
War
- War
(original URL) by
Brian Orend.
In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
First published Feb 4, 2000; last revised July 28, 2005.
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Computers, Ethics, and Collective Violence
(scan) by Craig Summers and
Eric Markusen.
Journal of Systems and Software, vol. 17, pp. 91–103, 1992.
Password protected.
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Farewell Address to the Nation
by Dwight D. Eisenhower
January 17, 1961. A very short reading to pair with the film “Why We Fight”
Intellectual Property
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The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind
(author’s website)
(Chapter 0)
(Chapter 1)
(Chapter 2)
(Chapter 3)
(Chapter 4)
(Chapter 5)
(Chapter 6)
(Chapter 7)
(Chapter 8)
(Chapter 9)
(Chapter 10)
by James Boyle.
Yale University Press, 2008.
Also available
in print.
Thanks to the author for making his entire book available on-line, under a CC license.
We may distributively read it.
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The GNU Manifesto
(original URL)
by
Richard Stallman.
1985.
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The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution.
By Peter Biddle,
Paul England, Marcus Peinado, and Bryan Willman.
Proc. of the 2002 ACM Workshop on Digital Rights Management.
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Microsoft Research DRM Talk by
Cory Doctorow, 2004.
Privacy
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The Transparent Society by
David Brin.
From Wired Magazine, Issue 4.12, December 1996.
See the
author’s book (1998)
for a fuller treatment.
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Beyond Google and evil: How policy makers, journalists and consumers should talk
differently about Google and privacy by
Chris Jay Hoofnagle. First Monday, 14(4), 6 April 2009.
Incidents
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Bhopal Lives by
Suketu Mehta.
Appeared in The Village Voice on Dec 3, 1996 and on Dec 10, 1996.
Password protected. CNN photos
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The Therac-25
Accidents
by Nancy G. Leveson.
Appears on the author’s website and as Appendix A of
Safeware: System Safety and Computers,
Addison-Wesley Professional, 1995.
For a shorter version:
Therac-25 Case Materials, from ComputingCases.org.
- The Fifty-Nine-Story Crisis
(OCR-produced html)
by Joe Morgenstern. The New Yorker, May 29, 1995, pp. 45–53.
Password protected.
Our Profession
- Codes of ethics:
(a)
ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct, 1992
(b)
IEEE Code of Ethics, 2006
(c)
Software Engineering Code of Ethics and Professional Practices, 1997.
Accompanying materials: some
scenarios collected up from Sara Baase’s book.
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Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women and Computing
(scan3, scan6)
by
Jane Margolis and
Allan Fisher.
The reading (14 pages) is an except from Chapters 3 and 6 of
Margolis and Fisher’s
book published by MIT Press, 2002.
Password protected.
Reconsider selection/redaction.
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The Future of Our Profession
by Bo Dahlbom and
Lars Mathiassen.
CACM, 40(2), June 1997.
Password protected.
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Disciplined Minds
(scan)
by Jeff Schmidt.
The reading (17 pages) is a selection drawn from chapters 1, 2, 3, and 13 of Schmidt’s book,
Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and
the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives,
Rowman & Littlefield, 2001.
Password protected. Do not omit.
Concluding Remarks
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Some pledges
- Russell-Einstein Manifesto (1955),
Bethe to Clinton (1985),
Bethe to the Science Community (1995)
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Video clip from
Jacob Bronowski’s TV mini-series
The Ascent of Man (1973).
We will also see some or all of the following films:
- Dekalog (Part 1), 1989.
Directed by
Krzysztof Kieslowski.
Time is 51.5 mins (beginning to start of credits).
Following some introductory remarks,
I always show this film in the first class meeting.
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An Inconvenient Truth (2006). Presented by
Al Gore,
directed by Davis Guggenheim.
Custom CD omits first 34 seconds of chapter 1, and omits 10, 12, 13, and 15.
Time is 79 mins to start of credits, and
84 mins including enjoyable credits.
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Why We Fight, 2005. Written and directed by
Eugene Jarecki.
Custom CD omits chapters 2 and 5. Time is
79.5 mins (start to beginning of credits) .
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The Corporation, 2003.
Written by Joel Bakan,
directed by Mark Archbar and Jennifer Abbott.
Custom CD includes chapters 1–5, 8:[beg–47:29], 8:[51:33–end],
10:[beg–1:02:34], 16[1:24:56–1:26:45], 18, 19:[beg–1:50:27],
22:[2:02:40–2:17:23], 23–24.
Time is 79.5 mins (beginning to start of credits).
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Food, Inc., 2008. By
Robert Kenner.
Total time is 94 mins.
This reader is a living document.
If you have suggestions for additions, deletions, or changes, please
let me know.
Important Copyright Information
The materials assembled here
are exclusively for educational purposes in one particular class at UCD.
Some of the readings are in
the public domain or have very unrestrictive use permissions,
but others fall under conventional copyright.
They are included in this reader with
careful consideration to the four factors used in ascertaining
fair use. They have been placed in a password-protected subdirectory.
I have marked those entries Password protected.
Many of these are OCR’d from scans.
The scans themselves
(which I also include in the password-protected subdirectory)
are large and sometimes not too legible, which is why most have
been OCR’d.
Last updated Sep 22, 2010