Darakshan Mir

Scholarly perspectives, largely outside the discipline of Computer Science, have long recognized that technological artifacts are not politically neutral, but that these technologies inherently embody certain political properties (for example, Winner’s 1980 article titled “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”). Like Winner, I use politics to mean “arrangements of power and authority in human associations as well as the activities that take place within those arrangements.” 

With increasing recognition of the power that computing wields in our current socio-political landscape, there is an emerging consensus that Computer Science departments and programs have a responsibility to educate students in considering the ethical and societal implications of the artifacts they create. Yet, the conceptualizations of these “Ethics in Computing” courses and pedagogical resources are, by and large, stripped of their political dimensions. This paper discusses the implications of such a depoliticized education by analyzing the Association of Computing Machinery’s (ACM) “Code of Ethics” and associated case studies. I interrogate the notion of “The Public Good” that the ACM Code of Ethics is rooted in, and examine what kinds of political arrangements this invocation of the public good supports. Using specific case studies, such as the one that analyzes ethical considerations in “Automated Active Response Weaponry”, I examine how an apparently de-politicized application of Principles outlined in the Code of Ethics, nevertheless, leads to specific political positions.