Maybe we should have ethics taught in CS so that people know that it's wrong even if you are sitting at a terminal and having fun because the work is challenging.
Many universities do, I know for sure UCLA does, although the course it is taken by other engineers as well so many case studies are from other areas. The closest one to CS at the time I was taking it was about Intel's floating point fiasco, but it did not sound as bad as others because it did not affect people's lives.
Hopefully they'll add recent NSA scandal to the syllabus.
That sounds silly. Ethics is subjective. When you teach "This is wrong." and the student replies "I feel it's right.", what do you say? Unless you have some ethical framework plus a good reason to follow act according that framework, you operate on the level of subjective feelings and opinions.
There is such a thing as "ethics class" and it's really not about dogmatic "do this" or "don't do that". Instead it analyzes various situations to derive insight about why some things are ethically right and some aren't.
By calling it entirely pointless you're dismissing a whole branch of philosophy. I know moral relativism is still popular among some groups of people, but there are other approaches to understanding morality. And no, I'm not talking about religion or Ayn Rand.
