Teaching CIS3250 means I carry a semester of ethics material around, and in January 2025 I compressed it into an hour for the product and engineering teams at Enable. The goal was not to lecture on ethical theory. It was to give a room of people who ship software a shared vocabulary and then make them use it on their own decisions.
The structure is three moves. First, definitions, because most arguments about ethics at work are two people using the word to mean different things: ethics as the code of the group, morals as the individual’s principles, virtue and vice as habits. Second, cases, each followed by one discussion question. Therac-25, where a race condition in a radiation machine killed patients and the manufacturer insisted for years it could not be the software, asks what organizations should do to reduce the consequences of software errors. Michael Schrage’s “Ethics, Schmethics” asks whether a business must choose between good ethics and financial results. Google’s Street View Wi-Fi collection asks how a company weighs the data it could collect against its obligation to the people it collects from.
Third, rapid fire, with questions written for that company rather than a textbook: what to do when a customer has been sold something that does not exist yet on a hard timeline, where the line is on sharing unbuilt features with customers, what stewardship of data means when training AI models on it, and what someone with cross-tenant data access should do when they see a trend that could matter. Those are the ones that got the room talking, because nobody in it was hypothetical.