Ethics & Computer Science

Richard Bergmair wrote an interesting article titled "Ethical Lessons Learned from Computer Science" that was published in the most recent Crossroads, the ACM student magazine. He uses techniques usually known from computer science to study ethics itself. He describes an interesting thought experiment on what is actually ethics, and how a non-existing artificial intelligence called "guru" would tackle this kind of problems. Of course, he only describes the way how to judge, but makes no assumptions on the actual ethics, and thus gives an interesting insight on how to judge, independent of your personal ethical views and ideas.