In 1963, Clark Kerr, then president of the University of California and “master planner” of American higher education, delivered the Godkin Lectures at Harvard University. Although those lectures are most widely known for his matter-of-fact description of the “multiversity,” the third lecture, “The Future of the City of Intellect,” concludes thus:

The organized intellect is a great machine that has gained extraordinary momentum since the Greeks got it going in 2500. It turns out countless pieces of new knowledge but with little thought for their consequences–their impact on the environment–like insecticide. Its attention to problems quite naturally does not always relate primarily to their importance, but often, instead, to the possibility of their solution. Thus the problems of rising population and rising levels of destructive capacity move along without study commensurate with their inherent significance. Does this machine have within it the seeds of its own destruction? Or can it develop an over-all rationality?. […] The process cannot be stopped. The results cannot be foreseen. It remains to adapt.

Kerr, The Uses of the University (2001, 92-93)

Kerr often spoke in these terms, embracing, on the one hand, unprecedented advances across a broad range of fields, while, on the other, pausing to point out the possible consequences of the pace and unreflective manner of postwar scientific and technological progress. But his pauses were always brief and largely of no substance. In his position as UC president and then chair of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, Kerr did many things, but generally overlooked is his perfection in both practice and theory of what I’d call a Cold War liberal ethics. He legitimated and helped to institutionalize the ideal of post facto moral reasoning.

The ideal of post facto moral reasoning continues to shape how most universities, not to mention most tech companies, conceive of the “ethics” initiatives and courses they now feel compelled to implement. When scientific and technological progress is given as fact, as having already been accomplished and presumed to have value, the purpose of “ethics” is moral accommodation. Doing ethics is simply learning how to live with the new reality. Taking scientific and technological progress as that which is simply given replaces moral reasoning––giving and rebutting arguments and claims about the good, recognizing conflicting values with others and within traditions and communities––with therapeutic forms of rationalization. After scientists and technologists have changed our shared reality, social therapists are needed to console the rest of us with strategies and psychic balms. Or, as, engineering and data science programs do it: we need a historian, a humanist, or really just anyone who can claim to care about this stuff to teach a three-credit course on AI ethics or the ethics of data.