Programming Education As An Orientation Towards Virtue

Human power is the ability to create something from nothing. This is divine not metaphorically but literally. To program is to imitate God’s first grammar: let there be light. But we often forget that God spoke the world into being for the other. Programming thus is not a just a skill, but at its essence is the metaphysical participation in the act of genesis.

Human power itself is distinct from natural power, or the power of nature. Natural power manifests in natural disasters, the evolution of species, the obligations of sustaining one's own life, like food, water, and sleep, for example. Natural power operates through necessity and force; it does not ask. It acts. Hurricanes do not deliberate, hunger does not consult the hungry. In contrast, human power emerges from the exertion of will, a concious act of genesis shaped by moral possibility.

Human power is not the exertion of force. Human power is not the domination of a military over an enemy, nor is human power providing wells to African tribes, nor is human power the corruption of a government official by a wealthy corporation. While many would argue that human power is the above examples through the exertion of influence and force, those examples are merely the application of force. The act creating those outcomes appears as power. In reality, those actions are required to will a new reality into this world, a side-effect of power. Human power is not in action, but the will behind it. It is not force: it is creation.

There exists a sacred ambiguity at the threshold of creation and force: childbirth. On one hand, birth belongs to the realm of nature. It is biological, involuntary, and often painful. It emerges from necessity, from hormonal drive, from processes beyond the will. In this sense, it is nature's doing: it does not ask. It acts.

But to welcome a child into the world, not merely to bear them, but to will their existence, to choose to care, to recognize them as a full, sacred human and act in reverence, is an act of human power. Birth may be biological, but creation is moral. Parenthood, teaching, mentorship are sacred forms of human genesis. To give birth without reverence is to participate in nature. To create a world for the other is to participate in divinity.

Suffering belongs to nature, but created meaning belongs to man. The hurricane destroys, but only man is wounded by it. Through this, suffering is the raw material of meaning. To create meaning from suffering is divine creation.

If power is the act of creation, not the exertion of force, then what categorizes a morally good and morally bad creation?

A morally good creation is one that recognizes the full expansive humanity of others and aligns itself towards reduction of harm.

To recognize the humanity of others is to understand their existence is as precarious, real, and complex as your own. It is to close the moral distance between the subject and object, to recognize that one's creation has a possibility of harming or improving another's life as if it was one's own. In other words, to recognize the humanity of others in the name of creation is to lose the distinction between "you" and "them".

This is virtue.

We may describe harm as that which diminishes the humanity of the self or another. To kill another, to starve another, to destroy the housing of another are examples of harming another through the interference with the natural power of this realm. Likewise, humans are bound to the moral demands of their spiritual dimension: the desire for alignment with his or her truth, the feeling of being rooted to this world, the feeling of being whole and not fractured. In this, physical harm at its worst may end the physical existence of another, and spiritual harm may end the mental existence of another, a fate arguably worse than physical death. Understanding the implications of harm requires human power to orientate towards harm reduction.

The full recognition of humanity precedes the reduction of harm. There exists no world where reduction of harm may be systematically achieved without revering the humanity of those which our power affects. To believe an orientation of harm reduction exists without recognition of humanity is contradictory. This misunderstanding is the cause of many political and social struggles. For example, removing healthcare from millions of Americans in the name of fiscal responsibility appears at a high level to prioritize harm reduction through the redistribution of funds, but, holding a true recognition of the impacts of this destructive policy decision, it is evident that immense harm is enacted systematically.

Quite simply, a morally bad creation is one which is created with moral distance between the creator and those affected by exerting his or her will, both in the process of creation and the manifested creation. It is to create with the "I" separate from the "them", as though consequence does not reach across that gap. The lawmaker sincerly believing he is performing fiscal virtue by reallocating free school lunch funds, a gambling application created under the closely held illusion that obsessive players are exerting free will by refusing to stop playing.

In many cases, systems are created which outlive creators and calcify. What once was created with an orientation towards virtue becomes self-executing, the orientation lost to the shifting sands of time. Moral distance in these systems is not born of intention but of amnesia. Reverence itself must become institutional; systems must remember the humanity they serve.

It's important to realize that to will a creation into this realm is to accept not just its immediate consequences, but its potential echo. Reverence does not end at deployment. It requires continual, radical attention.

Likewise, not all moral creation is gentle. Reverence for the other is not silence. A disturbing, violent novel that breaks illusions is a manifestation of power, not cruelty. Harm lies not in the presence of pain but in the absence of care and witness. Virtue itself points towards clarity.

A creator must not ask only "what does this do", but also ask "what might this become?" In the cases where a creator inflicts harm despite their radical attention and reverence, that is a moral failure. This is the cross to bear for aligning our world towards virtue, and that cross requires a specific orientation towards harm reduction.

I believe that programming itself is one of the most influential tools for human power that exists in our modern world. Simply through a trained programmer's mind and a simple laptop exists the ability to create a wildly influential application or system. The immense influences lies in the disparate scales: a single programmer, given enough time, can potentially create something that affects the world.

A computer science educator essentially is creating future programmers through the support, mentorship, and development of his or her students. The educator shapes the students who will wield unprecedented creative influence over humanity. Regardless of the educator's personal beliefs, he or she is a moral midwife. The educator are forming creators where silence permits harm and pedagogical choices shape the moral horizon of the future. This requires a fundamental shift in programming education: skills should be developed with an orientation towards virtue, not for an orientation towards course completion.

It often seems that society sees technical education as simply a pathway to obtain a well-paying technical job. In this, a singular question permeates throughout technical education: will what my students learn provide access to a job?

While this is indeed valuable, especially for poor students, it fails to recognize moral obligation of our students being granted with the capability for incredible creation. It is to hand our students the ability to incarnate fire and merely hope they do not torch this world.

More importantly, this teaches our future creators to fracture themselves. Through the reduction of our technical education into simply preparing our students to be employable, we indirectly teach our students to reduce themselves. Through this self reduction not exists one student, but a student and within their fractured self a software developer. Similar to moral distance, there now exists mental distance between themselves and their new skills. This compartamentalization softens the psychological barriers against harming others.

As technical educators, we must invoke in our students the role as a witness. Technical projects should namely require students to reflect on these dimensions:

Who will this affect, and how will it affect them?

What did I create?

Where will my creation be deployed? Is there a possibility that my creation will be used as a tool to enforce structural harm?

Why did I create what I did?

How does my creation improve society, reduce harm, and preemptively guard against harm when I am gone?

In teaching students to be witnesses, it is imperative to study cases of actively harmful systems. For example, consider students studying a predator mobile gambling game. Through reflection on the above dimensions, students begin to uncover the mechanisms through which harm is systematized: variable reward loops that exploit addiction, deceptive UX patterns designed to obscure financial loss, and monetization models that prioritize extraction against the most vulnerable. In witnessing these structures, not as neutral features but as deliberate design choices, students begin to understand that every element of design is a moral choice, and that silence or ignorance in creation is morally bankrupt.

Students must learn to erode the distance between themselves and end users through personal exposure. Imagine a classroom unit where students examine the dark design choices of that mobile gambling game and meet face-to-face a user who lost their livelihood from engineered systematic extraction. While empathy can be difficult to teach, it is critical for students to understand their capability for harm. Those most capable for good are the most capable for evil, and this includes them.

There undoubtedly exists a tension between virtue and capitalism. Bootcamps, corporate incentives, and student debt structures orient technical education towards outcome optimization: employment. This is a contradiction to deeply hold and reflect on. Why does this tension exist? There exists a false assumption that education is neutral, that it can be delivered without a theory of the good.

In reality, economic pressures create their own theory of the good. Technical education itself is not morally neutral: it is actively promoting a value system which favors market optimization over human flourishing. Technical education thus far has been structurally engineered to teach this moral system, yet it is never acknowledged.

As fellow creators with divine power, the question then is, "What moral system would I prefer my own children to live within?" What is accepted as the foundational premise of technical education is a social convention that can be dissolved through collective will.

The realization of latent divine power precedes the understanding that the influence of a single individual is hardly within our comprehension. To teach a single student to wield their power as a witness, to close the moral distance between themselves and others, is the single most radical subversion of engineered extraction in the name of market optimization.

It is precisely because the dominant technical education structures resist moral education in the face of divine power that such education becomes necessary. The resistance to moral formation reveals the inherent engineered corruption in the technical education system. In a town of people taught to fear water in a dying desert, it is imperative to ignore their screeches and drink anyways. This is the foundation of change.

I believe that many might argue that it is benevolent to teach employable skills to the poor, to lift them from poverty with code. And I agree. But to fracture our students and teach them to optimize their self for market forces is to ascend upwards in class and descend downwards into spiritual hell. This is the creation of agents of harm under the veil of virtuous pragmatism.

As a technical educator, the reality is that each day at work you participate in genesis. You are already shaping creators. The question is whether you will teach them to hold the fire of divine power with reverence or with violence. What worlds will they whisper into this realm given your guidance?

The idea that systemic change is unlikely due to the scale of the personal versus the whole is foolish. Our creators are humans, the fundamental units of systems wielding immense power. To wield our own power as educators and create programmers orientated towards virtue is the most radical, penetrating manifestations of power against morally sick institutions. Individual creation is systemic creation.

Will we teach our students to create light and illuminate our society?

Or will we teach them to burn our world?

Or, even worse, will we let them burn it, and call it progress?