An Introduction

Chuck Huff received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Princeton University in 1987 and was an NIH post-doctoral fellow with the Committee for Social Science Research in Computing at Carnegie Mellon University. He has been teaching and doing research at St. Olaf College since 1988.

At St Olaf Chuck teaches Social Psychology, Ethical Issues in Software Design, The Psychology of Good and Evil, Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, and the occasional Research Methods course.

He has published research on moral psychology, the psychology of spirituality, gender and computing, the social effects of electronic interaction, the uses of computing in education, and on teaching about the social and ethical issues associated with computing.  With his wife, Almut Furchert, he is has recently finished a book for Wiley-Blackwell on moral psychology. He has just returned from a sabbatical at Stadtkloster Segen in the middle ot Berlin Germany, where he was writing and reading on the role of humility in the 5 major religions. 

See his Google scholar page or ResearchGate page.

Teaching

Chuck has taught Psychology at William & Mary, Princeton, St. Olaf, and Carnegie Mellon. He has taught courses in Computers and Society at Carnegie Mellon, St. Olaf College, and The George Washington University. He has also taught courses in Philosophy at the University of South Florida and at the Jesuit School for Philosophy in Munich, Germany. 

His course Ethical Issues in Software Design was first taught in 1995 at George Washington University, and is now a required course in the computer science major at St. Olaf.  He has published often on the theory and practice of teaching the course, and the course has been selected for study as an exemplary approach to teaching computer ethics by an NSF-funded interdisciplinary research team.  

Ethical Issues in Computing

Chuck has worked for decades to influence the way that computer science is taught so that ethical concern would be integrated seamlessly into the software design process. Most of this education effort has been grounded in his empirical research on gender in computing and a on virtue model of ethical design of software.  During the 1994-1995 academic year he was a research scientist at George Washington University as a member of a national task force to set standards for teaching ethical and social issues in computing in the computer science curriculum. In 2002-2003 he was in residence at Demontfort University in Leicester, UK doing an NSF-funded research project on the life stories of moral exemplars in computer science in the UK and Scandinavia. He spent the 2008-2009 and 2016-17 academic years at the Jesuit Hochschule für Philosophie in Munich, both times teaching a class on professional ethics. The first stay was dedicated to doing NSF-sponsored research on the life stories of moral exemplars in computing in the UK and Scandinavia, while the second stay was devoted to extensive work on a book in moral psychology that came out of the previous research leave.  See the papers section below for more detail on these research programs.  

In 1999-2001 he was a co-leader of a series of NSF-funded computing ethics workshops at the Colorado School for Mines (with Deborah Johnson, Keith Miller, Tracy Camp, and Laurie Smith King). He was a member of the panel that designed the curriculum standards in Social and Professional Issues for Computing Curriculua 2001. He has championed teaching with thick, detailed cases like the three he provides on computingcases.org. In November of 2002 he was the keynote speaker at ETHICOMP 2002 in Lisbon, Portugal. In March of 2003 he was one of the team of leaders (with Simon Rogerson and Don Gotterbarn) at the first workshop in Poland on Professional Issues in Computing. In April of 2004 he was a keynote speaker at SIGMIS in Tucson AZ. He was a member of the National Academy of Engineering / National Academy of Science panel Ethics Education and Scientific and Engineering Research: What’s been learned? What should be done?  In 2008 (in Washington DC) and in 2014 (at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque) he served on NSF funded panels to construct an ethics code and a graduate level curriculum on ethical issues for GIS Professionals. 

He is an associate editor at the ACM Journal on Responsible Computing serves on the editorial boards of Social Science Computer Review, Computers and Society, and The Journal of Information, Communication, and Ethics in Society.

Moral Psychology

Chuck’s interest in moral psychology dates back to the early 1980s when he was Kelly Shaver’s student at William & Mary.  In social psychology the field was then called “attribution of responsibility.”  His NSF funded work on moral exemplars in computing led to him being asked to write a overview of the burgeoning new field of Moral Psychology – a decade-long project that has just now resulted in a book, done in collaboration with his wife, the German psychologist and philosopher Dr. Almut Furchert. The book, Taking Moral Action attempts to provide a systematic theoretical framework for moral psychology, and is published by Wiley Blackwell in the SPSSI contemporary social issues series. 

Taking Moral Action

These paragraphs and the TOC from the book will provide you an idea of the task we are attempting, and perhaps motivate you look further.

This book is an attempt to understand: (1) why people take moral action; and (2) the individual’s experience of actually doing so. The first task requires us to gather many different empirical literatures on the contexts, influences, and processes that explain why people take moral action. These literatures are what has come to be called moral psychology. The second task requires us to reframe those literature reviews in terms of the experience of the individual taking moral action. This second task, then, leads us into existential, philosophical, and theological concerns. The tension between these two tasks, the general/scientific and the individual/existential, allows us to use conceptual and empirical techniques from each approach to illuminate the other, thereby helping us to understand both better.

Together, we reject the idea that it is useful to restrict moral psychology to any singular definition of morality, and instead encourage opening up the scope of “the moral” to all the interesting places one might find it. Our approach to framing the field is more like what used to be called natural history:1 a wide-ranging approach to collecting the phenomena of interest wherever they are. It is not theory-driven science but it embraces and uses theory-driven science. Nor is it the amateur collection of occasional specimens – we try instead to systematically seek out naturally occurring variety and pattern in the phenomena of interest. Thus, this overview of moral psychology will be broader than others. We hope this breadth helps to heal some of the fragmentation in the field, placing often-isolated literatures in conversations with each other.

Our goal is to expand the horizons of the field of moral psychology and to deepen and structure the complexities that one can find there. As you approach this book, you will find it useful to read the Introduction first, and then perhaps the short Coda. Both chapters will give you a feeling for our approach and help frame your reading of the more specialized chapters. The other chapters are designed to be read in any sequence. They are heavily interdependent, as evidenced by the numerous cross-references to other chapters within each. One way to read the book is to follow these interconnections, starting with a chapter of interest, then deciding what to read next based on your interest and the interconnections. One can also read it straight through as a broad (if not exhaustive) overview of the field.

Table of Contents

  • Introduction xiii
  • Part I Contexts 1
    • 1 Evolution 3
    • 2 Neuroscience of Moral Action 29
    • 3 Moral Ecology 57
  • Part II Influences 87
    • 4 Personality 89
    • 5 Moral Identity and the Self 115
    • 6 Skills and Knowledge 145
  • Part III Processes 177
  • 7 Moral Reason 179
  • 8 Moral Emotion 215
  • 9 Moral Formation: Shaping Moral Action 246
  • Coda: Taking Moral Action 291

The Spiritual Life Story Project

Beginning summer 2018, Almut Furchert and I began to plan a project to repurpose the Life Story Interview that worked so well in my computing ethics research.  We have both long been interested in spirituality and the psychology of spirituality and wanted to begin to systematically investigate the processes that dedicated spiritual seekers nudge during spiritual development.  

At the same time, St Olaf College offered me the opportunity to teach a directed undergraduate research course as a part of my course load.  This seemed like a good way to get the Spiritual Life Story Project started.  Jessica Thao and Gaonue Vang did life story interviews with Hmong Shamans in their community.  Kristian Woie and Ben Froeschle did life story interviews with secular-humanistic spiritual seekers on campus.  And Liz Wilson, Jonathan Morrow, Adrianna Wozniak, and Ben Froeschle did life story interviews with some of the sisters at St. Benedict’s Monastery in St. Joseph MN. 

Some representative papers, sorted by area

Moral Psychology

Ethics and Virtue in Computing

Gender Bias in Computing

For other papers or documentation, please see this short version of my vita. If you really need to see the long, tedious version of my vita, ask me for it.