Ever tried to explain to a non-technical person why you can’t just “add ethics” to a programming language? It’s like trying to explain why you can’t just add sarcasm to calculus—technically possible, utterly confusing, and nobody asked for it anyway. Yet here we are, in 2025, and the conversation about embedding ethical constraints directly into programming languages is becoming increasingly impossible to ignore. Let me be upfront: this isn’t a question with a simple yes or no answer. It’s messier than that. But it’s also one of the most important design decisions we need to make about the future of software development.

The Current State of Affairs

Programming languages are, fundamentally, tools for expressing intent. They translate human thought into machine instructions. For decades, we’ve operated under a principle of neutrality—the idea that the language itself shouldn’t judge what you’re doing with it. Python doesn’t care if you’re building a life-saving medical device or a surveillance tool. C will happily compile your code whether it’s securing a bank or facilitating a hack. This neutrality felt like a feature. It gave us freedom. It gave us flexibility. It gave us the ability to use the same tool for wildly different purposes. But here’s the thing: that neutrality was always an illusion. Every design decision in a programming language embodies values. Garbage collection in Java? That’s a decision about memory safety and developer convenience. Type systems? That’s about preventing certain categories of mistakes. The choice to include or exclude certain APIs? That’s a values statement right there. The real question isn’t whether programming languages should embed ethics. They already do. The question is: should we do it intentionally and thoughtfully, or should we keep pretending we’re building neutral tools?

The Case for Built-in Ethical Constraints

Let’s start with the optimistic view. There are genuinely compelling reasons why programming languages should include built-in ethical safeguards. Harm Prevention at the Language Level Consider SQL injection attacks. They’ve been a nightmare for over two decades. What if the SQL language itself made this class of vulnerabilities impossible? What if, instead of requiring developers to remember parameterized queries every single time, the language made unsafe patterns literally uncompilable? This isn’t theoretical. Some languages are already moving in this direction. Rust’s borrow checker prevents entire classes of memory safety vulnerabilities by refusing to compile unsafe code. It’s an ethical constraint embedded at the language level: “You cannot write certain kinds of broken code here.” Democratizing Security The harder it is to build insecure systems by accident, the more inclusive our technology becomes. Not everyone can hire a security team. Not every startup can afford a penetration tester. But if ethical constraints are baked into the language, junior developers automatically get basic protections. This matters. A lot. Because right now, security is a luxury good. Those with resources can afford to build secure systems. Those without… well, they’re the ones getting hacked. Reducing Cognitive Load Every decision a developer doesn’t have to make is one less opportunity to make it wrong. If a language makes certain unethical patterns impossible, developers can focus on actual business logic instead of security theater. They can ship faster and with more confidence. Creating Industry Standards When constraints are built into the language itself, they create a common baseline. No more arguing about whether you should sanitize user input—the language does it for you. No more debates about secure defaults—they’re the only defaults available.

The Case Against (And It’s Substantial)

But let’s be real: there are genuinely serious objections to this approach. Who Gets to Define “Ethical”? This is the killer question. Ethics aren’t universal. What’s ethical in one cultural context might be forbidden in another. What one jurisdiction considers necessary security might be another’s surveillance tool. Consider encryption. In some countries, strong encryption is considered essential for human rights. In others, it’s considered a threat to national security. If Python bakes in mandatory encryption constraints, which side loses? If Go includes built-in rate limiting to “prevent abuse,” does that prevent a activist building a tool to expose government corruption? If JavaScript prevents certain DOM manipulations “for security,” does that prevent researchers from testing web security? The moment you embed ethics into a language, you’ve made a political statement. And not everyone agrees with your politics. Performance and Flexibility Trade-offs Every safeguard has a cost. Type checking takes time. Bounds checking has overhead. Security-focused string handling is slower than a simple buffer copy. In some cases, this cost is worth it. In others… a self-driving car might need real-time performance that safety checks would compromise. A scientific simulation might need low-level access that ethical constraints would forbid. The Compliance Theater Problem Here’s something nobody talks about: built-in constraints often become a replacement for actual thinking. If a language “prevents” certain vulnerabilities, developers stop worrying about them entirely. Then attackers find a creative way around the constraint, and suddenly we have a false sense of security doing more harm than no security at all. Vendor Lock-in and Control When language designers embed ethics, they gain enormous power over what’s possible in computing. That’s a lot of power to concentrate in the hands of a few people, even if those people have good intentions today.

A Practical Framework: Finding the Middle Ground

Here’s what I actually think should happen: we need a nuanced approach that captures the benefits of ethical constraints without the downsides of overzealous gatekeeping.

                    ┌─────────────────────────────────────┐
                    │  Language Design Decision Matrix    │
                    └─────────────────────────────────────┘
                                    │
                    ┌───────────────┼───────────────┐
                    │               │               │
                    ▼               ▼               ▼
            ┌──────────────┐  ┌──────────────┐  ┌──────────────┐
            │   UNIVERSAL  │  │  CONTEXTUAL  │  │  OPTIONAL    │
            │ CONSTRAINTS  │  │ CONSTRAINTS  │  │ CONSTRAINTS  │
            └──────────────┘  └──────────────┘  └──────────────┘
                 │                  │                  │
          • Memory safety      • Rate limiting    • Tracking
          • Type safety        • Data retention   • Logging
          • Basic crypto       • Encryption opts • Metrics
                 │                  │                  │
            ENFORCED            CONFIGURABLE        AVAILABLE
            BY DEFAULT          AT IMPORT           BY OPT-IN

Category 1: Universal Constraints (Enforce) Some ethical constraints should be universal and non-negotiable. These are problems that cause harm with almost no legitimate counterargument:

  • Memory safety violations (buffer overflows don’t have a valid use case)
  • Integer overflow without warning (unintended wraparound doesn’t help anyone)
  • Silent type coercion failures (JavaScript’s infamous gotchas) These should be built-in and enforced. The debate is over. These constraints prevent harm across virtually all domains. Category 2: Contextual Constraints (Configurable) Some constraints make sense in specific contexts but not universally:
  • Rate limiting (good for preventing DDoS, bad if you’re building a scientific simulator)
  • Forced encryption (necessary for banking, unnecessary for a local note-taking app)
  • Mandatory logging (required for compliance, costly for embedded systems) These should be available and encouraged by default, but developers should be able to opt out with explicit configuration and documentation. Category 3: Optional Constraints (Available) Some constraints are helpful but shouldn’t be mandated:
  • Activity tracking (useful for security audits, invasive for privacy-sensitive applications)
  • Automated vulnerability scanning (good practice, but slow in some scenarios)
  • Ethical policy verification (interesting, but not for all contexts) Make these available as libraries and tools, not language features. Let developers choose.

Real-World Implementation: A Practical Example

Let’s look at what this might actually look like in code. Imagine a new language called “Ethical” (bear with me, it’s a terrible name but it illustrates the point):

# Universal constraint example: The language forces you to handle null/None safely
# This code WILL NOT COMPILE in Ethical without proper handling
def process_user(user_id: int) -> str:
    # In Ethical, this would fail to compile
    # user = get_user(user_id)  # Returns Optional[User]
    # return user.name  # ERROR: potential null reference!
    # This WILL compile:
    match get_user(user_id):
        case User(name=name):
            return name
        case None:
            return "User not found"

# Contextual constraint example: encryption is default but configurable
from ethical.security import encrypted, unencrypted
# Default: data is encrypted at rest
@encrypted(algorithm="AES-256")
def store_sensitive_data(data: str) -> None:
    database.save(data)
# Explicit opt-out: you must declare WHY
@unencrypted(reason="LOCAL_CACHE_PERFORMANCE_CRITICAL")
def cache_frequently_accessed_data(key: str, value: str) -> None:
    local_cache[key] = value

# Optional constraint example: security auditing via library
from ethical.audit import track_access
def get_medical_record(patient_id: int, requester_id: int) -> MedicalRecord:
    # This is optional - you choose to import and use it
    track_access(
        resource="medical_record",
        target_id=patient_id,
        actor_id=requester_id,
        action="READ"
    )
    return database.get_medical_record(patient_id)

See the difference? Universal constraints prevent you from doing obviously stupid things. Contextual constraints are available but configurable. Optional constraints are there if you want them.

The Tension That Matters

Here’s what keeps me up at night about this issue: The more sophisticated our tools become, the more power they concentrate. A programming language that enforces ethical constraints is more powerful than one that doesn’t. But power requires oversight, and oversight is hard to maintain at scale. Yet, conversely, tools without ethical guardrails are demonstrably causing harm. We’ve seen it with surveillance technologies, with biased AI, with security vulnerabilities that were entirely preventable. We’re caught between two bad options:

  • Build languages without ethical constraints and accept the harm that results
  • Build languages with ethical constraints and accept the concentration of power that results The answer, I believe, isn’t to pick one side. It’s to build systems with distributed ethical decision-making built in.

The Path Forward

If we’re going to embed ethics in programming languages, we need to do three things simultaneously: 1. Make constraints transparent and auditable Every ethical constraint should be documented, justified, and open to challenge. If you’re enforcing something, people deserve to know why. 2. Build in override mechanisms with accountability Don’t make constraints unbreakable. Make them breakable only with explicit justification that creates an audit trail. This prevents security theater while maintaining practical flexibility. 3. Create governance structures that represent diverse perspectives Language design decisions shouldn’t be made by a small group of engineers. They should involve ethicists, security professionals, domain experts from different fields, and—crucially—people from different cultures and value systems.

The Questions We Should Actually Be Asking

Rather than debating whether languages should have ethical constraints, we should be asking:

  • Which ethical constraints are universal enough to enforce? (Memory safety, probably. Cultural values, probably not.)
  • How do we make constraints configurable without turning them into security theater?
  • Who should decide what constraints exist, and how do we keep that decision-making process legitimate?
  • How do we build escape hatches that are safe but not easy?
  • How do we measure whether ethical constraints are actually having the intended effect? These are harder questions than yes/no. But they’re also more useful ones.

My Personal Take

I’m not a absolutist about this. I think we need both: the universally-enforced safety constraints that prevent obvious disasters, AND the flexibility to handle contexts we haven’t imagined yet. I think Rust got something right with its philosophy of “fearless concurrency”—constraints that feel limiting until you realize what they’re preventing. But I also think we need to be humble about the limits of what any single language designer team can anticipate. The future, I think, looks like this: programming languages will become more opinionated about ethics. They’ll embed more constraints. But the really good ones will do it in ways that allow for informed override, that explain their reasoning, and that remain open to challenge. The languages that will matter most won’t be the ones that prevent you from doing bad things. They’ll be the ones that make doing good things the path of least resistance. And we’re nowhere near there yet.

What do you think? Should languages have built-in ethical constraints, or does that cross the line into over-design? Where would you draw the line? Sound off in the comments—this is the kind of conversation that needs multiple perspectives to mean anything.