That acute sense of self-criticism also helps explain why Dr. Latiff, 63, now wearing the blue blazer and oxford shirt of a professor with a Ph.D., strolled into a classroom at the University of Notre Dame one afternoon last month for the opening session of Philosophy 20628. The course is called “The Ethics of Emerging Weapons Technologies,” and it is a forum for both Dr. Latiff and his students to grapple with the moral meaning of arms.

The syllabus, as Dr. Latiff explained to his 35 or so undergrads, centers on the arsenal of the high-tech era: drones, cyberwarfare, robotics, data mining, soldier enhancement by prostheses or drugs. Just because we have these weapons, he asked the class, should we use them? If we use them, how can we stop others from using them? The search for answers to such questions will occupy the semester.

And while the hardware is new, the questions are not. The assigned readings, dealing with the ethics of war, include Thucydides and Thomas Aquinas. In his first lecture, Dr. Latiff went back in time to 1139, when Pope Innocent II banned the use of that era’s cutting-edge armament, the crossbow, against Christians. He mentioned the American decisions to firebomb Dresden and drop atomic bombs on Japan in World War II. Drawing closer to his own era, he spoke of Agent Orange, the toxic defoliant used in the Vietnam War.

“At the time, it was an expedient thing to do,” he said, using words that could well apply to drones today. “It helped us find the enemy. But was there anyone who thought about long-term consequence? I contend there was nobody.”

In trying to be such a somebody now, it is no mere coincidence that Dr. Latiff devised Philosophy 20628 specifically for Notre Dame. He earned all three of his degrees here. He studied Catholic theology and existential philosophy against the backdrop of the countercultural 1960s; simultaneously, he served in the R.O.T.C. as part of the military scholarship that was the only way he, the son of a shopkeeper in Appalachia, could have afforded a private university.