Title: Why Show We Care about Ethics? What is ETHICS? The practice
1Why Show We Care about Ethics?
2What is ETHICS?
- The practice of making a principled choice
between right and wrong. - For a responsible person, ethical principles are
an essential part of solving a problem. - Using ethical principles as a basis for decision
making prevents us from relying only on intuition
or personal preference.
3- Why should we care about ethics?
- Is computer ethics (ethics regarding
information technology) really different from
regular ethics? - Capabilities of computers lend special character
to problems of ethics. - Difficult, often, to identify the ethical issues
I didnt know I did anything wrong. - Computer ethics have a strong link to policy or
procedure.
4Competing Factors in Decision Making
- Biological level guided by drives for food,
shelter, love - Guided by laws (government, church, culture)
- Guided by an understanding of what is good,
right, proper, moral, or ethical.
5- At any one time, influences from several levels
affect or behavior. These influences often lead
to competing outcomes, which must be weighed
before we make judgments about how to act. - Decisions involving information technology
incorporate many levels of influences many
shades of gray. - A risk in situations involving ethics is the risk
of poor judgment. Decisions made with poor
judgment can have a wide range of problematic
results. - ETHICS is the practice of making principled
choices.
6Types of Ethical Choices
- Choosing Right from Wrong
- Stealing, lying, cheating
- Taboos of a commonsense morality
- Choosing Right from Right
- Situation is not clear not black or white
contains some gray - Complexity of ethical choice the necessity of
choosing a course of action from 2 or more
alternatives, each having some desirable result. - Choosing 2 or more goods / or lesser of 2 evils
7Practical Approaches to Ethical Decision Making
- Defensible decisions
- Using Law to Make Ethical Decisions
- Legality versus Ethicality
I An act that is ethical and legal II An
act that is ethical but not legal III An act
that is not ethical but is legal IV An act
that is not ethical and not legal
8The ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct
- http//www.acm.org/constitution/code.html
- Purpose to foster understanding about
information technology and standards for its use. - Formal guideline to gaining a clear picture about
a problem or dilemma, and beginnings of an
ethical solution - Is the act consistent with corporate policy?
- Does the act violate corporate or professional
codes of conduct or ethics? - Does the act violate the Golden Rule?
- Does the act serve the majority rather than a
minority?
9Using Informal Guidelines to Make Ethical
Decisions
- The Mom Test
- The TV Test
- The Smell Test
- The Other Persons Shoes Test
- The Market Test
10The Principle of Harm Minimization
- A common standard for deciding right and wrong
- Prescribes choosing the course of action that
minimizes the amount of harm. - STAKEHOLDERs perspective stakeholder is any
person or organization with a stake in the
decision. - HARM any act, physical or psychological, that
denies a stakeholder his or her reasonable rights.
11How Rights and Duties Relate to Ethics
- Deontology the study of rights and duties
- Rights are inherent universal privileges
- The right to know
- The right to privacy
- The right to property
12Considering Duties
- Feel compelled by a moral obligation-the action
cannot be avoided - Duties are basis for our definition of rights. If
a person has rights, s/he also has corresponding
dutiesduties are expected of an individual in
society - The basic duty is harm minimization
13Responsibility
- A concept closely related to duty is
responsibility - Responsibility is a duty that is usually well
defined and specific to a profession. - Information professionals have the personal
duties we all have as individuals, as wells as
professional responsibilities which are described
in various codes of ethics.
14Personal Duties
- Each person has the personal duty
- To foster trust
- To act with integrity
- To do justice
- To practice beneficence and nonmaleficence
- To act with appropriate gratitude and make
appropriate reparation - To work toward self-improvement
15Professional Responsibilities
- Two factors apply to all professionals and
influence their actions - Professional relationships
- Professional efficacy
- Confidentiality
- Impartiality
16Consequentialism
- When we focus on the goals, ends, results, or
consequences of an action, we are using the
principle of consequentialism. - We judge the rightness of wrongness of an action
by the outcomes. - Two major types
- 1. egoism
- 2. utilitarianism
17Egoism
- The concept of long-term rationality
- Enlightened self-interest or prudence
- If an action doesnt help you in the long term,
it is foolish, or imprudent. - We use this ethical principle as justification
when we do something that furthers our own
welfare or serves our own advantage. - Good for me principle or ethics of arrogance
- Self-interest, in form of company seeking to
increase its profits, is a valid justification
for many businesses - Results in ambiguity, so egoism needs to be
guided and limited by other ethical principles.
18Utilitarianism
- When our actions benefit others as well as
ourselves, we are operating in the public
interest. - We measure the usefulness, or utility, of our
actions for all stakeholders. - This is utilitarianism, which helps a person
judge, through a form of cost-benefit analysis,
whether an action is ethical. - An action is right if it maximizes benefits over
costs for all involved, everyone counting equally.
19Kants Categorical Imperative
- 2 principles for examining whether a person has
the right to act a certain way in a given
situation - Consistency would it make sense to force
everyone to take the action being studied? - Respect We must treat people with dignity.
People are ends in themselves, not means.
20Summary
- In making ethical choices, answer the following
questions - Does the action serve the public interest or, at
least, not cause unnecessary social harm? - Are any basic human rights violated?
- Are any commonly accepted duties abridged?
- The key to solving an ethical dilemma is to use
as many logical approaches as possible to analyze
the problem.
21Ethics and Information TechnologyComputers
Dont Have Ethics,People Do
- Difficulties posed by computers
- Alters relationships among people
- Information in electronic form is more fragile
more easily changed and more vulnerable to
unauthorized access property rights, plagiarism,
piracy, privacy - Efforts to protect information integrity,
confidentiality, and availability often conflict
with desire for benefits of information sharing - Lack of widespread means of authorization and
authentication exposes IT to unethical practices.
22- Difficulties posed by People
- The Order-of-Magnitude Effect
- For each tenfold increase (an increase of one
order of magnitude) in speed, our perception of
what is going on changes dramatically. - The Effort Effect
- The principle of unreasonable effort if a task
is not worth the effort, people will tend not to
undertake it.
23What is Unethical Computer Use?
- Social and Economic Issues
- Job displacement
- Work-related demands on computer professionals
- Power and access to power civil rights
- Issues of Individual Practice
- Development Process Issues
- Issues involving Mangers and Subordinates
- Processing Issues
- Unreliability
- Untimely Output
- Unintended Data Use
24- (cont)
- Issues Relating to the Workplace
- Ergonomics
- Monitoring
- Issues of Data Collection, Storage, and Access
- Data confidentiality, privacy, accuracy
- Issues About EMail
- Resource Exploitation Issues
- Vendor-Client Issues
- Issues of Computer Crime
25Cases
- Case 3 Something for Everyone
- Case 12 The Engineer and the Teacher
- Case 13 Test Data
- Case 17 Code Blue