Humanities 375, September 8, 1998

Why are we reading this book?

1. To raise your sensitivity to circumstances involving information technology that have the potential to harm individuals or society.

2. To provide you with a process for analyzing ethical situations and for making decisions in response to situations.

What you learn from this book should help you:

1. Perform your own job, task, or studies using computers ethically

2. Create an ethical environment 3. Guide others to perform ethically 4. Recognize and report ethical violations

The case studies should help you:

1. Discover ethical issues and identify the major ethical dilemmas.

2. Analyze the ethicality of the alternatives through applying ethical principals.

3. Suggest alternative courses of action to relieve this situation.

The case studies should help you:

4. Recommend long-term, systemic, organizational or societal changes to prevent further occurrences. This includes developing policies that will help prevent problems in the future.

What is Ethics? How is it different from law, legality?

Law is a set of policies set up by government. Ideally they should be ethical, but they sometimes conflict.

Ethics is making a PRINCIPLED choice between right and wrong, which means that it is based on ethical principles.

What are ethical principles?

Why isn't your own intuition good enough? How about personal values and

preferences? Why do we care about ethics? Why do

they require it for the Computer Science major?

The Social Contract

P 4. "each person who benefits from living in society has an obligation to uphold the principles on which it is based"

This is another version of the social contract of Jean Jacques Rousseau.

The dictionary defines social contract as follows:

An agreement among the members of an organized society or between the government and the governed defining and limiting the rights and duties of each.– Rights and duties, in this context, are

important, as we shall see in a bit. In exchange for rights, you have to be willing to accept duties to others.

Questions:

How is computer ethics different from regular ethics?

What are the differences in computers and network that lead to special kinds of problems?

Strategy:

When we identify problems, we can discuss approaches and come up with strategies for solving them. After we solve the problems, we should develop policies to prevent them from recurring.

Questions:

What factors influence your behavior? That is, what principles do you weigh your

behavior against? Church? Family? School? Friends? Television and movies?

Examples of possible factors influencing behavior

Will it make me feel good? Will it help me in the long run? Will it hurt anyone else? Would my family/church/school approve? Is it legal? Drives for food, shelter, love.

Questions:

How do lawmakers decide on laws? On what do they base laws?

Value Judgments

For what reasons do we often make bad value judgments?

Inadequate examination of the facts Failure to apply appropriate ethical

principles Failure to consider all perspectives on an

issue

Right from Right???

Sometimes it isn’t clear that one choice is wrong and the other right

We have to weigh competing “right” alternatives

This is the heart of the “ethical dilemma” See example at the bottom of P. 6

Defensible Decisions

Not a right decision How do we defend our ethical decisions? We provide good reasons, by examining the

facts carefully and applying some tests

Law and Ethics

Give examples 1. Ethical and legal 2. Ethical but not legal 3. Not ethical but legal 4. Not ethical and not legal

Informal Guidelines

“Shushers” The Mom test The TV test The market test The smell test

Formal Guidelines

Corporate Policy Professional Codes of Conduct The Golden Rule

Rights and Duties

Also known as deontology See rights on p. 13 See duties on p. 14 Your professional responsibilities are a part

of your duties Rights and duties are reciprocal

Consequentialism

What will happen if I…? Also known as teleology Egoism Utilitarianism Altruism

Kant’s categorical imperative

Principle of consistency Principle of respect Know how to apply these tests to any

situation you encounter Know how to identify stakeholders in any

situation