Name: ________________________
Date: ____________________
ITMG481 Week 2 Assignment (3% of Grade)
APUS/Yocam
Lesson 2 Review: Conduct & Moral Responsibility
The purpose of this activity is to reinforce what you have learned so far about conduct and moral
responsibility.
1. How do religion, law, and philosophy each provide different grounds for justifying a moral principle?
How can each perspective be applied to the analysis of the moral principle “Stealing is wrong?
(Minimum word count: 60)
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2. What are the basic differences separating ethicists from moralists? (Minimum word count: 60)
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3. Identify and briefly summarize four different kinds of “discussion stoppers” in ethical discourse.
(Minimum word count: 60)
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4. What is moral relativism? How is it different from cultural relativism? (Minimum word count: 60)
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5. What is moral objectivism, and how is it different from moral absolutism? (Minimum word count: 60)
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6. What is professional ethics? (Minimum word count: 60)
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7. What is a profession, and who is a professional? (Minimum word count: 60)
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8. Who is a computer/IT professional? (Minimum word count: 60)
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9. Do computer/IT professionals have special moral responsibilities that ordinary computer users do not
have? (Minimum word count: 60)
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10. What are professional codes of ethics, and what functions do they serve? (Minimum word count: 60)
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CHAPTER 2: Ethical Concepts and Ethical
Theories: Establishing and Justifying a
Moral System
In Chapter 1, we defined cyberethics as the study of moral issues
involving cybertechnology. However, we have not yet defined what is
meant by ethics, morality, and the study of moral issues. In Chapter 2,
we define these terms as well as other foundational concepts, and we
examine a set of ethical theories that will guide us in our deliberation
on the specific cyberethics issues we confront in Chapters 4–12. To
accomplish the objectives of Chapter 2, we provide answers to the
following questions:
What is ethics, and how is it different from morality or a
moral system?
What are the elements that make up a moral system?
Where do the rules in a moral system come from, and
how are they justified?
How is a philosophical study of morality different from
studying morality from the perspectives of religion and law?
Is morality essentially a personal, or private, matter, or is it
a public phenomenon?
Is morality simply relative to particular cultures and thus
culturally determined?
How is meaningful dialogue about cyberethics issues that
are global in scope possible in a world with diverse cultures and
belief systems?
What roles do classic and contemporary ethical theories
play in the analysis of moral issues involving cybertechnology?
Are traditional ethical theories adequate to handle the
wide range of moral controversies affecting cybertechnology?
2.1: ETHICS AND MORALITY
Ethics is derived from the Greek ethos, and the term morality has its
roots in the Latin mores. Both the Greek and the Latin terms refer to
notions of custom, habit, behavior, and character. Although “ethics”
and “morality” are often used interchangeably in
everyday discourse, we draw some important distinctions between the
two terms as we will use them in this textbook. First, we define ethics
as the study of morality.1 This definition, of course, raises two further
questions:
a.What is morality?
b.What is the study of morality?
We had begun to answer question (b) in Chapter 1, where we
described three approaches to cyberethics issues. You may want to
review Section 1.4, which describes how moral issues can be studied
from the perspectives of professional ethics, philosophical ethics, and
sociological/descriptive ethics. We will say more about the study of
morality from a philosophical perspective in Section 2.1.2. Before we
examine the concepts and theories that comprise morality or a moral
system, however, we briefly consider a classic example of a moral
dilemma.
First, we should note that the phrase “moral dilemma” is often misused
to describe a “moral issue.” We will see that not every moral issue is a
moral dilemma, and not every dilemma is necessarily moral in nature.
A dilemma describes a situation where one is confronted with two
choices, neither of which is desirable. Sometimes it may mean
choosing between (what one may perceive to be) the lesser of two
evils. But our primary interest in this chapter is not so much with the
specific choices one makes; instead it is with (i) the principle that one
uses in making his or her choice, and (ii) whether that principle can be
applied systematically and consistently in making moral decisions in
similar kinds of cases. We next consider a dilemma that has become a
classic in the ethics literature.
SCENARIO 2–1: The Runaway Trolley:
A Classic Moral Dilemma
Imagine that you are driving a trolley and that all of a sudden you
realize that the trolley’s brake system has failed. Further imagine that
approximately 80 meters ahead of you on the trolley track (a short
distance from the trolley’s station) five crew men are working on a
section of the track on which your trolley is traveling. You realize that
you cannot stop the trolley and that you will probably not be able to
prevent the deaths of the five workers. But then you suddenly realize
that you could “throw a switch” that would cause the trolley to go on to
a different track. You also happen to notice that one person is working
on that track. You then realize that if you do nothing, five people will
likely die, whereas if you engage the switch to change tracks, only one
person would likely die.2
What would you do in this situation—let the trolley take its “natural”
course, expecting that five people will likely die, or intentionally
change the direction of the trolley, likely causing the death of one
person who otherwise would have lived? If you use what some call a
“cost-benefits” approach in this particular situation, you might reason
in the following way: throwing the switch will have a better outcome,
overall, because more human lives would be saved than lost. So, in
this case you conclude that throwing the switch is the right thing to do
because the net result is that four more people will live. If the
reasoning process that you used in this particular case is extended to
a general principle, you have embraced a type of consequentialist or
utilitarian ethical theory (described later in this chapter). But can this
principle/theory be consistently extended to cover similar cases?
Next consider a variation of this dilemma, which also involves a
runaway trolley, but this time you are a spectator. Imagine that you are
standing on a bridge overlooking the track on which a runaway trolley
is traveling. You observe that the trolley is heading for the station
where there are many people gathered outside. Standing next to you
on the bridge is a very large and obese person (weighing
approximately 500 pounds), who is leaning forward over the rail of the
bridge to view the runaway trolley. You realize that if you gently
pushed the obese person forward as the trolley approaches, he would
fall off the bridge and land in front of the trolley; the impact would be
sufficient to stop the trolley. Thus you could save the lives of many
people who otherwise would die.
Would you be willing to push the obese person off the bridge? If not,
why not? What has changed in the two scenarios? After all, if you are
reasoning from the standpoint of a utilitarian/consequentialist theory,
the same outcome would be realized—one person dies, while many
others live. But studies have shown that most people find it far more
difficult to push (intentionally) one person to his death, even though
doing so would mean that several persons will live as a result.
However, in this case, you might reason that intentionally causing
someone’s death (especially by having a “direct hand” in it) is morally
wrong. You may also reason that actively and deliberately causing
one person’s death (as opposed to another’s) is unjust and unfair, and
that it would be a dangerous moral principle to generalize. In this
case, your reasoning would be nonutilitarian or nonconsequentialist.
Perhaps you see the inconsistency in the means used to make
decisions in the two similar scenarios. However, you might react
initially by saying that it is permissible to flip-flop on moral principles,
depending on the particular circumstances you face. But we will see
that it is difficult to have a coherent moral system where the ethical
theories used to frame policies are inherently inconsistent.
Fortunately, there is no need for us to resolve these questions at this
point in the chapter. Rather, the purpose of posing this dilemma now
is to get us to begin thinking about how we can respond to dilemmas
that we will invariably face in our professional as well as personal
lives. Later in this chapter, we revisit this dilemma and we complicate
it somewhat by replacing the trolley’s human driver with an
autonomous computer system. We then examine in detail some
specific ethical theories that can be applied in our analyses of this and
other moral dilemmas. First, however, we examine some basic
concepts that comprise morality and a moral system.
2.1.1: What Is Morality?
As noted above, we defined ethics as the study of morality. However,
there is no universally agreed upon definition of “morality” among
ethicists and philosophers. For our purposes, however, morality can
be defined as a system of rules for guiding human conduct, and
principles for evaluating those rules. Note that (i) morality is a system,
and (ii) it is a system comprised of moral rules and principles. Moral
rules can be understood as rules of conduct, which are very similar to
the notion of policies, described in Chapter 1. There, “policies” were
defined as rules of conduct that have a wide range of application.
According to James Moor (2004), policies range from formal laws to
informal, implicit guidelines for actions.
(Tavani 33-36)
Tavani, Herman T. Ethics and Technology: Controversies, Questions,
and Strategies for Ethical Computing, 4th Edition. Wiley, 2012-11-26.
VitalBook file.
CHAPTER 4: Professional Ethics, Codes of
Conduct, and Moral Responsibility
In this chapter, we examine a range of issues often categorized under
the general heading “professional ethics.” More specifically, we
analyze the following questions:
What do we mean by “professional ethics” in a computing
or informationtechnology (IT) context?
What are professional codes of ethics, and what important
functions do they serve in the computing/IT profession?
What is “whistle-blowing,” and when is it permissible or
perhaps even required for computer/IT professionals?
Which standards of moral responsibility, legal liability, and
accountability should apply in cases of computer malfunctions,
especially in safety-critical computer systems?
Is an adequate model of risk analysis for developing
software, especially for safety-critical and life-critical systems,
possible?
Issues involving software reliability and risk are also examined from
the perspective of cybersecurity, in Chapter 6, where concerns about
the vulnerability and reliability of computer systems are considered
from the vantage point of attacks on computer systems from external
sources, such as malicious hackers. In this chapter, our concern with
unreliable computer systems centers primarily on issues that arise as
a result of malfunctions and errors generated from “internal” sources;
that is, we are concerned with reliability and safety issues that can be
traced to the coding and testing of software and to the manufacturing
of hardware components used in computer systems.
A principal objective of this chapter is to determine the extent to which
computer/IT professionals should be held accountable for
malfunctions involving computer systems. Why is this important? For
one thing, advanced and sophisticated technologies, developed by
computer/IT professionals, are increasingly used in military defense
systems and
warfare. In 2007, the South African army deployed a semiautonomous robotic canon that malfunctioned, killing nine “friendly”
soldiers and wounding fourteen others (Wallach and Allen, 2009). And
in 2010, the U.S. military lost control of a helicopter drone for more
than 30 minutes during a test flight; the drone veered toward
Washington, D.C., violating air space intended to protect the White
House and other official government buildings (Lin, 2012).
We should note, however, that computer malfunctions involving lifecritical applications are by no means new. Consider two incidents,
now viewed as classic cases, which occurred in the 1980s. In 1988,
the USS Vincennes, a U.S. Navy ship equipped with the Aegis Radar
System, accidentally shot down an Iranian passenger airliner, killing
290 people. A poorly designed user interface to the computerized
radar system contributed significantly to this accident.1 Between 1985
and 1987, a series of malfunctions involving the Therac-25, a
computerized radiation-therapy machine, resulted in six serious
accidents and three deaths. The problem was eventually traced to a
bug in a software program that, in certain instances, caused massive
overdoses of radiation to be administered to patients.2
Both the Therac-25 and the Aegis incidents are examined in detail in
this chapter, in Sections 4.5.2 and 4.6, respectively. Accidents of this
type are sometimes categorized as “computer error” or “computer
malfunction.” But who, exactly, is responsible for these computer
errors and malfunctions? It would seem reasonable to hold the
manufacturers of unreliable computer systems legally liable for harms
caused by faulty design interfaces or “buggy” software. But we must
also ask to what extent the computer/IT professionals, especially the
software engineers who design and develop “safety-critical” and “lifecritical” applications, bear responsibility for the harmful consequences
that result from unreliable computer systems.
While the Aegis and Therac incidents each raise concerns about
professional responsibility for safety-critical and life-critical systems,
our analysis of responsibility and reliability issues in Chapter 4 is also
concerned with failures and malfunctions of computer systems, which
might not be “safety-critical,” but which can cause businesses and
ordinary users to lose work, time, and money. For example, problems
in the computerized baggage system at the Denver International
Airport caused both damage to luggage and routing problems, which,
in turn, cost the airport millions of dollars and significantly delayed its
opening. Before examining specific cases involving unreliable
computer systems, however, we first briefly consider some
foundational issues in professional ethics.
4.1: PROFESSIONAL ETHICS
Recall that in Chapter 1 we described professional ethics as one of
the three main perspectives through which cyberethics issues can be
identified and analyzed. We saw that, when applied to computing,
professional ethics is a field of applied ethics concerned with moral
issues that affect computer professionals. You may also recall from
our discussion of professional ethics in Chapter 1 that Don Gotterbarn
suggested that professional ethics is the principal, perhaps even
exclusive, perspective through which ethical issues involving the
computing field should be examined.3 Although this claim is
controversial and will not be further considered here, we have devoted
this
chapter to an analysis of computer ethics issues from the vantage
point of professional ethics.
Why have a category called “professional ethics”? After all, one could
reasonably argue that independent of whether a particular moral issue
happens to arise in either a professional or a nonprofessional context,
ethics is ethics; the same basic ethical rules apply to professionals as
to ordinary individuals. In response, many ethicists argue that some
moral issues affecting professionals are sufficiently distinct and
specialized to warrant a separate field of study. Some ethicists also
argue that, at least in certain cases, professionals have special moral
obligations, which exceed those of ordinary individuals. To grasp the
essential points in the arguments advanced by these ethicists, it is
useful first to understand what is meant by “profession” and
“professional.”
4.1.1: What Is a Profession?
The meaning of “profession” has evolved significantly over time.
Harris, Pritchard, and Rabins (2004) note that the term was once
associated with people “professing a religious or monastic life,” before
taking on a more secular meaning in the late seventeenth century,
when it was first used to refer to one who “professed to be duly
qualified.”4 In more recent times, a profession has come to be
associated with a certain kind of vocation or an occupation in which a
person has a specific set of skills or a mastery of knowledge in a
particular field.
A profession can be distinguished from many ordinary occupations in
terms of certain kinds of characteristics, such as having a code of
ethics. Consider that the field of computing/IT has a number of
professional societies with ethical codes (see Section 4.3), as do
professions such as medicine and law. However, the computing/IT
profession also differs from traditional professions such as medicine
and law in at least one key respect. While many doctors and lawyers
work in private practice, most computer/IT professionals are not selfemployed; even though some work as independent consultants, most
are employed by corporations. So, some may question whether the
computer/IT field is a “true profession.” But Robert Barger (2008)
argues that it qualifies as a genuine profession because the field
satisfies two criteria that have traditionally characterized a profession:
(1) expert knowledge, which he describes as a “special technical
knowledge that is certified by some authority and is not possessed by
the layperson”; and (2) autonomy with respect to “independence in
conducting one’s professional practice.”5
4.1.2: Who Is a Professional?
As in the case of “profession,” the term “professional” has also
evolved over time. Traditional professionals included lawyers, medical
doctors, and professors. In our current and expanded use of that term,
we refer to a broader range of professional categories, such as realestate professionals, marketing professionals, and so forth. A defining
attribute of traditional professions, such as medicine and law, is that
members often find themselves in situations in which their decisions
and actions can have significant social effects; for example, medical
doctors can prescribe the use of certain drugs for their patients, who
otherwise would have no legal access to them, and lawyers
(Tavani 101-103)
Tavani, Herman T. Ethics and Technology: Controversies, Questions,
and Strategies for Ethical Computing, 4th Edition. Wiley, 2012-11-26.
VitalBook file.
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