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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) _____________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________ 2. What are the basic differences separating ethicists from moralists? (Minimum word count: 60) _____________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________ 3. Identify and briefly summarize four different kinds of “discussion stoppers” in ethical discourse. (Minimum word count: 60) _____________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________ 4. What is moral relativism? How is it different from cultural relativism? (Minimum word count: 60) _____________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________ 5. What is moral objectivism, and how is it different from moral absolutism? (Minimum word count: 60) _____________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________ 6. What is professional ethics? (Minimum word count: 60) _____________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________ 7. What is a profession, and who is a professional? (Minimum word count: 60) _____________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________ 8. Who is a computer/IT professional? (Minimum word count: 60) _____________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________ 9. Do computer/IT professionals have special moral responsibilities that ordinary computer users do not have? (Minimum word count: 60) _____________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________ 10. What are professional codes of ethics, and what functions do they serve? (Minimum word count: 60) _____________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________ 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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