AUTHOR
Kiyoshi Murata

ABSTRACT

Nowadays, information and communication technology (ICT) is ubiquitous, and the quality of our home, work and social life is significantly dependent on the quality of ICT-based information systems. Since the majority of ICT and ICT-based information systems are developed and used in business organisations, ICT workers, including ICT professionals and ICT non-professionals or end-users, have both intentional and unintentional power over the general public. They have to recognise their responsibility to the general public and develop a professional outlook and attitude in order to create and maintain a safe and reliable information society.

Well-organised codes of conduct for guiding ICT workers in their professional behaviour have already been laid down; however, these codes may not function well on their own, unsupported by context. An ICT worker is not necessarily an independent and unchallenged entity; he/she works within a complex environment filled with various types of stress and pressure. This context might affect individual decisions, which may result in unprofessional behaviour, even though that individual has made a conscious decision to abide by a code. Therefore, the construction of an appropriately professional working environment, designed to encourage ICT workers to develop their sense of professional ethics, could offer a useful strategy for making codes of ICT professional conduct more effective.

AUTHOR
Marcus Johansson

ABSTRACT

In my paper, I explore the possibilities for legitimately punishing a virtual character. I propose a plausible example, where John (a physical person) develops a close emotional relation to Dante (his virtual character). If a moral wrongdoing is done, either in real life or in the virtual world, I argue that there could be instances where a retributive punishment should be measured out to the virtual character. The argument goes as follows: as John and Dante affects each other to a high degree, there are reasons to view the two as a singular moral agent, in which John and Dante are both contributive parts. While John carries the moral component, the moral agent as such cannot be accurately described without Dante, just as a moral agent cannot be properly described without any extension such as a body. John and Dante thus constitute an organic whole. Arguing from our commonly held conviction about appropriate punishment, I then conclude that there would be nothing extraordinary, in terms or reasonableness, to punish a virtual character – such conclusion seems to be in line with our everyday reasoning in questions regarding punishments. Punishing Dante could be either a part of punishing John and Dante as an organic whole, or it could be a pragmatic way of punishing the physical person John. However, there are reasons to believe that the first view is to be preferred, since the second, pragmatic view collides with some deeply held convictions. If this reasoning – which I believe could have some force – is correct, then it would imply new demands on legislation and judicial reasoning in order to handle questions concerning retribution in the virtual sphere.]

AUTHOR
Nivedita Debnath and Dr Kanika T Bhal

ABSTRACT

The theory of cultural lag postulates that material culture like technology changes very fast however the non-material culture like social norms and values take much longer to change. Information technology too has given us the advantages of speed, time and accessibility at a level which was inconceivable till very recently, however the concomitant social and ethical issues of piracy, intrusion of privacy and accuracy too have become increasingly significant, which need to be addressed both at the level of laws and social norms. With the introduction and use of technology are sought to be resolved through old paradigms, which applied to the older social order. Since these paradigms often are not generic they fail to address the typical issues. In these situations understanding how individuals construe the reality in their minds helps us in not only understanding how they would behave, it also helps in the evolution of subsequent social norms.

Piracy in the workplace is one of major ethical issues that have arisen in the context of IT usage. The ease of copying has made the issue of piracy very prominent in the current society. In this paper we first explore whether people perceived doing piracy as ethical or not. Since the personal norms and cognitive maps are important, we next explore the personal norms (mental frameworks) that people use for their perception of ethicality. Kohlberg’s model (1981) of cognitive development tested over the last 30 years emphasizes the cognitive development or reasoning aspect of moral decision -making. It addresses how the cognitive processes of moral decision-making become more complex with development. The emphasis here is on the cognitive decision-making processes, the reasons an individual uses to justify a moral choice, rather than the decision itself (e.g., the outcome). Kohlberg proposed that people go through stages of moral development, and naturally the stage of moral development will influence his decision-making process. His framework provides three broad levels of cognitive moral development; each composed of two stages. Moral development involves the individual’s passage from stage to stage in an invariant irreversible sequence. The profile of an individual represent a dominant stage the person is in, a stage the person is leaving, and a stage he or she is moving into. Though this process the individual develops a personal philosophy.

The various cognitive logics can be mapped on Kohlberg’s stages of moral development by looking at the content of the logics. If the moral logic corresponds with the normative principles the individual is at the principled level, however if logics of self-interest and other defense mechanisms (like neutralization, negation etc) are used they represent lower levels of moral logics. Though Kohlberg and others have used the level to explain moral development of an individual it is possible that certain situations (issues) might either reflect use of different moral principles while making ethical decisions. It is also possible that the situations under enquiry are amenable to various interpretations of principles. Thus, we build in a possibility of the situation under condition determining the use of cognitive logics as well. The major thrust of the research on cognitive logics has been identifying normative logics, taken from philosophy and /or existing psychological defense mechanism while identifying the predominant moral logic. The research has been done through a positivist approach wherein the individual chooses from a given set of philosophies. This methodology is useful when applied to traditional issues, which have clear normative principles, however if we use the existing frameworks we are less likely to explore the unique connotations of ethical issues that a new situation brings in.

In this paper we first explore whether people perceived software piracy as ethical or not. Since the personal norms and cognitive maps are important, we next explore the personal norms (mental frameworks) that people use for their perception of ethicality. Thus, this paper reports the findings of in depth interviews conducted to find out whether people perceive the situation of piracy as ethical or not, and the logic or personal norms that they use for their perceptions. For this purpose data has been collected through in depth interviews of 38 software professionals, from 6 different IT organizations based in North, South and West region of India. Out of 38 respondents 29 were male and only 9 respondents were female. Mostly the respondents were in the age group of 25-30 years. The paper would identify the personal norms of the people and their construction of reality. The paper reports the findings of these interviews conducted to find out whether people perceive piracy in the workplace as ethical or not, and the logic or personal norms that they use for their perceptions. Interviews have been analyzed using grounded theory. Grounded theory “is a qualitative method that inductively discovered by careful collection and analysis of qualitative empirical data. This methods does not being with theory, and then seek proof. Instead, it begins with an area of study and allows theory to emerge from that area of study” (Strauss and Corbin, 1990 p23). The theory that is literally grounded in the data, but is not the data itself (Glaser and Strauss, 1967). Since the interviews are open ended they are likely to get insight into the people’s mental models/personal norms instead of imposing the current models.

Interestingly, besides using the normative principles for ethical decision making individuals use psychological defense mechanism too as guiding philosophies. Results have implications for future research and practice.

REFERENCES

Glaser, B. and Strauss, A. (1967). The discovery of grounded theory – strategies for qualitative research. London: Weiderfeld and Nicolson.

Kohlberg, L. (1981). The Philosophy of Moral Development. San Francisco: CA, Harper and Row.

Strauss, A. and Corbin, J. (1990). Basic of qualitative research techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory. California: Sage.

AUTHOR
Bernd Stahl

ABSTRACT

This paper introduces a new online resource for the community of scholars interested in computer and information ethics called the “Information Ethics Library”. Originally born from the idea to build an online teaching system for information ethics, the system developed to a community based resource. The paper will recount the rationale and development of the system. It will describe some of the main functionalities and organizational aspects. It will conclude with a discussion of the ethical issues raised by the IEL.

AUTHOR
Mary Prior

ABSTRACT

A paper presented at the first ETHICOMP conference made the case for a Hippocratic Oath for IS professionals (Prior 1995). This paper claimed that there had been little debate among members of the profession about potentially harmful applications of computer technology, such as the use of software to control weapons of mass destruction or the violation of human rights through the development of databases to track ‘dissidents’. It suggested that codes of conduct may have a role to play in stimulating debate and helping to encourage the growth of practitioners with a ‘well-developed conscience’, a term used by Thring (1980) in his arguments for a Hippocratic oath for engineers. However, the paper noted that unlike the more established professions such as medicine and the law, there were a number of professional bodies for computing professionals, in general their codes contained flaws (such as not providing guidelines about the priority of obligations when there is a conflict of interest), there were no sanctions for members not abiding by them and there was no obligation for those working in the IS field to even belong to any professional body. It nevertheless proposed that codes of conduct include a Hippocratic oath, ‘committing the IS professional to ensure that the work s/he engages in is for the benefit of human society and the world it inhabits’.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether, ten years on, an argument for a Hippocratic oath for IS professionals can still be made and if so, whether any progress towards this concept has been made.

One of the questions to be addressed is the extent to which the potential for the deployment of computer technology to have negative consequences on society has changed in the past decade. Another will be whether the changes that have been made to the codes of ethics/conduct of various Computing and IS professional associations during this time have lead to major improvements (for example, BCS Code of Conduct (2001) and Code of Good Practice (2004); IMIS Code of Conduct; ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct (1992); Software Engineering Code of Ethics and Professional Practice (1999); IEEE Code of Ethics; Australian Computer Society Code of Professional Conduct and Professional Practice).

The consideration of the role of professional bodies is complicated by the fragmentation of those working in IS/IT among many different areas and the ability of such workers to join one or more of a variety of professional associations, or none at all. Nevertheless the licensing of software engineers was introduced in Texas in 1998 and is a topic that has produced vigorous debate elsewhere in the U.S.A. and Canada (e.g. articles by Bagert, Kennedy & Vardi, Knight & Leveson, Parnas and White & Simons in Communications of the ACM 2002); it has also been the subject of papers presented to ETHICOMP conferences (e.g. Betts, Rackley & Webb, 1996 and Storey & Thompson, 1999). A survey of the ethical attitudes of members of the Institute for the Management of Information Systems found considerable support for the idea of licensing (Prior et al 2003). The prospect for these developments and the implications they may have on the issue of a ‘Hippocratic oath’ will be examined.

In addition to Thring (1980) there have been others who have argued for a Hippocratic oath for engineers. Singleton (1991) considers the IEEE code of ethics in the light of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster and concludes that the code is not widely implemented in the engineering workplace. She calls for the establishment of ‘an engineering oath modelled on the Hippocratic oath’ as part of a campaign to raise the ethical standards of engineers. Student Pugwash USA (SPUSA) has a pledge that it encourages young scientists and technologists to take in which they promise not to use their scientific and technological education ‘for any purpose intended to harm human beings or the environment.

Researchers at IBM are working on a ‘Hippocratic Database’ (Agrawal et al 2002), based on the principle of privacy as expressed in the oath. ‘Hippocratic databases would negotiate the privacy of information exchanged by a consumer to companies’ (Hicks 2002) and the concept is being prototyped to work with the P3P (Platform for Privacy Preferences) standard from the World Wide Web Consortium.

Taking all of the above factors into account, the paper will conclude by considering whether the professional bodies for computing professionals now have the equivalent of a Hippocratic Oath embodied in their codes and what further steps might be required to ensure socially responsible practice by those involved in this field.

REFERENCES

Agrawal, R, Kiernan, Srikant, J. & Xu, Y. (2002) Hippocratic Databases. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Very Large Databases, Hong Kong, China, August 2002.

Betts, J, Rackley, L. & Webb, J (1996) Licensing – What is Happening to the Existing Professional? Paper presented at ETHICOMP 1996, Madrid.

Communications of the ACM (2002) Special issue: licensing software engineers. Vol. 45 (no. 11).

Hicks, M. (2002) Data security oath. http://www.eweek.com/print_article2/0,25533,a=30785,00asp Accessed 01/02/2005.

Prior, M. (1995). The Case for a Hippocratic Oath for Information Systems Professionals. ETHICOMP95, De Montfort University, Leicester, March 28-30 1995.

Prior, M. Fairweather, N.B. Rogerson, S. & Freeman, J. (2003). Is IT Ethical? 2002 ETHICOMP Survey of Professional Practice. IMIS.

Singleton, M. (1991) The need for Engineering Ethics Education. Paper presented at IEEE 1991 Frontiers in Education Conference.

Storey, A. & Thompson, J.B. (1999) Will the Regulation of Software Engineering and the Texas Licensing Model Act as Catalysts for the Integration of Computer Ethics into Mainstream Computer Education? Paper presented at ETHICOMP 1999, Rome.

Thring, M. (1980) The Engineer’s Conscience. Northgate Pub. Co. Ltd.

AUTHOR
Laurette Pretorius and Andries Barnard

ABSTRACT

Modular design and analysis approaches proliferate in computing, and in particular in software design. Layered approaches also belong to this paradigm. The ethical discussion and analysis of software designs and implementations, and of software artefacts for solving real problems may also benefit from such inherent structure. In particular we briefly review an appropriate layered approach, the extended OSI model for Internet-based computing, which has been the subject of ethical discussion (Gleason and Friedman, 2004). We also summarise the modelling of Web services as a protocol stack consisting of six layers (Jeckle and Wilde, 2004) for the purposes of an ethical discussion thereof.

The purpose of the somewhat technical discussion of the layered approaches is to contextualise and to focus the ethical discussion and may be justified as follows: In computing the whole point of modularity, and in particular layeredness, is that it facilitates the identification (and isolation) of functionality and its associated issues (and problems). The idea is that by resolving the individual “simple” issues, the more complex system that is built out of the different modules would be easier to design and validate. We are of the opinion that this modularity, which is usually based on (computational) functionality and allows system designers to focus on one issue at a time, will also be of significance in the ethical analysis of computationally complex systems. In this paper we subject each layer of this model to an ethical discussion appropriate for the specific layer on the basis of its associated functionality.

At the core of cyberspace are the physical components and attributes that facilitate interconnectivity. Theoretically the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model is a comprehensive representation of what happens between two nodes on a network. This model divides networking architecture into 7 layers; viz. the Physical, Data link, Network, Transport, Session, Presentation, and Application layers (Dean, 2000). Gleason and Friedman (2004) argue that the OSI model is an accessible and descriptive model of cyberspace that enables an extension of this model in order to focus on humanistic and ethical issues. They propose three additional layers “to elucidate the human side of the equation”. These three layers are the user interface, interpretation and impact layers.

The Web services paradigm of computing has become a de facto standard in Internet computing. Indeed, the “Gartner Group predicts that by 2004 Web services will dominate deployment of new application solutions for Fortune2000 companies, and companies that fail to adopt this technology will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage” (Beyond Integration, 2003).

It so happens that the Web Services paradigm of Internet computing still (in 2005) continues to grow in use and popularity. Moreover, it may be conceptualised as a layered approach where each layer has it own functionality, as given below. What we are aiming to do, is to exploit this modularity in order to focus on the particular ethical issues of each individual layer separately. This approach allows us to appropriately apply different ethical theories/analyses/approaches to different layers. As a first step we focus on each layer individually, but it would certainly be interesting to explore the ethical interconnections/dependencies between neighbouring layers as well. The latter investigation falls outside the scope of this paper, but is the subject of future work.

Jeckle and Wilde (2004) propose a six layered protocol stack to provide a conceptual understanding of Web services application artefacts in general. The idea behind Jeckle and Wilde’s (2004) proposal is to cluster related functionally in a horizontal manner, thus constituting separate layers.

The first layer, the underlying protocol layer, provides transport mechanisms such as, for example, HTTP and TCP. The second layer, the URI, XML and SOAP layer, is responsible for reliably transmitting data between two communication peers that are connected through a first layer infrastructure. At the next layer, the addressing and routing layer, the logical connections for communication are provided. The fourth layer is the security and message pattern layer, which sets out a collection of message patterns that define the sequence and cardinality of abstract messages, which can be applied to every communication protocol, e.g. SOAP. Session management essentially constitute the basis of layer 5, the coordination layer. Potential candidates for this layer include BPEL4WS and WS-Choreography (Jeckle and Wilde, 2004). The sixth layer, the vocabulary layer, is responsible for mapping the application’s data model into a form that can be transmitted between communicating peers. In the Web services world XML Schema accomplishes this.

In summary, the main focus of our paper is to consider ethical issues and/or perspectives that arise at the various layers of the Web services protocol stack of Jeckle and Wilde (2004). We base our discussion on some recent computing ethics initiatives, among others, disclosive computer ethics (Brey, 2004), information ethics (Floridi and Sanders, 2003 and 2004) and the ethics of surrogate agents (Johnson and Powers, 2004). We explore their applicability to the individual layers within their various contexts as presented by (Jeckle and Wilde, 2004).

REFERENCES

Beyond Integration: Assembling Business Solutions from Web Services (2003). Above All Software. Accessed September 2004 at http://www.aboveallsoftware.com.

Brey, P. (2004). Disclosive Computer Ethics, Readings in cyberethics, Second edition, (eds. R.A. Spinello and H.T. Tavani), Jones and Bartlett Publishers, Sudbury, Massachusetts, pp.55-66.

Dean, T. (2000). Network Guide to Networks, Course Technology Thomson Learning: Cambridge, MA.

Floridi, L. and Sanders, J.W. (2003). Internet Ethics: the Constructionist Values of Homo Poeiticus, Invited chapter for The Impact of the Internet on Our Moral Lives; (ed. R. Cavalier) (SUNY: Fall 2003). Accessed June 2004 at http://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/~floridi/ .

Floridi, L. and Sanders, J.W. (2004). The Foundationalist Debate in Computer Ethics, Readings in cyberethics, Second edition, (eds. R.A. Spinello and H.T. Tavani), Jones and Bartlett Publishers, Sudbury, Massachusetts, pp.81-95.

Gleason D.H. and Friedman L. (2004). Proposal for an Accessible Conception of Cyberspace, Proceedings of the seventh international conference: Challenges for the Citizen of the of the Information society – ETHICOMP2004, (eds. T.W. Bynum, N. Pouloudi, S. Rogerson and T. Spyrou), Volume 1, pp. 318-329.

Jeckle, M. and Wilde, E. (2004). Identical Principals, Higher Layers: Modeling Web Services as Protocol Stack, XML Europe 2004, Amsterdam, April 2004. Accessed August 2004 at http://dret.net/netdret/docs/wilde-xmleurope2004.pdf.

Johnson, D.G. and Powers, T.M. (2004). Computers as surrogate agents, Proceedings of the seventh international conference: Challenges for the Citizen of the of the Information society – ETHICOMP2004, (eds. T.W. Bynum, N. Pouloudi, S. Rogerson and T. Spyrou), Volume 1, pp. 422-435.