In the past decade software products have become pervasive in many aspects of people's lives around the world. Unfortunately, the quality of the experience an individual has interacting with that software is depen...
详细信息
ISBN:
(纸本)9781450385688
In the past decade software products have become pervasive in many aspects of people's lives around the world. Unfortunately, the quality of the experience an individual has interacting with that software is dependent on the quality of the software itself, and it is becoming more and more evident that many large software products contain a range of issues and errors, and these issues are not known to the developers of these systems, and they are unaware of the deleterious impacts of those issues on the individuals who use these systems. The authors of this paper are developing a new digital ethics curriculum for the instruction of computer science students. In this paper we present case studies that were explored to demonstrate programming issues to First Year Computer Science students. Each case study outlines key issues associated with a particular scenario and is accompanied by specific questions to be used by the instructor to allow students to begin to reflect on, and evaluate, the implications of these issues. The objective of this teaching content is to ensure that the students are presented with, and engage with, ethical considerations early in their studies and well before they encounter them in an employment setting.
programming is riddled with ethical issues. Although extant literature explains why individuals in IT would act unethically in many situations, we know surprisingly little about what causes them to do so during the cr...
详细信息
programming is riddled with ethical issues. Although extant literature explains why individuals in IT would act unethically in many situations, we know surprisingly little about what causes them to do so during the creative act of programming. To address this issue, we look at the reuse of Internet-accessible code: software source code legally available for gratis download from the Internet. Specifically, we scrutinize the reasons why individuals would unethically reuse such code by not checking or purposefully violating its accompanying license obligations, thus risking harm for their employer. By integrating teleological and deontological ethical judgments into a theory of planned behavior model-using elements of expected utility, deterrence, and ethical work climate theory-we construct an original theoretical framework to capture individuals' decision-making process leading to the unethical reuse of Internet-accessible code. We test this framework with a unique survey of 869 professional software developers. Our findings advance the theoretical and practical understanding of ethical behavior in information systems. We show that programmers use consequentialist ethical judgments when carrying out creative tasks and that ethical work climates influence programmers indirectly through their peers' judgment of what is appropriate behavior. For practice, where code reuse promises substantial efficiency and quality gains, our results highlight that firms can prevent unethical code reuse by informing developers of its negative consequences, building a work climate that fosters compliance with laws and professional codes, and making sure that excessive time pressure is avoided.
作者：
Gordon, John-StewartVytautas Magnus Univ
Fac Polit Sci & Diplomacy Dept Philosophy & Social Critique V Putvinskio G 23 R 403 LT-44243 Kaunas Lithuania Vytautas Magnus Univ
Fac Law Res Cluster Appl Eth V Putvinskio G 23 R 403 LT-44243 Kaunas Lithuania
This paper examines the ethical pitfalls and challenges that non-ethicists, such as researchers and programmers in the fields of computer science, artificial intelligence and robotics, face when building moral machine...
详细信息
This paper examines the ethical pitfalls and challenges that non-ethicists, such as researchers and programmers in the fields of computer science, artificial intelligence and robotics, face when building moral machines. Whether ethics is "computable" depends on how programmers understand ethics in the first place and on the adequacy of their understanding of the ethical problems and methodological challenges in these fields. Researchers and programmers face at least two types of problems due to their general lack of ethical knowledge or expertise. The first type is so-called rookie mistakes, which could be addressed by providing these people with the necessary ethical knowledge. The second, more difficult methodological issue concerns areas of peer disagreement in ethics, where no easy solutions are currently available. This paper examines several existing approaches to highlight the ethical pitfalls and challenges involved. Familiarity with these and similar problems can help programmers to avoid pitfalls and build better moral machines. The paper concludes that ethical decisions regarding moral robots should be based on avoiding what is immoral (i.e. prohibiting certain immoral actions) in combination with a pluralistic ethical method of solving moral problems, rather than relying on a particular ethical approach, so as to avoid a normative bias.
暂无评论