Multiple choiceQuestion 1 · Recall
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By the end you can explain why a computing professional needs ethics, what ethics is for, and the impact on people and organisations when a computing professional acts ethically or unethically in a given situation.
A program can do exactly what it was asked and still cause harm. Consider a system that works perfectly but:
Nothing here is a bug. Nobody wrote the wrong line of code. The problem is that the people who built the system did not ask whether they should.
That question — what is right and wrong in the work we do — is what ethics is about.
Ethics
Principles that guide behaviour by distinguishing right from wrong. Professional ethics are the standards expected of people working in a particular profession, over and above what the law requires.
Ethics is not the same as law. The law is a minimum enforced by courts; ethics asks what a responsible professional ought to do even when no law forbids the alternative.
Computing is unusual in how far one decision travels, and in how little the public can see of it. That combination is why the profession needs explicit ethical standards.
Think about a pharmacist. You cannot check that the pills in the box are what the label says, so you trust the pharmacist and the rules of the profession.
Software is the same, only more so: you cannot check what an app does with your data, or whether the algorithm that rejected your loan was fair. If users stopped trusting software in general, the whole industry would suffer — which is why ethical behaviour protects the profession as well as the public.
Professional bodies publish codes of conduct that members agree to follow. The British Computer Society (BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT) is the usual example for this syllabus; the IEEE and ACM publish similar codes.
Codes differ in wording but share the same four themes:
| Duty | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| to the public | put safety, privacy and the public interest first |
| to competence | only take on work you are qualified to do; keep your skills current |
| to integrity | be honest about what a system can and cannot do; do not mislead |
| to the profession | do not bring the profession into disrepute; respect confidentiality |
A code cannot decide every case for you, but it gives a shared standard to reason from — and a basis for disciplinary action if a member ignores it.
In day-to-day work, ethical behaviour usually means doing something inconvenient:
Unethical behaviour is often the same list, reversed: hiding a defect, exaggerating accuracy, taking a shortcut with someone's data, or copying code and pretending it is yours.
Ethical and unethical decisions have consequences well beyond the individual developer.
| Whose interests | If the professional acts ethically | If they act unethically |
|---|---|---|
| users and the public | kept safe, informed and fairly treated | harmed, misled, discriminated against |
| the organisation | trust, good reputation, fewer legal problems | fines, lawsuits, recall costs, lost customers |
| the professional | respect, career progression | dismissal, prosecution, loss of membership of a professional body |
| the profession | public confidence in IT | suspicion of all software and IT staff |
Some of these impacts are immediate (a crash, a data leak), some appear later (a bias discovered years after a system was deployed), and some cannot be undone at all (a life lost because a safety check was skipped).
Worked example: Worked example: the recruitment algorithm
A company asks a software team to build a system that ranks job applicants automatically. The team is told to train it on the company's own hiring records from the last ten years.
Identify the ethical issues and say what the team should do.