Ethics in IT

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Ghinda

6 min readJun 6, 2017

In the last period I am somehow concerned with ethics and especially with ethics applied in IT.

I shared this topic with the organisers of DevTalks last year and here I am this year moderator of a panel discussion about Programming Ethics at DevTalks 2017 Bucharest.

I am not an expert in this field, but I am curious and I would like to explore it and learn more about it. I could not find that many resources related to topic so I am going to start by raising a series of questions.

What is Ethics?

The simplest definition that I found is [0]:

“Ethics is a system of moral principles”

A more lucrative one that I like is [1]:

“The discipline dealing with what is good and bad and with moral duty and obligation”

Basically we are looking at some ideas/criteria/values we are using in our life to determine what is good/right or bad/wrong and how to take such decisions.

“Often knowing what is the right thing to do, knowing what is right, and knowing what is good is not all that easy.
Answers to the questions, “What is the right thing to do?” and “What is the good ?” aren’t obvious to many or universally agreed upon.
Yet, humans need answers to these questions.” [2]

Why should one follow ethics principles?

This is one simple question apparently. But when we start to explore it, things get a bit more complicated:

Why follow ethics principles as an individual in our personal or professional life?
Why should a company follow ethics principles?

If we are going to link ethics with moral values (as many philosophers do) then the above questions could be reformulated like:

Why be moral?
Why should a company behave moral?
Is it talking about gains in this context (ethics/morality) a good discussion to have or does it invalidate the very core of ethics?

The answers to these questions are related to understanding how does ethics helps us live together and how does it help to answer the question “What does it mean to live a good life”.

Here are some answers I found to these questions, but I suggest you should search and read more on your own because you might find an answer that best fits your worldview:

Sociological: “Without morality social life is nearly impossible” [3]
Psychological: “Reputation and social censure: people care about what others think of them. Conscience: some people care about doing the right thing” [3]
Collaboration: “ethical standards promote the values that are essential to collaborative work, such as trust, accountability, mutual respect, and fairness”. [4]
Finding something positive in personal life: “There is no reason to do “the right thing,” beyond what it does for you to do so. The only reason to behave ethically is to discover its real value to the quality of your life. “ [5]
Decision Making: Ethics helps to decide the best course of action when we are dealing with situations where the path to a good or bad moral decision is not so clear and it requires a framework for the decision.

These six are just a scratch on the surface of understanding the importance of ethics.

In a more pragmatic sense I really like the following quote from the Practical Ethics — a News Blog from Oxford University [6]:

“In order to be as ethical as one can be, one must learn to experience pleasure in morality.”

Why are professional ethics important?

There might be a lot of reasons to follow ethics in personal life but it is as important to do so in ones professional life.

I think we can first make the following logical inference:

If ethics is important in personal life and it influences our decisions
And if decisions taken in professional life are shaped by personal believes or values
Then it follows that ethics is as important in ones professional life as it is important in ones personal life.

This seems to be true if we are going to think about a group of people working on a project and their need to make decisions, to lean on each other, to have a sense of trust, of common understanding of what is good or bad.

But, before moving on, let’s explore more about the implications of ethics in professional life.

First, not everything that is immoral is illegal. Usually the law defines some hard edges for behaviour. But is does not define some rules about how we should behave to be good team players, to have healthy work relations or to have a great relation with our customers.

Second, in a market with a lot of possibilities and at the same time with a complex producing process the customers cannot understand the production process and they base their decisions of what to buy and from whom by finding a way to trust that what you say about your product is what it is inside. This is a base for ethics.

Third, there are more and more groups of people concerned not only about the price and reliability of a product but also with the behaviour of the producer towards other customers, towards the nature and towards society. These customers are holding accountable the company but also the individual employees or contractors to some ethic principles.

Programming Ethics

Finally after setting up a context for our ethics discussion and based on a prep discussion I had with the DevTalks panel colleagues here is an interesting list of possible questions for Ethics in IT:

Does it make sense to talk about morality for software?
What could be some ethics principles we should follow in programming? Some practical tips on applying ethics?
Should we teach ethics along with programming?
Are there any particular sides/areas of ethics that can be applied to programming and we should talk about more?
Why should a programmer follow guidelines concerning ethics ?
What does a programmer do when a job/project collides with his/her own values or believes? How to respond to this?
Do programmers have a moral responsibility if they write software that could be used in a malicious way?
If something can be build (and could have potentially harmful use cases) should we build it?
What should we do when we are asked to implement a bad architecture, or to reuse code?
What kind of ethics should we build into AI?
How to implement ethics in AI? Should it be conditional (if this situation then do that?) or should it be a learned way through some basic rules?
Is there a market for companies who have a working environment focused on ethics? How does this market look like?
What could be the real advantages of such company?

A good list of ethics guidelines could be the ones described by Association for Computing Machinery: Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct and approved by IEEE as a standard for teaching and practicing software engineering [7].

Other great resources on this topic were written by BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT about “Code of Conduct”, by Tyson Gill in Inform IT, issue 3, 2001 about “The Ethics of Programming” or by Gary Pollice, IBM, 2006 in “Ethics and software development”.

You can also read some other articles like The Programmer’s Oath on Clear Coder blog or Formulating the Ethics of Programming by Ariel Caplan.

Or you can watch a great panel hosted at IEEE AI & Ethics Summit in 2016 about “Programming Human Ethics: Cui Bono?”.

See you at DevTalks 2017 on 8th June at 17:05 on the main stage where I will host the Programming Ethics panel and where I will enjoy the conversation about ethics with Anatol Prisacaru (Founder at Security Espresso), Paul Ardeleanu (Mobile Software Consultant at Lupo), Sorin Tarmure (Senior Web Specialist at Honeywell).