Welcome to the course!  This is a very exciting and relevant topic and there is a lot to discuss.  In this lesson we are going to take stock of what you might already know about the subject and introduce you to the use of the Scholar learning platform.

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“Computer ethics requires us to think anew about the nature of computer technology and our values.” - James H. Moor, American Philosopher

 

Overview

If you were asked by an agency of the U.S. government to provide all the data your company has been collecting on its customers, would you do it? The information would be easy to access and communicate and it is possible that your customers might not ever find out that you did it. There are many legal reasons that might compel you to comply, but there are also some troubling moral and ethical arguments that might lead you to the opposite conclusions. In this course we will look at some of the most important moral and ethical frameworks that IT professionals use today to help navigate the challenges raised by the questionable recording, synthesis, and communication of information using digital technologies.

This course consists of eight modules each with two to four individual lesson units. In the first half of the course you will gain proficiency in using the vocabulary of terms found in the study of ethics and morality. In the second half of the course you will apply that knowledge to specific problems that you are likely to encounter in your career as an information technology professional.

The course modules are designed to build on each other so that once you have completed them you will be able to leave the course with a well reasoned personal ethos statement and a plan for answering questions of character you will likely be asked during a professional job interview process and for dealing with the inevitable moral and ethical challenges you will face on the job.

 

Pre-course Survey

Before we get started with the content of this course it is important to get a feeling for what you already know and what you may yet need to learn. This assignment will be assessed but will not affect your final grade. It is simply to allow you and your course administrator to see where you stand today.  This will help you and your course administrator discover what you need to focus on fully complete this course.

Your course administrator will place a link to this survey on your comunity page when you do "Module 1--Navigating this Course." Once you see it, then take the survey and review the results. Avoid the temptation to search for answers on the internet. We know you will not be able to answer all of these questions completly. We are just trying to see where you are in understanding the basic terms we will use in the course.

• The basics of using the Scholar platform

This course takes place on the Scholar Platform. You will be completing all your assignments here and you will also interact with your course administrator and other peers in the Scholar community. If you have any trouble, please navigate to the "help" tab found on the menue on the top left of this page. Scholar uses some of the tools of social media as well as powerful writing tools to help you succeed in this course.

• How to use scholar to communicate with the course administrator and other communities on the site

Communication is the key to your sucess in this course. You will be using Scholar to communicate with your course administrator. You will find this communication in your "messages" tab located on the top menue of this page. You might also be able to find others that are taking this course who can provide valuable feedback on your assignments. These people will be found in the "community" tab. Your education will be greatly enhanced by participating in this community of scholars.

• How will your work be assessed

We use a reading, review, reflection, and synthasis modle for learning the material in this course. Each Module will include some items to read, you will review these readings with some short activites and then you will do a written reflections that describes your curent understanding of the topics we are studying. These reflections will com in the form of updates you will manage in the "publisher" tab.

• How to revise work when needed

It may happen that you will be asked to revise your written work based on the comments and rubric score you recieve from your course administrator. This is simple to do and the Scholar system excells in making this an easy process. When you finish a publisher project you can be confident that you have succeded in making significant progress in understanding and using this subject.

• What some of the technical terms we use in the class mean

You may have already noticed some of the technical terms used in the Scholar platform. Here are some that will be of use right away and any others that you come accross are explained in the appropriate section of the "help" tab found at the top right of the page.

Create and publish

Your course administrator will create projects for you to complete. You will manage these projects in the "Publish" tab found above. If you need a step by step guide on how to do this, please refer to the help tab found on the top right of this page.

There are some bigger assignments in this cousre and you will use the "creator" tab to manage these documents. This will be explained in more detail in each of the assignments that require it.

Unit or Assignments

since the term "project" has a specific meaning in Scholar, we will use the term "unit" to refer to assigments generally.

• Requirements to avoid plagiarism

This is a course on professional ethics, it would be the height of hypocracy to succed in such a course by using the work of others. You will be doing a lot of reflecting on your personal values and what it means to be a professional in the course, one of the first will be thinking about what plagarisim means and making a personal pledge to complete this course without comiting any acts of plagarism. For more information on what plagarism is please see this Wikipedia article. Your continued participation in the course will be taken as your pedge to complete the course without resorting to plagiarism.

If you have any questions about this overview please post them in the comments box below.

“Computer ethics requires us to think anew about the nature of computer technology and our values.” - James H. Moor, American Philosopher

 

Overview

If you were asked by an agency of the U.S. government to provide all the data your company has been collecting on its customers, would you do it? The information would be easy to access and communicate and it is possible that your customers might not ever find out that you did it. There are many legal reasons that might compel you to comply, but there are also some troubling moral and ethical arguments that might lead you to the opposite conclusions. In this course we will look at some of the most important moral and ethical frameworks that IT professionals use today to help navigate the challenges raised by the questionable recording, synthesis, and communication of information using digital technologies.

This course consists of eight modules each with two to four individual lesson units. In the first half of the course you will gain proficiency in using the vocabulary of terms found in the study of ethics and morality. In the second half of the course you will apply that knowledge to specific problems that you are likely to encounter in your career as an information technology professional.

The course modules are designed to build on each other so that once you have completed them you will be able to leave the course with a well thought out personal ethos statement and a plan for answering questions of character you will likely be asked during a professional job interview process and for dealing with the inevitable moral and ethical challenges you will face on the job.

 

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this course, you will be able to:

1. Confidently communicate a well-reasoned and accountable personal ethos in regards to the challenging ethical questions raised by working with information technologies.

2. Understand the best practices found in the computing industry that outline the professional codes of ethics for computer professionals such as, the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct .

3. Gain a practical understanding of the most important ethical theories of today such as, deontology, utilitarianism, virtue ethics, and information ethics, as well as understanding how basic human rights apply to the various fields of information technologies.

4. Follow the debates on the issues of privacy, property rights, and security in the digital age.

5. Better negotiate the ethical complexities of the modern workplace through the effective and ethical communication and listening skills needed when working in groups.

Course Materials

The primary course content for each lesson will be found within that lesson and will consist of readings, multimedia, recorded lectures, slides, etc. You will also be asked on occasion to access or find additional content on the web as needed.

If you have any questions about course materials, then please post them to the comments box below.

Course Modules and Lesson Plan

The course is broken into two parts. In the first part you will learn various tools for thinking about moral and ethical values. In the second section, you use these tools to practice resolving professional ethical dilemmas. Each of these sections is broken into a number of modules. Modules are designed to be taken in order at approximately one week per module. Each module includes various lessons that are designed to be done at one or two per day. In addition to the lessons, there are some larger writing projects that have their own due dates and build on work you have done in the various lessons. You are encouraged to look ahead and plan out how you will fit the bigger projects such as your Personal Ethos Statement and the Ethical Analysis Project into your own work schedule.

If you have any questions about this portion of the course, please post them in the comments box below.

Grading

Each lesson will also have various interactive components that will typically involve your production of documents that will be commented on by your course facilitator or others who are at a similar level to you in their coursework. After submission a final grade will be assigned by the course facilitator.

General Course Rubric

Each assignment will be graded according to a rubric which will give you feedback on whether the work you submitted meets the requirements or if there is more that should be done before you continue to the next assignment. We will use a rubric that ranges between 0-3, and each level means the following:

0- Incomplete or missing work. Work may not have been done or it may be missing significant portions of the assigned task. You may also receive a 0 if the work seems largely copied from other sources. Resubmit based on instructor/peer comments.

1- Partially Complete. The work is largely complete but missing specific items from the assignment. Resubmit based on instructor/peer comments.

2- Complete but could be improved. The assignment meets the minimum requirements and the assignment is considered complete, however it may be resubmitted for a higher grade if improvements are made. Optional resubmit based on instructor/peer comments.

3- Complete to the level appropriate to the assignment. The assignment is complete and no further improvements are needed. Assignment is  considered  finished.

 

Plagiarism is one of the most important challenges facing education today. It is trivially easy to access the internet at any time and find work that others have written on almost any topic. Since this is a class on professional ethics we will be taking this topic very seriously. We will be thinking a lot about intellectual property rights and open source programing. This can sometimes muddy a strict definition of plagiarism, but we can cut through that complexity by reading this article and paying close attention to the sections on Academic writing and Self Plagiarism. Once you have read about plagiarism, then write your own pledge that states your name, what you understand plagiarism to be, and then a statement of purpose that describes how you will not submit any work for a grade that is not your own.

Please post a statment where you pledge to not commit any acts of plagiarism into the comments box below.

In this module we will learn:

• What are the basics of using the Scholar platform
• How to use scholar to communicate with the course administrator and other communities on the site
• How will your work be assessed
• How to revise work when needed
• What some of the technical terms we use in the class mean
• Requirements to avoid plagiarism

How much time will it take to complete this learning module?

Activity	Estimated Time
Pre-course survey (update 1)	1 hr
Reading	45 min
Exploring Scholar	1-2 hrs
Writing your introduction (update 2)	1 hr
Reading plagiarism requirements	20 min
submitting non-plagiarism pedge (update 3)	5 min

In the first part of the class we will be learning the basic concepts used in the philosophical study of ethics and morality.  Our goal is not to become experts in philosophy, but instead to use the powerful theories and techniques that have been developed in the study of philosophy over the last few millennia and use those tools in dealing with the ethical and moral problems that are encountered every day by IT professionals.

You will work through each module in turn at your own pace.  Each module is meant to take about a week to complete but some modules require more work than others.  Each module will have a table that will give you a suggested schedule of how much time you will need to devote to each lesson and activity within the module. 

Pre-course Survey

Your course facilitator will now post the Pre-course Survery to your activity stream.  This survey is intended to test your ability to understand and use the basic terms we use in the study of ethics and morality. Do not worry if some of these terms are new or hard to understand. We will be covering them later in the course. Also, do not look up definitions online yet, we will not be using this survey to calculate your final grade so no need to stress too much about this one.

Learning communities

Being part of a learning community will greatly enhance your education. To help facilitate this please introduce yourself to the course facilitator through the messaging function on Scholar. Include what your professional goals are and anything else that might help your course administrator get to know you better. Also be sure to introduce yourself to other students found on the community. Be sure to have your user profile fully filled out and upload a picture or avatar as well. Building a network of colleagues is one of the things that will ensure your success in the professional world so always take every opportunity to extend that network through interacting with fellow students.

Please post an introduction of yourself into the comments section below

In Module 2 we will look at why it is important for IT professionals to have a working understanding of ethics and morality even though you may be planning on just working with computers in your professional lives.   

What does the study of ethics have to do with being an IT professional? By the end of this course it is unlikely that you would even consider asking this question as it will become obvious to you. We hope to prove to you that not only does information technology contribute to ethical problems faced by our society today, but that through its proper design and programming we can help enhance our society as well. This module is a first look at the ethical complexities of the modern work world and in it we will learn the distinction between ethics and morality and begin to look at the complex ways these beliefs interact with information technologies.

It is suggested that you take a week to do this lesson and try to do each lesson in order. A good plan would be to do one lesson early in the week and one near the end. If the modlule takes you more than a week to do then you need to reasses your work schedule as you might be falling behind. You also do not want to work too fast. Thinking about this topic takes time and reflection and if you rush through it you will not get much out of the experience.

Please post any questions in the comments box below and then proceed to--Lesson 1: Thinking about ethics is not my job, I am a computer programmer.

How much time will it take to complete this learning module?

Activity	Estimated Time
Lesson 1 Written reflection and digital media log	2 hrs
Lesson 2 Reading and written reflection	2 hrs

Case Study: Apple, Xerox and values centered design.

One of the most famous cases in the development of the personal computer occurred in the early 1980s. While today most people would rightly credit Apple computers with championing the personal computer revolution, what fewer people know is that many of the technological innovations and ideas that got this revolution off the ground were incubated at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). The biggest of these ideas was the graphical user interface, GUI, which was an idea, began by Douglas Englebart at Stanford Research Institute and extended by Alan Kay at PARC in the early seventies. Many of these ideas were incorporated into the user interface of the Xerox Alto computer released in 1973.

There are many stories about what happened next but Apple was granted access to the technologies at Xerox PARC in return for some generous Apple stock options. That is the official story, but when you talk to the people at PARC that were involved, they felt that Xerox executives sold for a pittance one of the best ideas to come out of user interface design and it happened due to not understanding the value commitments behind the design. At the time Xerox was committed to developing the lucrative business computing market, where no nonsense efficiency was perceived as the primary value. Englebart had been motivated by a desire to use computers to enhance individual human intelligence and capabilities. But at the time this was not such an easy argument to make. A trained computer operator could quickly manipulate their machine using complex key commands whereas a GUI relied on the user poking around with a mouse or other pointing device along with the more computationally heavy demands made by the graphics needed to make this work than was required by the simple command line and blinking cursor of traditional operating systems. The values of speed and efficiency trumped those of ease of use and inclusivity represented by the personal computer and the GUI. The executives at Xerox held the former set of values whereas the executives at Apple shared the later set of values and instantly saw the potential they represented. The Apple Macintosh was the first machine to fully embrace these new values and the rest is history, Xerox got a million dollars of Apple stock and Apple went on to make billions on more and more powerful personal user interfaces that seek to make the experience easy and fun for even the most casual computer user.

Human values play an important role in the development of technology. As we just saw, getting a value judgment wrong might cost a company billions of dollars. As we will see later, bad decisions might not just cost money but could result in damage to people’s lives or even death. This means that information technology professionals have to develop a good sense for understanding human values and how they relate to the technologies they create.

Let’s now see where you are in your understanding of information ethics. Please complete the following assignments and follow the instructions of your course administrator.

Assignment 1 (update 3): Writing reflection, Post a comment to the section below this update using the following prompt. remember to title it "Assignment 1" so it is easier to find and grade—given your own understanding of ethics and morality, please describe something you have notice in your own online or professional life that has caused you to wonder if something unethical has occurred. What could you have done differently in this situation? 400-500 words.

Please comment on at least two other posts from your community. For these comments label them with the community member's name who's work you are commenting on.

Assignment 2 (update 4): Start compiling a log of your digital media use in this format:

Digital Media Log

Date Technology Used Hrs. % of my Waking day Ethical issues noticed Week 1         Mon Example: Face Book 7 50% noticed racist comments and cyberbullying Tue         Wed         Thu         Fri         Sat         Sun         Week 2         Mon         Tue         Wed

Do this for each individual technology you use, don't forget texting, watching movies or listening to songs on a digital device, etc. Post a copy of your first day log in an update to your community but keep the log going for the entire class and we will turn it in eventually and you will analyze it near the end of the course in your personal Ethos Statement assignment.

Google has a famous motto that many you have heard. In a letter from the founders of Google they explain their motto this way:

"Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served — as shareholders and in all other ways — by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains." From Google’s Don’t be Evil Manifesto

The social responsibility of large corporations has been a subject of debate for quite some time. On one hand there is the claim that corporations have a duty to help push forward certain social goals, or at least appear to do so to maintain public good will. The other side of this argument is best represented by the Economist Milton Friedman who said:

“There is one and only one social responsibility of business...to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud” Milton Friedman

The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits by Milton Friedman

It seems from the quote above, that the founders of Google disagree with Friedman and are willing to take some short term losses in order to do good things for the world. This is worth some thought, do you think your role in a company a job or corporation is to maximize its profits in any legal manner, or does your job also include looking out for ways in which your company can do real good for the world. Notice that Friedman is not condoning blatantly unethical behavior. People who have not read his work but have only heard the above quote often do not know that Friedman includes certain core ethical behaviors in the “rules of the game” along with laws. He is perfectly aware that some things can be legal but not ethical. For instance, it was legal for a long time in America to own and sell slaves, but it was never ethical to do so. What Freidman seems to be arguing for is that corporations are composed of management, employees, and stock holders (investors). Since the corporation is using the investors’ money they must be maximally focused on producing returns for them, which is their primary duty. Any activity that is not focused on maximizing profit is a breach of trust and is in that way unethical. For Friedman then if the management of a company uses resources to do something they think is ethical but that loses money, then they have created a paradoxical situation, their quest for an ethical outcome results in their own ethical failing in delivering on the promise to make profits they made to their stockholders and investors. Friedman’s arguments are very convincing unless you remember that a corporation is more than simply the Management-employee-shareholder triad, there are also customers, governments and other people that are affected by the actions of corporations. If these others are included into the social calculus, then we might be able to see some room for seeing that corporations have ethical duties to more people than only their investors and that the managers and employees of those corporations have a hard job ahead of them to figure out exactly what those duties are.

Let’s now see if we can make sense of Google’s social stance as a corporation. Read these documents Google Code of Conduct and Ethics and Google Corporate Philosophy Look for statements of social values and any commitment Google is claiming it has towards them.

Assignment 3: Writing reflection to be posted in the comments section below (200 to 400 words, please title the comment as "Assignment 3")—Now that you have reviewed the stance Google takes, imagine that you have been hired by them. What kind of actions do you think this code of behavior would favor, what actions might be unwelcome there?

We have been using a lot a technical language so far so we should take some time to learn how to use it correctly. Please read distinction between ethics and morality and then read short explanations of egoism, realism and relativism, possibly the pages found on this site.

Then watch these three short videos:

Ethical Egoism

Realism in Ethics and Morality

Ethical Relativism

Assignment 4: Writing workshop (600-700 words) this assignment will be sent to you as what Scholar calls a "project," that will inform you of the due dates and other instructions needed to complete the assignment. Prompt—what are your thoughts about ethical: egoism, realism, and relativism? Many people in the modern workplace find these theories persuasive, what are the known deficiencies that have been found in these theories?  What are some of the ways you have seen these theories used to motivate actions in those around you?

A note on religion

There is a very long and important tradition of ethical thought within the major religions of the world. This course is not going to directly address these. Not because we think they are unimportant, on the contrary, they are too important to brush over quickly. We cannot do a good job covering every major world religion and it is best for you to seek those answers from experts in the traditions you are interested in. Instead, this course will be taught from the tradition of philosophy which is somewhat separate from religion. You will find religious philosophers and religious leaders who are interested in philosophy, so there is quite a rich dialog between the two traditions. They are separate though in this one very important way. Philosophy never assumes the truth of any of its propositions except for certain sentences that are true by definition. When one is acting like a philosopher, nothing is held sacred and everything can be questioned. This can come into conflict with religious beliefs that assume some things are true based on faith or that certain topics are sacrosanct and cannot be discussed. We will try hard to avoid these as much as possible but we cannot promise never to offend you. We do ask that you tolerate this offense and use the challenge to make yourself stronger in what you decide is true about the world.

We also need to make a distinction between morality and moralizing. We will be discussing morality quite a bit but we will never indulge in moralizing and we ask that you refrain from it in your own written reflections and dealings with other students. Moralizing occurs when you judge another’s behavior based on religious beliefs you may not both share. Basically it is shaming others not through a strong well-reasoned argument, but through pronouncements of partially remembered religious dogma. Our standard is the standard of correct argumentation, which has served philosophy well for over three millennia, if not more and it will serve us just as well in this course.

In this module we gain a practical understanding of some of the most powerful and persuasive ethical systems developed during the long history of the human quest for meaningful lives. An ethical system is a well thought out rationale for guiding behavior and there have been quite a number of them offered by various philosophers over the millennia. It is a sad truth that none of these have ever been proven to be correct and entirely without contradiction. We looked at three systems that have proven to be not as useful as we would hope. It may be the case that there is no possibility of humans ever achieving the dream of figuring out an exact code of behavior that will be able to guide our actions through every conceivable situation a human might find themselves in. But there have been a few that have come very close and are the best that the human mind has come up with yet. In the next two lessons we will look at four of these ethical systems.

 

How much time will it take to complete this learning module?

 

Activity	Estimated Time
Lesson 3 Reading and written reflections	2 hrs
Lesson 4 Reading and written reflections	2 hrs

Consequentialism is an ethical stance that claims that what makes an action right is that the action produces the best outcome of all the other possible actions that one might contemplate. So even if the action might feel wrong, it is the outcome that matters. For instance, if you could stop a murder from happening but it required that you kill the attacker, then the wrongness of your killing would be counterbalanced by the beneficial outcome of the life or lives you saved. There are a number of consequentialist ethical theories but the most influential at this time is known as Utilitarianism. We will see that there is a bit of complexity to this idea but for our purposes here, we can say that the consequence that a Utilitarian cares about the most is creating outcomes that benefit as many people as possible. Using our example above, stopping one killer is clearly good for the potential victim, but if we could. Perhaps, find ways of keeping people from becoming violent in the first place we could save even more potential victims and that would be an even better outcome. Let’s look at this idea in more detail.

Watch this video and then read this this detailed article on Utilitarianism.

Assignment 5: Writing reflection 200-400 words posted in the comments section below (Please lable this comment as "Assignment 5"—Imagine you are writing a program but you wanted to do so in a way that expresses utilitarianism in the way you distribute the program to users. How might you achieve this?

Kant's Ethics

As we have seen, utilitarianism makes some people nervous because it seems to allow for actions that seem unethical to be done in the name of maximizing good outcomes for the most people. If we could make the lives of many people better at the expense of the lives of a very few, then a utilitarian would have to accept that, if there were no better alternatives. this kind of cost-benefit analysis is done all the time. We know that around forty-thousand people will be killed in automobile accidents this year and another large amount due to disease that is caused by their emissions but we do not ban cars because of the other ways that they benefit society out ways this cost. We do not know exactly who these victims will be until after the damage is done so we can't do much to prevent this damage. The victims just have to take one for the team, but of course if you are the one that is directly effected, you may begin to seriously question this calculus.

Science fiction is full of wonderful examples of utilitarian logic gone bad. One truly great one is the short story, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," by Ursula K. Le Guin. In this story we are told of a beautiful idyllic town called Omelas, whose citizens are happy, well fed, and content. Later we learn that all this goodness comes at the cost of one small child who is locked in a closet and caused to suffer its entire life. The citizens of Omelas all know that the child is there but console themselves in the knowledge that the child's suffering brings them all so much good so they have come to accept it. But some of the citizens can not bear the injustice of the suffering child and they walk away from the town. A philosopher who would be leading the march away from Omelas would be Immanuel Kant. Kant formed a very different set of ethical beliefs based on the idea that the consequences of ones actions do not matter, what makes an action ethical is that it proceeded from a good will that is motivated by logically defensible moral commands. This kind of ethical theory is known as "deontology" which is just a Greek work that means the science of duty.

Please watch this video and then read this article on Deontology.

Assignment 6: Writing reflection posted in the comments section below (pleae label this "Assignment 6"—Give an example of deontological thinking that you have witnessed either in your own actions or the actions of others close to you. 

Please comment on at least two other posts from your community. For these comments just label them with the community member's name who's work you are commenting on.

Virtue Ethics

Western philosophy had its origin in ancient Greece a little more than three millennia ago. While many of the theories they had about the world have not stood the test of time, some of their contributions to the field of ethics are still very relevant today. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle conceived of an ethics based on the cultivation of character and virtue. His belief was that Instead of trying to impose ethics on a society through large social institutions, he argues that we can only be successful if we concentrate on the moral character of each individual. A virtuous society can only happen if all of its members are individually virtuous. As we will see, Aristotle taught us that good personal character is found in those who seek to avoid extreme behaviors or motivations. Today, this idea has become part of a larger field of study called "Virtue ethics."

 

Let's begin by looking at this video and then please read this description of Virtue Ethics.

Assignment 7: Writing reflection (200-400 words) posted to the comments section below (please label this as "Assignment 7")—Think of a programmer, hacker, or other information technology professional that you admire. What are the personal characteristics of this person that you think you might be able to emulate? How could a version of virtue ethics be worked into your professional life?

 

Ethics of Care

You may have noticed that up to this point, there has not been a lot of women involved in the development of ethics.  This is a little overstated because there are many fine contributions to the ethical theories we have looked at by women scholars, but it is true that they never get credited with founding any of these schools of thought.  In the last few decades feminist philosophers have tried to redress this omission by beginning to rethink traditional ethics from the point of view of women and one of the results of that work is a theory called "Ethics of Care." In this theory it is argued that the human capacity for care is the most important concept in creating a workable ethics and that care has been largely neglected by traditional thinkers as merely a women's concern.

Watch this video and then please take a look at this reading on feminist ethics.

 

If we accept the claim that the status of women has affected their ability to contribute to the study of ethics, we must also take seriously the claim that the status of other marginalized communities has likely affected their ability to contribute to the study of ethics.  To redress this we must also broaden our purview to ethical theories that originate in cultures other than the west. This is a very big topic and we can only do a brief survey, but it is important to learn what we can from these rich traditions in ethical thought. By the end of this lesson, you will see how these theories can help us confront ethical problems encountered by IT professionals today.

Since the IT profession is an international business, it is important to have some familiarity with the ethical thought of other cultures.  One that cannot be ignored is Chinese ethics.  Please read over the following article on Chinese ethics.  Some cultures can really challenge core concepts in western ethics and one of those is the ethical theories found in Africa. Please review them here.  Finally, read section four of this entry on international business ethics to learn how we might apply this cultural sensitivity to international business.

In later lessons we will be applying what we have learned in this section to specific topics in the ethics of information and computer technologies.

Assignment 8: Writing reflection (200-400 words) post this to the comments section below and label it as "Assignment 8")— Imagine you are doing business with a group of people who see privacy from a vastly different perspective than you.  How might you go about resolving this problem given what you learned in this lesson?  Please use examples form the readings and lectures.

The Moral Paradox of Information

 

Now that we have a good background in ethical theories we can begin to apply these ideas to issues that arise in the use and design of information technologies.

Let's begin by reading the intro and section 1 of this article on information technology and moral values. Pay special attention to the way that information technologies have fundamentally changed the way we record, access, and create information products. We are living in a time of great historical change. In the past, the control and access to information was used to create certain power relationships between those who had the access and those who needed it. With the advent of information technology, information products have become easier to create, find and keep. Whereas a printed book takes up physical space and therefore exclusive ownership rights can be claimed, "this is my book not yours." If someone wants my book they would have to compensate me since I would no longer have access to that copy. But after the digital revolution books become digital text documents and it is trivially easy to make as many copies of the text as anyone would want so that both the original holder of the document and the new readers can have the same access to the text at any time, books are now non-exclusive property.

The only problem with this is that we have set up centuries of copyright law, property law that seems to no longer apply, and we have business models for the sale and distribution of books that have crumbled in the face of these new challenges. We are now working on new ways to keep authors and content creators employed given that the old modes of compensation are failing. This is the moral paradox of information technology, on one had we are experiencing an unparalleled access to information that has had important positive social effects, but at the same time economic forces are causing those in traditional media to ask for protections and to set up artificial blocks to the access of information in order to protect these social institutions.

 

Assignment 9 (200-400 words) posted in the comment box bellow and label it as "Assignment 9")— Think of one of your favorite media types that makes your life better, be that music, video, films, books, whatever. How do you see the paradox of information technology playing out in the media that you access?

 

Law has had to adapt to the massive changes in information technology and this is a fascinating and growing field of study. Let's take a quick look at some of the issues that are important for information technology professionals to be aware of. We will start by reading this article:

The Law Where There Is No Land; A Legal System Built on Precedents Has Few of Them in the Digital World. By AMY HARMON. Published: NYT, March 16, 1998

The legal system that most of you will be working under is one that attempts to base its judgments on precedents set in the past. It is easy to see that new technologies bring up new problems that have no precedent. Here is an interesting recent example. The philosopher Patrick Lin writing about the ethical challenges of autonomous cars has noticed that there are certain driving laws that will be hard for the makers of these machines to follow. One is the New York state law that one must have one hand on the wheel of a car at all times while it is in operation on public roads. Well what happens if no one is actually driving the car, or if it is a Google car which is built with no steering wheel at all? There are many many examples just like this as information technology takes us into new ways of living that no one has dealt with or maybe even thought about in the past.

 

Assignment 10 reading reflection (200-400 words) post this to the comments section below and label it as "Assignment 10")— If law can not constrain our behavior with new technologies, due to the fact that there may not be a law against the new thing people are doing with some information technology, then what are some other ways to control these activities?

Lesson 6: Ethical and moral values in recording, communicating, and organizing information

In the last lesson we learned about the moral paradox of information.  In this lesson we are going to track how it has already changed your own life as a consumer and producer of information and then we will look at some future trends you should be thinking about as you plan your career.

We now live in a time of user generated content UGC, which just means that much of what you read, listen to and watch online is not professionally produced but is instead the result of amateur efforts.  Think of the various viral videos you have seen such as Charlie Schmidt's "Keyboard Cat" and Charlie Schmidt used commonly available information technologies and created something that nearly everyone in the world has seen.  It is not always clear what you get by becoming a viral video sensation, but the drive to become one is what fuels much of the content uploaded to sites like YouTube each day.  Quite a lot of this content plays fast and loose with copyright, there is an entire subgenera that is thriving just taking the idea of keyboard cat and spoofing it, remixing it, rethinking the format, both commercially and by fans.  This strange new world of UGC challenges our traditional legal and moral codes on intellectual property. Read the following article: Intellectual property rights and online sharing and this one on protecting your intellectual property on social media

 

Disruption and your future job prospects

Entrepreneurs in information technology like to see themselves as disrupting old tired ways of doing things and introducing new, more efficient, and better ways of doing things.  You might be one of these entrepreneurs or you may work for one, either way this activity is often aggressive and can cause large-scale change in society.  A good example can be seen with Uber the ride sharing app. It is a simple idea, just link people who are driving someplace with people who need a ride, and while doing so provide a way for the rider to pay the driver and then Uber takes a cut that amounts to billions of dollars .  Uber is admittedly a wonderful idea, unless you happen to be in the traditional transportation business, and in that case it is a threat to one's livelihood.  As Uber has taken off and spread worldwide, it has come into direct conflict with taxi drivers and others whose lives have been disrupted.  See an example here.  Driving passengers is not a new thing, but it is something that is generally a likened activity and some professional drivers have certain job protections and benefits that Uber drivers do not share.  As independent contractors these drivers might work excessive hours to make more money and you as a passenger have no idea if your driver is well rested or not.  We can see right away that this simple act of disruption in an industry that could probably use a little competition, immediately opens an ethical maelstrom of problems that its founders and operators must take a stand on.  Unfortunately Uber has been notoriously bad at this and Peter Thiel has called the company "ethically challenged," due to their aggressive competitive practices and dismissive attitude towards critics.  It is, of course, perfectly fine to be competitive and to seek innovation in an industry.  It is widely acknowledged that this activity will cost real people their jobs if they find themselves in the disrupted end of the equation, but that is why we need ethical reasoning amongst those playing the game so that they do not go too far.  Uber's problem is not so much what it does, as it is in how they ignore legitimate criticisms.

Information technology is just getting started in disruptions that will eventually impact every industry imaginable.  Since most of those disruptions involve many workers in a traditional business being replaced by a smaller number of workers and automation, you need to think hard about how you are going to avoid being in the majority of people who will be out of a job.  Much of the new labor is now done by user generated labor, meaning that the users of the service do most of the labor in an unpaid or lower paid way than a professional would have done it.  Let's try to get a sense of where this all may be heading.  start by reading section 2 of this article and then look at the executive summary of this white paper, The Future of Disruption in Business (note you may read the entire white paper if you like, but it is not required).

 

Assignment 11, Writing Workshop 2 Surviving the user generated labor market, 400-600 words, a work request sent to you via Scholar—How do you plan on confronting the perils and opportunities that disruptive information technologies will pose throughout your future career?  Do you see an ethical solution or is this a war of all against all to take the dwindling number of jobs that are left in the world.  Argue for or against the idea that it is ethical for rich entrepreneurs to disrupt the lives of workers around the world.  Due dates and additional instructions can be found on the work order that will be sent to you. 

Module 5 Lesson 7: Professional Codes of Ethics

Where codes of Ethics Come From

A code of ethics is a series of statements or aphorisms that one lives their life by.  Maybe you remember the apocryphal story of George Washington and the cherry tree, where the young George Washington professes “I can not tell a lie” and must admit to his father that it was he who cut down the tree.  In this story, though he might have been able to avoid punishment, his code of ethics prevents him from taking the easy way out.  Many individuals attempt to live their lives by codes of conduct that they have conceived of themselves or that they may have received from their family, culture or religion.  Many of you in this class will be familiar with the Ten Commandments, which are a code of conduct promoted by Moses sometime in the 1400’s BCE, but other cultures and religions have similar codes, some even more ancient. 

Professions also have codes of ethics that are specific to what they do.  Some Professional codes of ethics also have ancient origins.  The earliest evidence of these professional codes that we have can be found in the Code of Hammurabi, which was developed and written down by the Babylonians sometime between 1790 and 1750 BCE.  We can conjecture that there were other similar codes previously but these are the first ones that we know of that were written and archived.  While much of the code sow seems quaint, such as the provisions against falsely claiming others have cast deadly spells on them, in the code we also find some interesting evidence that the code enforced ethical business behavior.  For instance one section of the code directly regulates engineering, design, and building practices.  Translated to English a few samples of these codes read:

• 229. If a builder has built a house for a man, and has not made his work sound, and the house he built has fallen, and caused the death of its owner, that builder shall be put to death.
• 232. If he has caused the loss of goods, he shall render back whatever he has destroyed. Moreover, because he did not make sound the house he built, and it fell, at his own cost he shall rebuild the house that fell.
• 233. If a builder has built a house for a man, and has not keyed his work, and the wall has fallen, that builder shall make that wall firm at his own expense.

There are also sections that relate to the conduct of surgeons, what they are responsible for and exactly what they should be paid for their services.  For example:

• 218. If a surgeon has operated with the bronze lancet on a patrician for a serious injury, and has caused his death, or has removed a cataract for a patrician, with the bronze lancet, and has made him lose his eye, his hands shall be cut off.
• 221. If a surgeon has cured the limb of a patrician, or has doctored a diseased bowel, the patient shall pay five shekels of silver to the surgeon.
• 222. If he be a plebeian, he shall pay three shekels of silver.

There are also sections on other the business such as shipping, and some very distasteful sections on the buying, selling and treatment of slaves.  While I am not suggesting that we adopt this fairly brutal code of ethics, it is worth looking at for historical reasons as it shows that codes have been a useful tool for regulating human behavior for a very long time.   

By the fifth century BCE we have the emergence of the Hippocratic Oath, which most modern readers mistakenly remember as: “Primum non nocere (First do no harm).”  This concise version of the oath has an uncertain origin and appears much later than the original.  It is at best just inspired by the wording of the original document but, due to its brevity and powerful message, this later version is widely cited both in and outside the medical community today and still serves as a good basic code for anyone to live by.  The original code is fairly dated with its references to healing Gods and also in some of the treatments it suggests or prohibits, but in other instances it still holds value.  The code asks the physician to swear an oath to the Gods to make sure their treatments do not cause more harm than healing, never use or make poison, not to lie to a patient or give false counsel, not to have sexual relations with a patient, keep a patient’s medical conditions and treatments secret, and aid in the education of others in the healing arts.  There is a modern version of the code that is still in use today that appeals more to science and reason for its foundation, but for the most part the code asks the physician to uphold pro-social standards of behavior to protect the patient, the profession, and society at large form the potential abuses of medical science.  By the time we see this version of the oath arise we can see the emergence of modern codes of ethics that begin to appear in every conceivable profession.   No matter what profession you are contemplating joining, there is a code of ethics specific to your career choice and that you should find and be aware of as you will be held, explicitly or implicitly, accountable for what those documents say.

 

 Codes of Ethics for Computing Professionals

The computing profession is not very old and as such there are no ancient documents to consult.  Instead, there are a number of relatively recent documents which computing professionals who are interested in promoting ethical behavior in the profession have written.  There are at least three important documents that we need to know about and each has its particular strengths and weaknesses.  First please read over the ACM Code of Ethics for Computer Professionals which was written by a committee of computing professionals and ethicists for the Association of Computing Machinery.  After you are familiar with those, then read this discussion on how they can be used in making real decisions here: Using the New ACM CODE of Ethics in Decision Making.  Next, let’s look at another interesting document written by Stuart Allen for CPSR, the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility called, “The Ten Commandments of Computer Ethics.”  Finally, look at the Moral Responsibility for Computing Artifacts: The Rules, and this paper (Moral Responsibility for Computing Artifacts: “the Rules” and Issues of Trust) that explains what “the Rules” are and how to use them.

 

Assignments 12: Writing Reflection posted in the comments section below (no less than 400 words)—first, briefly explain how you think codes of ethics fit in with the ethical theories you have studied in this class.  Next, of the various codes for computing professionals that you have just studied, which do you believe is the most effective?  Please back up you claims with well thought out reasons and examples.  Finally, write a short code of ethics for you to use in your own life.  This will be part of your personal ethos statement which you will be turning in later in the course so please be diligent in thinking this thorough. Model it off of the codes we have looked at in this lesson but make sure it is personally relevant to you.  The goal is to create something you can take with you after this class is done.  You will be using this again later in your personal ethos statement.

 

Module 5 Lesson 8: Political Action and Computer Professionals

Problems with codes of behavior and rules based ethical systems

In the last lesson we looked at the state of the art in codes of ethics for computing professionals.  We saw that codes of behavior have a long tradition and that computing professionals have continued this practice and devised a number of codes to guide their own profession.  The usefulness of codes of ethics is not something that there is universal agreement on.  It is a serious question as to whether these codes work or not.  It might just be the case that workers may look over them once when they are newly hired and then never refer to them again.  Or that even if they know the codes, there is nothing to enforce them and people may violate them whenever it serves their interests without consequence.  In this lesson we will read some critiques of these codes and then look at one way we might address the criticisms.

Let’s start by reading Are Codes of Ethics Useful?  Then look at Criticisms of a Code of Ethics.  After that please read, “Commentary on the ‘Ten Commandments for Computer Ethics’ by N. Ben Fairweather for a critique of short codes of ethics.  Many codes of ethics have a distict cultural flavor and may take some things as granted that people from other cultures may find problematic.  For one example of that let’s read “A Scandinavian View on ACM’s Code of Ethics.”

Embedded Ethics Design

One of the things we begin to see from these criticisms is that even well-crafted codes of ethics cannot be the entire solution when we are trying to create more ethical outcomes in our use of information technologies.  While codes of ethics are one ingredient for building an ethical workplace in the information technology profession, we also have to think about how more nuanced ethical decisions are going to be made during the design phase of a new information technology.  There are many examples of what happens when we ignore ethics in the design of products.  Many times the results are highly damaging to the corporation that chose to cut when it comes to ethics.

A prime example of this can be found in the famous Ford Pinto case: THE FORD PINTO CASE: THE VALUATION OF LIFE AS IT APPLIES TO THE NEGLIGENCE-EFFICIENCY ARGUMENT, by Christopher Leggett, Law & Valuation.  As you can see from the case study, Ford was aware of the danger inherent in the design of the Ford Pinto that would likely result in the burn deaths of drives and passengers of the car in certain rear end collisions.  The company did a cost benefit analysis and determined that the benefit of eliminating the estimated 180 burn deaths, 180 serious burn injuries and the loss of 2100 burned vehicles at accost of $49.5 million was offset by the cost of fixing the problem which would require adding an $11 part to every car and truck that Ford made, which would cost $137 million.  The company decided on not installing the part to save money and just pay out to the victims as they happened.  This decision makes good economic sense when just looked at as a dollars and cents problem.  However, when the drivers and passengers of rear-ended Ford Pintos started being burned alive and the survivors suffering horrible disfiguring burns, lawsuits ensued.  Ford’s cost benefit analysis eventually became public and the cold calculation of it all enraged jurors who were morally offended by it which caused them to award massive damages to the plaintiffs in the case with $125 million suffered in damages alone, not to mention having to recall all their vehicles and fix the exploding gas tank problem.  Ford’s calculations were wrong due to not taking into account the potential moral outrage and loss of public opinion they would suffer for making this choice.  The people making this decision seem to have been completely morally and ethically blind, common ethical values made no appearance in their thought process.

Information technology is not often safety critical in nature and people do not directly die from software crashes, but IT corporations still make many design decisions that seem obviously unethical in retrospect and suffer from the otherwise easily avoided loss of public opinion and punitive lawsuit damages as a result.  An interesting example of this is the Facebook Beacon case.   In November of 2007 Facebook launched the Beacon service on their social network platform.  Beacon was a piece of software that could track the user’s buying activities in third party websites and any buying decisions made by the user would be posted to the user’s newsfeed, even if they were not of Facebook at the time and without their knowledge or permission from the Facebook user.  By the end of November angry Facebook users cause the company to allow users to opt-out of Beacon. By August of 2008 a class action lawsuit was filed and by 2009 Beacon was shut down entirely and Facebook paid $41 million dollars in a settlement to the plaintiffs of the lawsuit.  It would not have been too difficult to see that Beacon was a breach of trust between Facebook and its users and that there was serious privacy issues at stake.  If the designers of Beacon had thought about the ethics of the situation, they could have saved their company millions of dollars and lost public opinion.  They might have even been able to design a Beacon that honored the privacy of its users in a way that was palatable to them and the program might still be successful and profitable today.

The best way to keep these problems from occurring is for corporations to take ethics seriously as a necessary part of the design process and embed it deeply in the teams of people working on these products.  The following reading is an example of how this might be done in the field of robotics, but it applies equally well to many different IT endeavors.  Please read, “Applied Professional Ethics for the Reluctant Roboticist,” by John P. Sullins.

 

Political Action, IT professionals and the Electronic Frontier Foundation

There will be times when codes of ethics and ethical designers will not be enough either.  This can happen when IT companies are forced to do things they might not otherwise do by government agencies that have the power to coerce their behavior.  Or it just might be the case that the general public is not aware of their own interests when it comes to IT policy due to the fact that the technology is too new and difficult for nonprofessionals to understand.   When this happens, IT professionals need to become politically active, educate, and promote their political views.  Two groups that exemplify this activity are; CPSR, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility; and EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation.  Please browse both of these sites and see how IT can be a deeply political activity.

 

Assignment 13, Writing Reflection (200 to 400 words) posted to the comments section below—In your own words, explain why having a code of ethics might not be enough to prevent ethical abuse in the field of information technology.  What are some of the other tools that are needed?  What are some examples of issues IT professionals are concerned with given what you read at CPSR and EFF?

Module 6 Whistleblowing, Lesson 9-- Whistleblowing in the age of Wikileaks

Assignment 14: Before you get started on this lesson, please take the midterm survey that your instructor has assigned you on Scholar.  This midterm will cover information from lessons 1-8.  When you are done you may start on this lesson.

 

Whistleblowing in the age of Wikileaks

When it is ethically required that you expose the wrong doings of your colleagues or even your employer?  Let’s hope you never have to make that decision in your professional career, but if you ever do, it will be helpful to have spent some time now deciding on an answer.  In most of the case studies we have looked at in the course so far and that we will look at later are based on information leaked to authorities and watchdog groups by whistleblowers.  A whistleblower  is a person inside an organization who exposes illegal, dishonest, or suspect information or activities of that same organization, be it a public or private entity.  A person who exposes this same kind of information from outside the organization committing the action is usually called a “watchdog.”  Whistleblowers are in very compromising position as they will almost certainly alienate their coworkers and lose their job.  If the whistleblower is calling out their own country, they may face charges of treason with jail, banishment, or capital punishment as their reward.  Due to the social value of whistleblowing for the safety of consumers and the general public, there are some who work tirelessly to legally protect these people when they come forward.  In the next lesson we will look at some case studies of modern whistleblowers but right now we will focus on what makes whistleblowing different in the digital age.  For instance, do sites like WikiLeaks make it easier for whistleblowers to expose wrongdoing without having to suffer the serious consequences? 

Whistleblowing in the Modern Workplace

Please read Rethinking whistleblowing in the digital age and this article on whistleblowing in modern sports in the age of the internet.  Then read this article on hacking and whistleblowing .

When is it right to turn in your own Government?

Julian Assange believes he has made the world much safer for whistleblowers everywhere.  Ironically, this move may have cost him his freedom, as he remains trapped in the embassy of Ecuador in London.  He has been granted asylum in Ecuador but if he leaves the embassy to travel there he will be arrested by British authorities and extradited to Sweden for alleged sexual offenses.  You can read some of the complicated story here.  He still lives a rich life on the internet and is the editor in chief of the WikiLeaks website along with other publishing activities.

Please watch this video where Assange explains why the world needs WikiLeaks.

Assignment 15: Writing reflection (200-400 words) posted to the comments section below—What is whistleblowing? Why or why don’t you agree with Julian Assange on the value of anonymous whistleblowing? Pick one of the examples from the articles we read, or one you may know of in your own life, do you think the situation was resolved ethically?  If so explain why and if not argue your conclusion.  In both cases use the theories we have learned in this class.

Module 6 Lesson 10: High Profile Case Studies

We will now look at two historic cases of Whistleblowing, one that used IT to inform the world about alleged abuses in the Iraq war and one that warned of abusive use of IT by the National Security Agency (NSA).  Both of these cases are still ongoing and even when they are settled, the repercussions will resonate for some time. 

Case 1, Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks

Chelsea Manning (then Bradley Manning) was a US Army intelligence analyst who provided WikiLeaks with hundreds of thousands of Army reports, diplomatic cables, and videos relating to the Iraq war  and the Afghanistan war  in January of 2010.  The one item that received the most media attention was the release of a video now entitled “Collateral Murder,” which shows gun camera footage from an incident in Baghdad on July 12, 2007, where two American helicopter gunships fire on a group of ten men.  The group included two Reuters employees who were there to photograph and American Humvee that was under attack by a militia group.  The Reuters cameramen were killed in the attack as were a large number of the men around them and two children were also injured as they were passengers in a van that arrived to try to help the wounded.  This video was what put Wikileaks into the spotlight.  Chelsea’s leaking of this video and the other documents were found out and later in 2010 she was arrested.  A high profile trial ensued and in 2013 she was charged with 22 offenses, 10 of which she plead guilty to and found guilty of 7 more.  She avoided the death penalty but was sentenced to 35 years in maximum security, though she is eligible for parole once 8 of those years are served.  Her stated motive for releasing this material was that she believed, “…[t]his is one of the most significant documents of our time removing the fog of war and revealing the true nature of 21st century asymmetric warfare” Manning, January 9, 2010.  Others have claimed it was treason and an attempt to aid the enemies of the United States.  Let’s try to form our own opinions of this case, please view the “collateral Murder video above and then watch at least one of the presentations in this video from a conference held on the ethical and legal nature of what Chelsea did.

 

Case 2, Edward Snowden: hero or traitor?

Edward Snowden’s case is a very complicated one.  We can find reasoned arguments that claim he is a hero, traitor, dissident, whistleblower, ethically motivated, and unethically self-serving. We are not going to settle that issue here and the case continues to evolve, but this case is too important not to have an understanding of it, at least in general terms. 

Snowden was an IT professional who had worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).  In addition to this he worked for Dell and Booz Allen Hamilton to do contract work for the National Security Agency (NSA).  In 2013 he leaked thousands of classified documents to various media outlets which contained many thousands of files form American Australian and British intelligence services along with hundreds of thousands of documents from the department of defense.  These documents were leaked to reporters such as Glenn Greenwald from The Guardian and Barton Gellman from The Washington Post, along with the controversial documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras.  The articles that these reporters began writing using this material began to appear May 20, 2013 while Snowden was traveling in Hong Kong.  This was the beginning of his self-imposed exile form the United States due to his fear of retribution if he were to return.  At this time he is living in Russia under the protection of the Russian government from extradition to the US. 

The many articles that have now been written on the evidence provided from this material have proven that the NSA has been involved in surveillance of US citizens on an unbelievably massive scale. Snowden has shown that through new advances in IT, the NSA has been able to compile massive amounts of data on nearly everyone who has made a call into or out of the United States.  The extent of this activity is incredibly wide, there is evidence that the NSA spied on foreign corporations, and heads of state, not only of the enemies of the US but its allies as well.  The spying included some strange targets including users of the online games “Second Life” and “World of Warcraft.”  These examples only scratch the surface of the revelations and more is learned every day.

To get a better handle on all this lets first read this article, How Edward Snowden went from loyal NSA contractor to whistleblower, The Guardian February 1, 2014.

Let’s now look at two sides of the debate.  Please read Edward Snowden is a hero, and then Edward Snowden is no hero.

Finally, let’s hear from Snowden himself in this TED talk: Here’s how we take back the Internet.

 

Assignment 16, writing reflection (200 to 400 words) posted to the comments box below—We have looked at two complicated cases of whistleblowing that have had worldwide impact.  Where do you stand at this time in relation to the value of whistleblowing, our capacity to protect whistleblowers, and whether or not these two cases are an example of ethically motivated whistleblowing? 

 

Module 7, Lesson 11—Privacy, Free Speech, Freedom, and Security.

In this module we are concerned with understanding how our beliefs in human rights interact with digital technologies.  Recall that human rights refer to the belief that humans have certain inalienable rights that they gain simply by being human.  Maintaining human rights is a very difficult challenge in the physical world and the online world adds even more complexity to the problem.  To further complicate things, digital technologies operate mostly on line and therefore internationally.  There is not widespread agreement on all human rights which means that if you release an app, webpage, program into the world, one country may find it useful while others may find it a gross violation of human rights.

The Right to be Forgotten

Here is a case in point.  French law recognizes “the right of oblivion,” which gives the right to those convicted of a crime and whom serve their sentence and become rehabilitated to have the right to restrict the publication of the details of their earlier conviction and incarceration.  This is to allow them to reenter society and function without the stigma of their past haunting them.  Similar laws are encountered across Europe but they are not found in the US.  This has led to some problems involving Wikipedia, one example being a law suit leveled on Wikipedia by two former murderers to remove information that named them as the killers of a popular actor from that actors Wikipedia page.  Do you have the right to have your past misdeeds forgotten?  How far does this right extend?  To criminal convictions or civil suits, ex love affairs or pictures you posted to the web but now regret?  Let’s get up to speed on this by listing to this lecture by the Oxford philosopher Lucian Floridi who has worked with Google to help make sense of recent rulings on this right coming out of the European Union.

Rights and Computer Ethics

We are now going to read this article:

J. P. Sullins, 2010: “Rights and Computer Ethics,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Luciano Floridi (ed) 2010.

From this article, pay particular attention to the fact that rights like free speech and privacy can conflict in ways that do not allow for a solution where both rights can be honored at the same time.  It is often the case that one has to give way for the other to be expressed.  Making these hard choices can only be accomplished by appealing to the various ethical theories we have studied in this class so far.

Freedom vs. Security

One of the most vexing problems of our time is the difficulty in granting rights to personal freedom while also guaranteeing collective security.   The more you have of one, the less you can have of the other, regardless of that we want both at the same time. 

To frame our thoughts on this problem, let’s look at the work of Yochai Benkler who argues that in some cases we have given up freedoms without even getting increased security in return.  Please read this article.

In the last section of this lesson we will think about what the War on Terror has done to civil liberties in the United States and how we might recover from where history has taken us to.  Please read this article: Liberty’s lost decade.

 

Assignment 17, Writing reflection (200-400 words), posted to the comments section below—While we have read some terrifying accounts of the use of technology to curtail liberties, we should also remember that digital technologies have a great capacity for advancing liberty and freedom of speech.  Think of an example from your own life, career, or from the news that illustrates this.  What is your considered opinion on the balance of freedom of speech and security?

 

Module 7, Lesson 12—Pornography, Racial Politics, and Games Online

There has never been another time in human history where pornographic material is so easy to produce, distribute, and consume and this is all due to information technology.  One of the very first images scanned and digitized to test image processing algorithms in 1961 was a Playboy centerfold and ever since the porn industry has grown as digital media technologies expand and open new markets for this material. Porn is still ambiguously legal but it also has an almost mainstream level of acceptance.  Popular mainstream media stars such as Miley Cyrus and Kim Kardashian use porn styling and images in their videos and self-image.  Children are exposed to these popular images from birth and begin watching actual porn as pre-teens.  In recent years a trend has begun where professional porn stars are being replaced by amateurs or semi-pro performers.  Fueled by the many thousands of potential actors and actresses who are drawn to the allure of porn, the industry now runs through these people at an alarming rate with most only lasting a few shoots before their career is over and the next “star” is born.  To extend their career they can do more niche market porn where abuse and violence is prevalent.  Eventually this becomes too much and they leave the industry, no better off and arguably worse than they were before they started.

The promise of money and an exciting lifestyle along with the presumed anonymity ensures a constant stream of actors and actresses.  But in actuality it is very difficult to keep ones identity anonymous for long and friends and family will soon find out, often in a very public way.  An example is the story of Belle Knox a Duke University student who was using a surreptitious porn career as a way to pay her tuition.  She faced a great deal of harassment at Duke after a fellow student recognized her in a film and outed her to his fraternity.  Knox has fought back and has used the negative publicity in her favor but this can also end tragically as it did for Alyssa Funke a University of Wisconsin-River Falls student committed suicide after being outed and harassed by students from her former high school.  This is may be an even bigger problem in the gay porn industry.   With the advent of accurate facial recognition software, it is essentially impossible to achieve anonymity in this industry anymore. The reality is that the industry uses and abuses people while pandering to the fantasies of its viewers and any profits are very unequally shared with actresses typically coming out as the least paid except in rare occasions.   

As our world becomes more and more pornified we have to have an honest conversation about whether this is an ethical world we are creating.  Is porn an expression of free speech or is it a symptom of gender inequality and violence, or something in between?  Read this article that discusses free speech and pornography and this one on the Ethics of Porn.  There are those who argue that porn can be done in a socially conscious way.  As an example of that look at this article where a porn actress answers the question, “Can porn be ethical?”  There is also the argument that the money spent on porn could be used for pro-social purposes.   One interesting argument is made by Erica Lust who suggests that if more women and other under or misrepresented people get involved with porn at all levels, then it will become a much more ethical activity. Be sure to watch her Tedx talk which is embedded in the article linked to above. 

Assignment 18 Writing reflection (200 to 400 words), posted to the comments section below (please label this "Assignment 18)—we have seen some very troubling problems with the astonishing growth of online pornography.  Using the ethical theories we have studied in the class, argue your view on whether or not pornography can be ethically produced, distributed and consumed. 

Racial and Gender Politics Online

The initial anonymity enjoyed by early users of the mostly text based net of the 1990’s promised a cyber-world where race and gender could become irrelevant.  

By Peter Stiner, published in The New Yorker, July 5, 1993.

 

This has not turned out to be true.  The politics of race and gender have migrated from the real world and entered the modern net in a multitude of ways.  Lisa Nakamura has studied this process for some time.  Please read this paper she wrote, “Race In/For Cyberspace: “Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet," by LisaNakamura.

Next we will view this short Ted talk: TEDxUIllinois - Dr. Lisa Nakamura - 5 Types of Online Racism and Why You Should Care.  Also look at this article that argues that the internet is facilitating even more racism, Racism is Still Alive and Well Online. Also look at this Cyber racism definition and this report that racism even enters the world of online dating, Racism and Online Dating.

Games

As online games have increased in their ability to add voice and web camera footage to the games, this has helped increase the abilities of gamers to interact and cooperatively solve problems in the games.  But along with this has arisen an alarming trend where race, gender and sexual orientation have served as a catalyst for harassment.  For a good example read Online Gaming Marred by Racist, Anti-Semitic Hate Speech, and Higgin, T. 2015. Online Games and Racism, Sexism, and Homophobia. The International Encyclopedia of Digital Communication and Society. 1–7.

The counterpoint to this is well argued by the game designer Jane McGonigal in her talk Gaming can make a better world.  Please watch that video.

Assignment 19 Writing reflection (200-400 words), post this to the comments section below and label it as "Assignment 19")—Go play an online game that includes a lot of social interaction for a few hours then describe an instance of racism or sexism you experienced during that time. Describe the game and the event in your post. If you can’t think of a game to play spend some time on any other social network and see what you can find.

Module 8, Lesson 13—The Dark Side of Social Media

In 2004 the first Web 2.0 conference was held by O’Reilly Media to brainstorm some of the ideas and products we now take for granted online.  Web 2.0 includes things like Torrents, Wikis blogging, social networking, etc. where all seen as a major advance allowing for more personal participation and authorship for users online.  Technology rarely stands still and a new kind of web that includes things like augmented reality and robotics is on the way.  But that is still some time off so we will talk about that in a later lesson.  Web 2.0 is a mature technology that we work in on a daily basis. To get a sense of how these forms of information technology has impacted moral values please read section 2 to 2.3 of Information Technology and Moral Values .

The dark side of online communication: Trolls, Griefing, and Cyberstalking

Have you ever said or posted something online that was uncharacteristically mean or petty?  Of course you have, we all do it.  It happens because there are so few constraints on our behavior online.  In the physical world we would never say or do the things we regularly do online because in the real world we have a number of constraints on behavior.  Physical walls or distance constrains who we interact with.  Market constraints prevent us from doing or saying many things we might want to. Laws can punish us for assault and battery or worse behavior, if we get out of hand.  Religious and social mores which are enforced by the accusing glances and comments of people around us keep us from saying rude and thoughtless things.  And ethical beliefs stand as an additional level of self-control.  Online very few of these constraints are in play.  There are no physical walls and skilled hackers can easily bust through any constraint built into the software.  Online activity takes place in a cyber-world where determining what laws and what jurisdictions apply to any given event can be quite difficult.  Market constraints are lower since information technology is always lowering the cost to entry online. Religious and social mores are also tough given the international nature of most online interactions.  Finally online anonymity, asynchronous communication, and our failure to fully imagine the agency of others we encounter only online added to all of the above makes it possible for one to do and say things that no one can hold them accountable for without great effort.

The tendency we all have to act out when we realize there are few constraints online is called the Online Disinhibition Effect by psychologists.  This is not to say that nothing bad ever happens outside of the internet, but what we are finding is that people who might never act out in the real world will do so online.  Where one might never want to drive to the bad side of town, get out of the car and risk being seen entering a seedy establishment to buy hard core porn, if it is just a few clicks away and no one will ever know, then the temptation is much greater to take a look.  If one would never risk the fist fight that would be associated with shouting out racist comments in public, the physical safety of the online setting can tempt one to express their inner racist.  Online disinhibition is a major cause of unethical behavior online.   This will only decrease as it becomes harder to maintain anonymity online.  But, as we learned in the reading we did in lesson 11, the early designers of the web so highly valued anonymity and free speech so highly that they built it into the very core architecture of the internet so it is going to take a great deal of expensive reengineering to change this.  This means that the last line of effective behavior control available to us is the personal moral and ethical values of internet users.  Only through personal training and contemplation of these values can we expect any change in online behavior.  This will be difficult as we can see that much online behavior acts like a reverse virtue ethics.  You surround yourself with uninhibited unethical people and you build unthinking habits that express sexist, homophobic, and racist reactions.  To reverse that process you would need to consciously choose online communities where you interacted using your real identity and everyone was working to build ethical habits and reactions.

Trolls, Griefers and Cyberstalkers are some of the neologisms created by the online community to pick out those who engage in particularly egregious behavior.  If you have spent any time online at all you have run into these people (note that sometimes they are not actually people but bots programed to behave badly, like Trollbot).  But if you are lucky enough to have never encountered this behavior and do not know what these words refer to, read Internet Troll, Griefing, Cyberstalking, Hater (Internet).

Please read this article on the design of games to limit trolling and griefing: How developers deal with griefers, by Simon Hill.  And this article on how to be an ethical game player: Nine Tips for Nurturing Ethical Play, by Seann Dikkers

 

Computers and inequality:  The digital divide

Another promise of the early net was that information technologies could be made so cheaply that everyone in the world would be able to participate in the new global knowledge economy.  There have been a number of surprising barriers that prevented this from happening and these have created a number of “digital divides” between people.  Some of these divides happen between people who are excluded from partaking in the internet at any level.  The UN agency for telecommunication estimates that roughly one billion people on the planet have no access whatsoever to any kind of information technology, even old technology like fixed land line telephones.  But there are other divides where a community might have one kind of technology but not another,  including odd outcomes like the fact that the developing world has four times as many mobile subscribers per one hundred people than the developing world, but those statistics are reversed for fixed land line phones.  This means that if you were to make a website that did not function well for mobile users, you have effectively shut out most of the developing world from your site and you have contributed to the digital divide.  People on the wrong side of the digital divide are excluded from many of the economic opportunities afforded to those on the net. They are social excluded from participating in the development of online culture. And they are socially marginalized as their life experiences become almost invisible to their cousins on the net.

Digital Divide between nations—even if you are working hard to engage net users from the developing world, we are still confronted with the fact that the people using the web in the G8 countries (the eight richest countries in the world), the number of people using the net in the G8 is roughly equivalent to the number of people using the net in all other countries combined, even though their populations are much lower.  This means that your average citizen in the developing world does not have much contact with the net.

Digital Divide within nations—there are divides within the developed world as well.  While nearly everyone in the developed world has potential access to the net, their experiences may differ greatly due to economic factors.  For example, a student who has her own laptop, phone, and tablet, will be able to do much more on an assignment than one who only has limited access to a school computer.

Please view: The State of Digital Divides (Video and Slides) compiled by the Pew Research Center.  (Feel free to look at any of the other resources found on that page as well).

Finally, read this paper: Digital Ethics in Bridging Digital Divide, by Subhajit Basu, Queen's University Belfast

Assignment 20, Writing reflection (200-400 words) posted to the comments section below—Using the ethical values that we have studied in this course so far, construct an argument against Trolls, Griefers, and Cyberstalkers and one against the various digital divides.  Can you think of any way to justify either of these issues?

 

Module 8, Lesson 14—what does my online profile say about me?

At this point in the course you have gathered a good deal of data on your online activities.  You have done your best to diligently collect information on your own online behavior.  You have tracked the services you use, the kinds of activities you have engaged in, the apps, games, and programs you interact with, and some of the unethical things you might have encountered.  Even, with all this work, you are undoubtedly missing details such as the exact web address you visited, the network or server data related to your activity, the time you spend on a particular page, the links you hovered over but did not click, etc.  All this is part of web analytics and would be almost impossible for you to log on your own, but I guarantee you that this data was collected on you by third parties during the time you were logging your own behavior as it is very valuable data. 

You are what you buy

This data is used to do behavioral targeting which is a way of mining the data gained by recording aspects of your online life and predicting or manipulating your buying behavior through pretargeting, getting adds in front of you in clever ways on the pages you visit prior to visiting a retail site, and through retargeting which creates personal ads for you which follow you after you have visited a retailer’s site.  Read this explanation of one technique that has been used for some time to get data on your web browsing behavior, cookie profiling.  Through this data along with some other data collected in various ways it might be noticed that you are interested in shoes.  An online shoe retailer who found this out might start pretargeting ads for shoes to you.  You will eventually visit the online shoe seller’s site browse around, and perhaps put a pair of shoes in your shopping cart.  You will either buy them or perhaps you decide against it and leave the site.  The retailer might then retarget you with ads for those same shoes everywhere you go until you “buy or die,” to use marketing vernacular.  This will result in many more shoe sales than if the choice was just left up to you, the consumer.  It is possible for the retailer to get even cleverer since they have access to lots of data on all the other people who have gone through this process with them before.  They know what shoes other people who browsed the shoe you looked at were the ones that they eventually bought.  So, if your behavior profile is similar to theirs, you will probably buy that shoe too.  They might target you in particular by lowering the price a bit just for you to see if that might influence you to buy.  There are many marketing techniques that open up when you are able to use behavioral targeting, retargeting and pretargeting; the key is to have as much accurate data as possible on all the customers and potential customers one might attract. That data is available from a number of sources online and has proven to be the most profitable aspect of the web 2.0 revolution.  In the past getting this kind of data on customers was very costly and not terribly accurate, but in the web 2.0 world, consumers will give this data away for free, or for very little reward, through the use of squeeze pages or by using social media sites such as Facebook marketing. 

Please look at this site and read how Experian uses online behavioral profiling and modeling.  Notice the client testimonials and how Experian can generate a fairly accurate profile of a person by aggregating the right kind of data.  It is easy to see how this is a good thing for business, but is it a good thing for you and other consumers?  If a government was doing this to you, then you might be worried, but why not when it is big corporate interests?

Look who’s watching me now

Read this news item on a program that analyzes the tweets of job candidates which it then uses to classify them in these categories; extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness.    It turns out that just as one might profile a particular consumer as someone who might be interested in their products, a company can profile people who might be good employees.   In your career it is very likely that the people hiring or firing you may be making those decisions based on data and lots of it.  While it makes sense for companies to get as much data about potential employees as possible before hiring, there are clear legal boundaries that we must not forget which safeguard equal employment opportunities.  Read this article for some examples. 

An employer who might be tempted to look over a potential employee’s Facebook feed is treading some tricky legal and ethical territory.  If they trick the candidate into “friending” them through a false profile, then this is a breach of privacy and an instance of fraud which could lead to a lawsuit.  Using the profile might cause an employer to let race, gender, or age to enter into their hiring decision in ways that are illegal.  In some cases, sexual preference might also be used inappropriately.  It is also wrong to use someone’s legal use of alcohol in job related decisions.  People deserve to have a private life and to be able to share that with friends online.  Having one’s work superiors and supervisors snooping in on that extends the reach of those people into all aspects of an employee’s life and a job can start feeling like indentured servitude.  Unfortunately, we live in a time where there is a lot of abuse going on and much of it is not technically illegal yet.  Only the personal commitment to the ethics of privacy held by your potential boss can help prevent this from happening to you.   When you are making hiring decisions, try to avoid the temptation to do some online snooping of the candidate since you are very likely to offend the candidates’ privacy and you may also be opening yourself to a potential lawsuit.

We have talked about privacy at various points in this course and we have seen that there are a number of ways to think about one’s right to privacy.  Regardless of your stance on this, we can see that digital technologies are clearly altering what one can realistically expect in terms of privacy.  In the past there were clearly delineated realms of public and private, but with information technology finding its way into every aspect of our lives, the boundary between public and private blurs.  Reestablishing new boundaries is an ethical and legal problem.

 

Assignment 21 Personal Digital Medial Log, Please upload your finished digital media log as an update to your community stream.  This is one of your culminating assignments in this course so please do your best work here.  If you have used a spreadsheet of some sort, save it as a pdf and then embed it in the update using the insert file function.   If your online data is highly incriminating or is just not something you want the members of the class to see, then email this log to your instructor.  Answer the following questions in your update.  What does your online behavior say about you? Do you let your real personality show, or are you pretending to be someone else online?  Are you honest and affirming to your online friends, or are you a deceitful troll?  Would you hire someone like you, why or why not?  Do you see any areas that you might like to work on changing?  Is your online life getting in the way of or enhancing your offline life?  Do you now see some ethical issues in your online life that you were unaware of before taking this course?

Module 8 Lesson 15— Future concerns--Virtual Reality, Robot Ethics, and the Infosphere

There are a number of emerging technologies that we need to spend some time thinking about as we near the end of this course.  Given that the technologies you use are often designed years before they actually make it to the public, there are decisions being made right now in research and design labs around the world that you are unaware of now, but the ethical choices made by the designers and builders of these emerging technologies will deeply affect your life in the near future.

Let’s begin by reading section 2.4 and all of section 3 here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/it-moral-values/.  We can see from this reading that whatever the specific technology we are talking about might be, the rate of change in that technology is likely to be accelerating.  We are used to innovating on technology but information technology has allowed us to innovate on the processes of innovation.  The consequence of this is that we do not have as much time to adjust to new technologies as we might have in the past.  Where it took about seventy five years for land line telephones to reach ninety percent market saturation in the US, it took cell phones about fifteen years to do the same thing.  Additionally, mobile smart phones are going to bring internet technologies to people that have been left on the wrong side of the digital divide.

We now have world changing technologies coming at us faster which gives us less time to think through their effects on our society before the next one comes along.  We will now look at three broad categories of information technologies that seem poised to bring real change to our lives in the foreseeable future.  Each one of these could have an entire course devoted to it but we will have to suffice with a quick overview for now, but we all need to watch the developments of these technologies over the next few years and contribute when we can in the ethical development of them. 

Virtual Reality

Virtual reality is all hype, until it is not.  This technology has been a staple of science fiction, books, movies and games since the middle of the last century.  Unfortunately, it has had a slow birth as a real technology.  There was a brief period in the 90s where the technology at first seemed like it was ready for implementation but then died out as a fad.  Today we are seeing another resurgence of interest with big money investment from companies like Facebook in the Oculus rift headset.  The idea is that this technology will have initial payoffs in gaming but that it will expand well beyond that as a new interface for social networking and business applications.  

Included in this technology would be things like blended reality and augmented reality where one might use technologies like Google Glass perhaps that would allow one to see virtual images superimposed on one’s visual field.  You could use data and information that was superimposed over what one was looking at to help make decisions.  Perhaps you are looking at a shelf and data on comparative prices flash before your eyes next to the item you are looking at to help you make a more informed buying choice.  You could be looking at a historical ruin and also see the building as it would have looked new.  An acquaintance stops you to say hi but you have forgotten their name, no worries, your augmented reality system has already brought up their Facebook page and you are able to use their correct name and strike up a conversation about their new pet that you just saw on their newsfeed as if they were an old friend.   

There are some easy to see ethical issues involved with this technology such as the nauseating effect this technology has on some people which might limit their ability to partake in new virtual wonders.   These technologies play with our sense of reality and while they open up the virtual world for us, at this point that seems to come at the cost of our self-awareness of the space around us.  We do not want to increase accidents in the real world while pursuing fun in the virtual world.  Augmented reality might be used to unfairly alter our buying choices if we are not careful with this technology. 

A harder to see concern is what some philosophers call “hyperreality” (please read this article). Have you ever been to a live event and wished that you were instead watching it at home because it would be so much easier to follow the action?  Our ability to create televised images is so good now, it is in many ways better than real.  Hyperreality is the next step in this direction and it will occur when we either can’t tell, or don’t care about, the difference between what is real and what is fiction, what is artificial and what is not.  We might greatly prefer to live in our virtual worlds and spend less and less time in reality.  Some studies have shown that children spend less time outdoors than earlier generations, preferring to spend time indoors consuming media.  If that is the kind of effect that old style media can have, just imagine the results with virtual, blended and augmented reality. 

Robot Ethics

Robotics is another field that seems ripe for innovation and consumer adoptions.  Robots, have of course been a staple of science fiction since the at least the 1920s if not before.  The idea may be old, but the enabling technologies have been lacking.  But it now seems like the miniaturized electronics and computers in our smart phones, along with mobile networks and cloud computing assets are combining to make a number of feasible robot applications. Let’s take a quick look at the ethical impacts of these new robotics technologies.  This subfield of computer ethics has picked up the name “roboethics” and at this time it focuses on these areas:

The following are excerpts from: “Open Questions in Roboethics,” in Philosophy and Technology, Luciano Floridi (ed.), John P. Sullins (Guest Ed.), pp. 233-238. Volume 24, Number 3/ September  2011.

Military applications

This is by far the most important of the sub fields of roboethics.  It would have been preferable had we worked through all the problems of programming a robot to think and act ethically before we had them make life and death decisions, but it looks like that is not to be.  While teleoperated weapons systems have been used experimentally since the Second World War, there are now thousands of robotic weapons systems deployed all over the world in every advanced military organization and in an ad hoc way by rebel forces in the Middle East.  Some of the primary ethical issues to be address here revolve around the application of just war theory.  Can these weapons be used ethically by programing rules of warfare, the law of war and just war theory into the machine itself?  Perhaps machines so programed would make the battlefield a much more ethically constrained space? How should they be built and programmed to help war fighters make sound and ethical decisions on the battlefield? Do they lower the bar to entry into conflict too low?  Will politicians see the as easy ways to wage covert wars on a nearly continuous level?  In an effort to keep the soldier away from harm, will we in fact bring the war to our own front door as soldiers telecommute to the battlefield?  What happens as these systems become more autonomous? Is it reasonable to claim that humans will always be “in” or “on the loop” as a robot decides to use lethal force?

Privacy

Robots need data to operate.  In the course of collecting data they will collect some that people may not want shared but which the machine needs nonetheless to operate.  There will be many tricky conundrums that have to be solved as more and more home robotics applications evolve.  For instance, if we imagine a general-purpose household robot of the reasonably near future, how much data of the family’s day-to-day life should it store? Who owns that data? Might that data be used in divorce or custody settlements? Will the Robot be another entry for directed marketing to enter the home?

Robotic ethical awareness

How does a machine determine if it is in an ethically charged situation?  And assuming it can deal with that problem, which ethical system should it use to help make its decision?  But we are sorely lacking on the specifics needed to make any of these claims anything more than theoretical.  Programmers and engineers are wonderfully opportunistic and do not tend to have emotional commitments to this or that school of thought in ethics.  Therefore what we see occurring today is that they tend to make a pastiche of the ethical theories that are on offer in philosophy and pick and choose the aspects of each theory that seem to work and deliver real results.

Affective robotics

Personal robots need to be able to act in a friendly and inviting way.  This field is often called social robotics, or sociable robotics, and was largely the brainchild of Cynthia Breazeal form the MIT robotics lab.  The interesting ethical question here is if your robot acts like your friend, is it really your friend? Perhaps that distinction doesn’t even matter?  With sociable robotics, the machine looks for subtle clues gathered from facial expression, body language, perhaps heat signatures or other biometrics and uses this data to ascertain the user’s emotional state.  The machine then alters its behavior to suit the emotional situation and hopefully make the user feel more comfortable with the machine.  If we come to accept this simulacrum of friendship, will this degrade our ability to form friendship with other humans?  We might begin to prefer the company of machines.

Sex Robots

It seems strange but it is true that there are already semi responsive sex dolls that do count as a minor type of robot.  These machines are such a tantalizing dream for some roboticists that there is little doubt that this industry will continue to grow.  This category of robotics supercharges the worries raised by affective robotics and adds a few more.  Sociable robots examine the user biometrics so the robot can elicit friendly relations, but here the robot examines biometrics to elicit illicit relations.  A sex robot is manipulating very strong emotions and if we thought video games were addictive, then imagine the behavior a game consul one could have sex with might produce.  These machines are likely to remain on the fringe of society for some time but the roboticist David Levy has argued that since this technology can fulfill so many of our dreams and desires, it is inevitable that it will make deep market penetration and eventually will be wide spread in our society.  This will result in many situations that will run the spectrum from tragic, to sad, to humorous.  The key point here is if the machines can really be filled with love and grace or if we are just fooling ourselves with incredibly expensive and expressive love dolls.  I can easily grant that engineers can build a machine many would like to have sex with, but can they build a machine that delivers the erotic in a philosophical sense?  Can they build a machine that can make us a better person for having made love to it?

Carebots

Somewhat related to the above is the carebot.  These machines are meant to provide primary or secondary care to children, the elderly and medical patients.  There are already a number of these machines, such as the Paro robot, in service around the world.  On one end of the scale you have something like Paro that is meant to provide something like pet therapy for its users.  Towards the middle of the scale you would have machines built to assist medical caregivers in lifting and moving patients or helping to monitor their medications or just to check in with patients during their stay.  At the far end of the scale you would have autonomous or semi-autonomous machines that would have nearly full responsibility in looking after children or the elderly in a home setting.  Here again we have some of the same issues raised by social robotics and the concomitant privacy issues.  But in addition to those you have the troubling problem of why aren’t other humans taking care of their own children and elderly.  What kind of society are we creating where we wish to outsource these important human relations to a machine?

Robot Surgery

These are robots that assist in surgery and other life and death medical practices such as administering medication.  Often the surgeons using these machines are close by but this technology could also be used to allow a surgeon to work on a patient many thousands of miles away, perhaps a wounded soldier or a patient with serious conditions who is living in remote or economically depressed places of the world.  This technology puts a new wrinkle on many of the standard medical ethics issues and we need more medical ethicists to study this phenomenon in-depth.

Autonomous vehicles

Our roadways are soon to change in a very radical way.  Autos and large transportation vehicles may soon have no human driver.  Already many of our vehicles can be seen as robots of a sort, some luxury vehicles will take over in emergency breaking situations and when you fall asleep at the wheel.  A number of autos will park themselves completely autonomously.  The vast majority of the issues involved here will be legal but there will be social upheaval and resistance here.  Imagine the destruction autonomous cars will have on the egos of the American Male who largely bases his entire personality on his vehicle.  More importantly, can one trust a vehicle to make the right decisions when those decisions mean the lives of you, your family and all those around you?  There have already been deaths caused by faulty automatic navigation services because people robotically follow the robotic voice no matter what it says even if it is giving incorrect directions that lead one out into the middle of Death Valley.  This latter event was caused by the fact that maps services use proprietary data that is programmed in by people with no experience of the territory they are mapping and they further do not share changes to road conditions that may save the lives of users of a competitor’s service. 

Attribution of moral blame

This is one of the biggest conundrums in roboethics.  Nearly all moral systems have some way of assessing which moral agent involved in a system is to blame when things go wrong. Most humans respond to blame and punishment and will modify their behavior to avoid it when possible.  But how does one blame a machine?  Will people use robots as proxies for the bad behavior in order to remove themselves from blame?  When an military robot kills innocent civilians, who is to blame?  If you are asleep in your robotic car and it runs down a pedestrian, did you commit manslaughter or are you just an innocent bystander?

Environmental Robotics

There are two ways to look at the environmental ethics impacts of robotics.  One is to look at the impact of the manufacture, use and disposal of robots.  Currently there is no green robotics that I am aware of and we should push for this to be developed.  The second interesting idea is that robotics could provide an invaluable tool for gathering data about environmental change.  The very same robots that are used to monitor enemy troops and scour the ocean floor for enemy activity can be easily re-tasked to monitor forests, ocean ecosystems, protect whale and dolphins or any number of environmental tasks that unaided humans find difficult.

Infosphere

The infosphere is a word that was coined to refer to the new information environment we are creating that layers over the natural environment.  Think of it like the ecosphere but for machines.  Machines use information technology to work together.  As these networks continue to form and evolve, the idea is that they will reach a certain complexity that will rival the natural world.  Watch this short video that explains how the philosopher Luciano Floridi uses the term infosphere. Another way to think about it is if we were to meld virtual reality and robotics together with future information technologies and networks, then we will have created the infosphere.  The ethical challenges of this would be very large as what were are doing is creating a new kind of environment along with the organisms that would inhabit it.  No humans have ever faced this kind of challenge before and it would require equally innovative thought in ethics and morality to be done correctly.  One new form of ethics that attempts to do this is called information ethics and it has a number of subfields that focus on specific challenges of the growth of information technology and the infosphere. 

Assignment 22, Writing Reflection (200 to 400 words) posted in the comments section below.  We have covered a wide territory here.  Go back and pick something that you found particularly interesting or challenging and describe how an understanding of the ethical theories we have looked at in this class can help us make better choices in the development of emerging technologies?

Module 9 Lesson 16— My personal ethos statement

We are now at the stage of this course where we are going to work on adding the knowledge you have gained into your own life.  It is one thing to know ethical theory and quite another to be an ethical person.  You have had a number of weeks to think about this subject and develop some considered opinions on the topics we have covered.  It is time to make some decisions on what of it, if any, you will be adding to your professional life.

You will now compose your own Personal Ethos Statement which you can refer to and update during your professional life when times get tough or you need to make an important decision.  Because this is an important document please do your best in constructing it.

Assignment 23, My personal Ethos statement

Resources needed

Gather your completed digital media log, your personal code of ethics from Lesson 7 assignment 12, and you will also need to refer to some of the reflections you submitted earlier.

Instructions

 Please follow this format for your finished document, 12pt type single spaced, with the following elements.  You will save this file as a PDF and post it to the proper assignment link in Moodle.

Preamble or Manifesto, this is a short paragraph or two where you pronounce the value that ethics and morality play in your life.  It is a final justification for the way you run your life.  Why do you live life the way you do? What are your biggest desires for your ethical life?  You actually might want to write this section last as the following sections will justify these statements.

Personal Code of Ethics. Attach your personal code of ethics from assignment 12 here.

Position Statements. These are very short statements of purpose on each of the following topics.

• My ethical thinking is guided by these theories of ethics________
• I propose to do the following in my political life__________.
• My stance on whistleblowing is______________.
• I believe privacy is__________________.
• I believe free speech is___________________.
• My stance on pornography is________.
• I pledge to behave this way in my gaming and social media life________.
• My considered opinion on the future of information technology ethics is__________.

My Digital Life

Looking over my digital media log, I notice that I average ______hours per day online.  This activity has the following strengths and weaknesses and I plan to make the following changes__________.

Module 9 Lesson 17— Ethical Analysis Project

 

Today we will see the results of your ethical analysis projects!  You have been working on these since the beginning of the course and the results will be quite interesting. 

Instructions

1). Each group will create one update for the community activity stream for this class before 11AM on the day this is due!!!! 

Please follow this format:

Title your post “Ethical Analysis Project Group number and Title”  Please fill in your own group number and the title of your project.  In this post write a one or two sentence description of your project and list all the group members that contributed to the project.  Next insert a link to your presentation.  This presentation must include an audio track so we can hear what you have to say.  Next post the PDF file of your white paper to the approprate assignment link in Moodle.

2). Please watch the presentations of the other groups in class and post a constructive comment in the comment box on their update.  This must be done before midnight on the day of this assignment.  After that you ought to look at the comments posted to your own presentation and answer any questions posed there.  Then you are done!

Module 9 Lesson 18—Final Course Survey and Closing Thoughts

 

You have now completed a through course of study on ethics for information technology professionals.  You are now more than qualified to apply what you have learned into your own professional lives.  Hopefully you have also learned a few valuable things that will enhance your personal lives as well.

In Module 1 we learned that ethics is not simply something that only professional ethicists need to know.  Instead it is a vital life skill that needs to be practiced and developed throughout one’s life.  

Module 2 showed us that companies are realizing that there are benefits to thinking ethically and to running their business in a more ethical way than was tolerated in the past. 

We learned some of the most important theories of ethics in Module 3.  We found that Consequential ism, Deontology, Virtue Ethics along with the Ethics of Care all have important contributions to make in how you think about problems you will encounter in your professional life.

We continued this line of thought in Module 4 where we learned about the new fields of information and computer ethics.  These fields deal directly with the unique issues that are raised by information technology. 

Module 5 looked at how professional associations have developed professional codes of ethics and how some computer professionals use their knowledge to help shape public policy on information technology.

In module 6 we learned that sometimes there is no other way but to act as a whistleblower when one is confronted with gross unethical behavior in an employer. 

Module 7 had us dive deeply into some of the most vexing problems we encounter in information technology today such as privacy, anonymous free speech, computer security, pornography, gamification, among others.  We found that racism and sexism still haunt the online world even though it was hoped that we would move beyond it with these technologies.

We explored social media and its dark side in module 8 where we found griefing, trolling, cyberstalking and other unethical behaviors that are exacerbated by the online disinhibition effect.

Finally, in Module 9 we tied this all together with some documents you produced that will help you synthesize what you have learned and apply it to your own lives.

I hope you have enjoyed this course, it is the result of many years of study and work in this field and it is my sincere desire that you have found something valuable that will make the world a bit better by your actions.

All you have left to do now is take the final course survey and any other student evaluations that are distributed.

Be successful and make ethical choices!