2.3 Good computing reports for computer ethics

Good Computing Reports (From Charles Huff, "Practical Guidance for Teaching the Social Impact Statement (SIS).From Proceedings of the 1996 Symposium on Computers and the Quality of Life, pp. 86-89. New York, ACM Press.)

Key Links

1. Materials from Magic Copy Center: Good Computing: A Virtue Ethics Approach to Computer Ethics, ChapterTwo, Huff/Frey

2. www.computingcases.org

Goals:

1. To uncover ethical surprises in major design projects. (These are ethical issues—potential ethical problems—that are embedded in the design project.)

2. To communicate effectively to the client the importance of considering ethical issues and problemsassociated with design projects upstream in the design process. (This means raising ethical problems from the beginning of thedesign process and continuously throughout the design process. This is opposed to the idea of waiting until the design process isfinished to raise ethical issues.)

Four Presuppositions

1. Socio-technical systems and their components (hardware, software, physical surroundings,people/groups/roles, procedures, laws, data/data structures) embody values.

2. Computing technologies (CTs) are always embedded in socio-technical systems.

3. CTs instrument (magnify or augment) human action.

4. There is a close analogy between solving ethical and design problems:

The table below provides a summary of this analogy that helps to introduce the Software Development Cycle. For a more complete account of this analogy see Carolyn Whitbeck: http://onlineethics.org/essays/education/teaching.html (This link is attached above in this module.)