5 ms·

Professional exams oftentimes cover subjects like ethics, which would undoubtedly help the industry

platinumrad 9y ago
Do you really expect individual dissenting developers, who in many cases are more replaceable than ever, to be able to effectively resist the decisions of design leads and business managers?
grandmczeb 9y ago
Is there evidence that people actually act more ethically after taking a class on ethics?
- barry-cotter 9y ago
  Not that I know of but there’s evidence professional ethicists behave no more ethically than other philosophers. Ethicists’ and Nonethicists’ Responsiveness to Student E‐mails: Relationships Among Expressed Normative Attitude, Self‐Described Behavior, and Empirically Observed Behavior https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/meta.12033 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/meta.12033
tvanantwerp 9y ago
I doubt that unethical people act unethically because it just never occurred to them to be ethical, and that they would've known better if there was a class.
- michaelchisari 9y ago
  The point of teaching ethics is to help people better recognize unethical situations, not to convince the strictly unethical to become what they're not.
- trowawee 9y ago
  I'm less worried about explicitly unethical people than I am about somebody just out of college in their first job whose boss asks them to build something ethically dubious. Professional ethics instruction would A) help determine if something was unethical ("My boss told me to add a feature to our social network app to vacuum up every call and text message made on a device that has our app installed. Should I do that?") and B) provide a framework for people to push back on and censure unethical requests.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
yourapostasy 9y ago
Including ethics at the individual contributor level of licensing is utterly detrimental to software individual contributors. It gives cover to business management who almost always can override technical individual contributors and technical managers even on decisions with ethical import. Ethics at the individual contributor level is NOT our civilization's problem, it is at the leadership levels, even more so the closer that leadership gets to levels where they have enough wealth and power to peddle influence upon judiciaries and legislators.
jadedhacker 9y ago
Teaching ethics won't help, but providing financial and social support for dissidents would. So would requiring members to adhere to an ethics pledge that can get their membership revoked if they fail to comply. The numerous repeated calls for ethics pledges taken by individuals I see on this site betrays a misunderstanding of how power works. Individuals can't fight the system alone, it takes a collective.
- kbaker 9y ago
  The membership revocation is key - the fact that you could lose your professional license for ethics violations is enough to keep everything above board. Also, the NSPE would provide support for an individual engineer in the dissident/whistleblower case. As an Electrical Engineer, we went over this in school, as ethics is one of the cornerstones of the Professional Engineer license. (Though, personally I am not professionally licensed.) See here for what it covers: https://www.nspe.org/resources/ethics/code-ethics https://www.nspe.org/resources/ethics/code-ethics

Do you really expect individual dissenting developers, who in many cases are more replaceable than ever, to be able to effectively resist the decisions of design leads and business managers?

grandmczeb 9y ago

Is there evidence that people actually act more ethically after taking a class on ethics?

barry-cotter 9y ago
Not that I know of but there’s evidence professional ethicists behave no more ethically than other philosophers. Ethicists’ and Nonethicists’ Responsiveness to Student E‐mails: Relationships Among Expressed Normative Attitude, Self‐Described Behavior, and Empirically Observed Behavior https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/meta.12033 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/meta.12033

tvanantwerp 9y ago

I doubt that unethical people act unethically because it just never occurred to them to be ethical, and that they would've known better if there was a class.

michaelchisari 9y ago
The point of teaching ethics is to help people better recognize unethical situations, not to convince the strictly unethical to become what they're not.
trowawee 9y ago
I'm less worried about explicitly unethical people than I am about somebody just out of college in their first job whose boss asks them to build something ethically dubious. Professional ethics instruction would A) help determine if something was unethical ("My boss told me to add a feature to our social network app to vacuum up every call and text message made on a device that has our app installed. Should I do that?") and B) provide a framework for people to push back on and censure unethical requests.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

yourapostasy 9y ago

Including ethics at the individual contributor level of licensing is utterly detrimental to software individual contributors. It gives cover to business management who almost always can override technical individual contributors and technical managers even on decisions with ethical import. Ethics at the individual contributor level is NOT our civilization's problem, it is at the leadership levels, even more so the closer that leadership gets to levels where they have enough wealth and power to peddle influence upon judiciaries and legislators.

jadedhacker 9y ago

Teaching ethics won't help, but providing financial and social support for dissidents would. So would requiring members to adhere to an ethics pledge that can get their membership revoked if they fail to comply. The numerous repeated calls for ethics pledges taken by individuals I see on this site betrays a misunderstanding of how power works. Individuals can't fight the system alone, it takes a collective.

kbaker 9y ago
The membership revocation is key - the fact that you could lose your professional license for ethics violations is enough to keep everything above board. Also, the NSPE would provide support for an individual engineer in the dissident/whistleblower case. As an Electrical Engineer, we went over this in school, as ethics is one of the cornerstones of the Professional Engineer license. (Though, personally I am not professionally licensed.) See here for what it covers: https://www.nspe.org/resources/ethics/code-ethics https://www.nspe.org/resources/ethics/code-ethics