Insights on Professional Computing Ethics

Insights on Professional Computing Ethics

I would like to say that computing is not a profession. It is similar to law and medicine in the sense that one must think of what they are doing with an ethical point of view. This ethical point of view is important because as more and more people decide to pursue this route, people need a certain standard to at least consider whenever something small or big is being considered. That is how law and medicine are similar to that of computing. Across the board there are just certain things that everyone or at least a vast majority of the profession agrees is ethical or unethical. Computing is not similar to law and medicine by the reason that in the article it was stated that computing is emerging as a different type of professionalism. It is more similar to software engineering vs the traditional professionalism that law and medicine would be.

 Computing is not a profession because at the moment there are no higher organizations that uphold sets of standards in terms of ethics or simply the technologies being used. Due to this and the fact that you could also get into the field of computing and be just as good as the next guy that has formal education while you would just have personal or informal training. These are why I think computing is not a profession, at least as of yet.

Different organizations are trying to tackle the issue of codifying computer ethics by doing the followings, Inspiration and Guidance for ethical conduct, Support those seeking to act ethically by appealing to the public system of ethics established in a code, Education and Shared understanding(by the professional and the public) of standards of practice, Deterrence and discipline for specific actions by sanctioning code violations, Protect the Status Quo by stifling dissent and state minimal level of ethical conduct, and Promote business interests by forbidding competitive bidding.

The ACM has adopted a code of conduct rather than a code of ethics. It is a model that is more of a list of violations and sanctions for those violations. The code has 3 types of statements. Cannons, Ethical considerations, and Disciplinary Rules.

The strength of the Candian Code of Ethics is that well at least in my opinion it really focuses on the community as a whole. “Contribute to the IT Profession” is something that would benefit the entire community as it allows for people to take the contribution and expand or grow it into something even better. A weakness would be that these codes are not modern so they can be viewed as not with the times and outdated. For ACM, a weakness is that they do not meet some of the traditional criticisms of codes of ethics. In one example from the text was that, it fails to supply adequate guidance when a difficult ethical decision needs to be made. This is a rather huge weakness as this means when the situation would eventually arise, chaos in the discussion could form. However, ACM over is a standard that is helpful in many other situations.

Overall I think I would choose ACM, although the huge weakness is a big downfall, I think overall it is a good code of conduct.