Ethical Theory
Ethics
Ethics are the moral principles that govern a person’s behaviour or the conducting of an activity.
It can be defined differently depending on the field of study:
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- sociology: underlying sentiment informing beliefs, customs, practices
- philosophy: science of the character of a group or individual
- science: the moral element determining a characters’ action rather than thought or emotion
Ethics is not necessarily the law and not the same for everyone.
Where does it comes from?
Hippocrates may have been the first proponent of “ethical behaviour”.
Normative Ethics
Normative Ethics looks at what theories we can create to explain what is good or bad, whether an action will be positive.
- Deontic ethics categorises actions into right and wrong.
- Aretaic looks at virtue / the person, it categorises how we should live.
Ethical Theories
- Deontology is an ethical theory that uses rules to distinguish right from wrong. It looks specifically at whether you follow the rules.
- Consequentialism says that the morality of an action should only be judged by its consequences.
- Virtue Ethics says one needs to try strive to become a virtous person, to reach a state where you are ‘fulfilled’.
Ethical Issues in IT
- Intellectual Property Rights
- Copyright, ownership, how to reward authors
- Software theft, illicit copying, spurious backups
- Social impacts
- Quality of software
- Unemployment and deskilling
- Digital divide in society
- Privacy & Anonymity
- Data mining, web surveillance, facial recongition, customer profiling
- Monitoring access to data on networks
- Digital Security
- Artifical Intelligence
- Interactions between algorithms and the people they affect
Ethical Issues in Business
Personal values in business ethics include:
- integrity, honesty, quality, loyalty
- professionalism, responsibility
- mutual respect, fairness and meritocracy
- leadership and responsiblity
- client focus and teamwork