Professional Ethics - Ethics for the Information Age - page 438

the bills paid on time. Causal responsibility is responsibility assigned to people because
they did something (or failed to do something) that caused something to happen. “Joe
is responsible for the network being down, because he released the virus that caused the
computers to crash.” Legal responsibility is responsibility assigned by law. Homeown-
ers are responsible for the medical bills of a postal carrier who slips and falls on their
driveway. Role responsibility, causal responsibility, and legal responsibility can be exclu-
sive. For example, if one person is responsible for paying the bills, the other employees
are not. Moral responsibility is not exclusive. For example, if an infant is brought into a
home, both the mother and the father are responsible for the baby's well-being.
Because moral responsibility is not exclusive, people cannot pass the buck by saying,
“My boss made the final decision, not me,” or by saying, “I just wrote the software; I
wasn't responsible for testing it.” When people abdicate their moral responsibility, great
harms can be done. For example, in the 1970s, executives at Ford Motor Company
were anxious to begin selling a 2,000-pound, $2,000 alternative to Japanese imports.
Unfortunately, prototypes of the Ford Pinto could not pass the mandatory collision
test, because the windshield kept popping out. Forbidden from making design changes
that would increase the weight of the car or delay its introduction, engineers solved the
problem by redirecting the energy of the collision down the drive train to the gas tank.
They knew this change would make the gas tank more likely to rupture, but the car did
not have to pass a fuel tank integrity test. Covering up design problems allowed Ford
to get its subcompact car to market. However, Ford eventually paid millions of dollars
to settle dozens of lawsuits resulting from fiery crashes involving Pintos. Moreover,
unfavorable media attention harmed Ford's reputation for years [18].
Michael McFarland argues that a team of engineers should be held to a higher level
of moral responsibility than any of its individual members. There may well be situations
where a person has a duty to speak the truth. To this duty, McFarland adds another duty
held by moral agents: the duty to help others in need. If whistle-blowing should be done
and no individual has the strength to do it, then it must be done by the group acting
collectively [21].
Summary
A computer-related job, such as system administration, computer programming, or
software engineering, is not a full-fledged profession like medicine or law, because you
do not need to be certified and licensed in order to design, implement, or maintain com-
puter hardware or software. Nevertheless, those who work with computers can, through
inadequate education, insufficient practical training, or bad choices, cause a great deal
of harm to members of the public. In this respect, the responsibility of computer “pro-
fessionals” can be similar to that held by members of fully developed professions. For
these reasons, the two largest computing societies have worked together to develop a
code of ethics to guide the actions of software engineers: those who develop or maintain
software or teach in this area.
The Software Engineering Code of Ethics and Professional Practice is based upon
eight general principles related to the following subjects: the public, client and employer,