Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Questions
1. Did the East Dakota State Police do anything wrong?
2. Who benefited from the actions of the EDSP?
3. Who was harmed by the actions of the EDSP?
4. What other courses of action could the EDSP have taken to achieve its
objectives? Examine the advantages and disadvantages of these alternative
courses of action.
5. What additional information, if any, would help you answer the previous
questions?
SCENARIO 4
You are the senior software engineer at a start-up company developing an
exciting new product that will allow salespeople to generate and email sales
quotes and customer invoices from their smartphones.
Your company's sales force has led a major corporation to believe your
product will be available next week. Unfortunately, at this point the software still
contains quite a few bugs. The leader of the testing group has reported that all
of the known bugs appear to be minor, but it will take another month of testing
for his team to be confident the product contains no catastrophic errors.
Because of the fierce competition in the smartphone software industry, it is
critical that your company be “first to market.” To the best of your knowledge,
a well-established company will release a similar product in a few weeks. If its
product appears first, your start-up company will probably go out of business.
Questions
1. Should you recommend release of the product next week?
2. Who will benefit if the company follows your recommendation?
3. Who will be harmed if the company follows your recommendation?
4. Do you have an obligation to any group of people that may be affected by
your decision?
5. What additional information, if any, would help you answer the previous
questions?
Reflect on the process you used in each scenario to come up with your answers. How
did you decide if particular actions or decisions were right or wrong? Were your reasons
consistent from one case to the next? Did you use the same methodology in more than
one scenario? If someone disagreed with you on the answer to one of these questions,
how would you try to convince that person that your position makes more sense?
Ethics is the rational, systematic analysis of conduct that can cause benefit or harm
to other people. Because ethics is based in reason, people are required to explain why
they hold the opinions they do. This gives us the opportunity to compare ethical eval-
uations. When two people reach different conclusions, we can weigh the facts and the
reasoning process behind their conclusions to determine the stronger line of thinking.
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