Ethics Week 2 - January 24, 26 1

Ethics

Week 2 - January 24, 26

Computers and Society • Carnegie Mellon University • Spring 2006 • Cranor/Tongia/Farber • http://cups.cs.cmu.edu/courses/compsoc-sp06/ 1

Why study ethics?

 Ethical analysis can provide a structured way to evaluate an issue and choose a course of action

 Ethical analysis can help illuminate multiple sides of an issue

 Ethical analysis can help produce persuasive arguments

 In your personal and professional life you will confront difficult decisions


Quinn 2, Scenario 4

 You are the senior software engineer at start-up developing software for handheld computers to help nurses keep track of patients

 Sales force has promised product by next week

 Product still contains many minor bugs

 No major bugs have been found, but QA recommends another month of testing

 A competitor plans to release a similar product in a few weeks

 If your product is not first to market your start-up will probably go out of business


Scenario 4

 Should you recommend release of the product next week?

 Who will benefit if the company follows your recommendation?

 Who will be harmed if the company follows your recommendation?

 Do you have an obligation to any group of people that may be affected by your decision?

 Do any of your answers change if the target users were not medical, but, say, the entertainment or retail industry?

Source: Slides for Chapter 2 of Ethics for the Information Age by Michael J. Quinn. Copyright © 2005 Pearson Addison-Wesley. All rights reserved.


Subjective Relativism

 Relativism

• No universal norms of right and wrong

• One person can say “X is right,” another can say “X is wrong,” and both can be right

 Subjective relativism

• Each person decides right and wrong for himself or herself

• “What’s right for you may not be right for me”



Subjective relativism evaluation of spam

 Spammers say spam is good

• Spam brings advertisements to the attention of some people who want to buy their products

• Spammers make money

• Purchasers are happy to buy their products

• Claim: “Direct mail” via email is a means to

“level the playing field”

 Most spam recipients and ISPs say spam is bad

• Spam wastes time and computer resources, congests networks, slows processing of nonspam email


Case for Subjective Relativism

 Well-meaning and intelligent people disagree on moral issues

 Ethical debates are disagreeable and pointless



Case Against Subjective Relativism

 Blurs distinction between doing what you think is right and doing what you want to do

 Makes no moral distinction between the actions of different people

 SR and tolerance are two different things

 Decisions may not be based on reason

 Not a workable ethical theory



Cultural Relativism

 What is “right” and “wrong” depends upon a society’s actual moral guidelines

 These guidelines vary from place to place and from time to time

 A particular action may be right in one society at one time and wrong in other society or at another time

• International issues may especially dominate, e.g., copying HIV drugs (“generics”)



Case for Cultural Relativism

 Different social contexts demand different moral guidelines

 It is arrogant for one society to judge another

 Morality is reflected in actual behavior



Case Against Cultural Relativism

 Because two societies do have different moral views doesn’t mean they ought to have different views

• Location and time both affect societal norms

 Doesn’t explain how moral guidelines are determined

 Doesn’t explain how guidelines evolve

 Provides no way out for cultures in conflict

 Societies do, in fact, share certain core values

 Only indirectly based on reason

 Not a workable ethical theory

Source: Adapted from Slides for Chapter 2 of Ethics for the Information Age by Michael J. Quinn. Copyright © 2005 Pearson Addison-Wesley. All rights reserved.


Divine Command Theory

 Good actions: those aligned with God’s will

 Bad actions: those contrary to God’s will

 Holy books reveal God’s will

 We should holy books as moral decisionmaking guides



Case for Divine Command Theory

 We owe obedience to our Creator

 God is all-good and all-knowing

 God is the ultimate authority



Case Against Divine Command Theory

 Different holy books disagree

 Society is multicultural, secular

 Some moral problems not addressed in scripture

• Issues of interpretation abound

 “The good” ≠ “God”

 Based on obedience, not reason

 Not a workable theory



Kantianism

 Good will: the desire to do the right thing

 Immanuel Kant: Only thing in the world good without qualification is good will

 Reason should cultivate desire to do right thing.



Categorical Imperative (1 st Formulation)

Act only from moral rules that you can at the same time will to be universal moral laws



Illustration of 1

st

Formulation

 Question: Can a person in dire straits make a promise with the intention of breaking it later?

 Proposed rule: “I may make promises with the intention of later breaking them”

 The person in trouble wants his promise to be believed so he can get what he needs

 Universalize rule: Everyone may make & break promises

 Everyone breaking promises would make promises unbelievable, contradicting desire to have promise believed

 The rule is flawed; the answer is “No”



Categorical Imperative (2 nd Formulation)

Act so that you treat both yourself and other people as ends in themselves and never only as a means to an end.

This is usually an easier formulation to work with than the first formulation of the

Categorical Imperative.



Kantian evaluation of spam ( 1 st formulation)

 Proposed rule:

• I can send advertisements to as many email addresses as I want

 Spammers want people to read their email and buy their products

 Universalize rule:

• Everyone can send advertisements to as many email addresses as they want

 Consequence

• If everyone sent advertisements to as many email addresses as they wanted to, email would be so clogged with spam that it would no longer be useful and people would stop using it

 The rule is flawed -> spamming is not ethical


Kantian evaluation of spam (2nd formulation)

 Spammers send ads for a product to many people, knowing only small number will be interested

 Most message recipients will waste time and money

 Spammers do not respect recipients’ time or money, and are only interested in using spam recipients to make a profit

 Thus spammers treat recipients as means to an end

 Conclusion: Spamming is wrong


Case for Kantianism

 Rational

 Produces universal moral guidelines

 Treats all persons as moral equals

 Workable ethical theory



Case Against Kantianism

 Sometimes no rule adequately characterizes an action

• Finding the right formulation can be difficult

 There is no way to resolve a conflict between rules

 Kantianism allows no exceptions to moral laws



Utilitarianism

 Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill

 An action is good if it benefits someone

 An action is bad if it harms someone

 Utility: tendency of an object to produce happiness or prevent unhappiness for an individual or a community

 Happiness = advantage = benefit = good = pleasure

 Unhappiness = disadvantage = cost = evil = pain



Principle of Utility

(Greatest Happiness Principle)

An action is right (or wrong) to the extent that it increases (or decreases) the total happiness of the affected parties



Act Utilitarianism

 Utilitarianism

• Morality of an action has nothing to do with intent

• Focuses on the consequences

• A consequentialist theory

 Act utilitarianism

• Add up change in happiness of all affected beings

• Sum > 0, action is good

• Sum < 0, action is bad



Bentham: Weighing Pleasure/Pain

 Intensity

 Duration

 Certainty

 Propinquity (proximity)

 Fecundity

 Purity

 Extent



Highway Routing Scenario

 State may replace a curvy stretch of highway

 New highway segment 1 mile shorter

 150 houses would have to be removed

 Some wildlife habitat would be destroyed



Evaluation

 Costs

• $20 million to compensate homeowners

• $10 million to construct new highway

• Lost wildlife habitat worth $1 million

 Benefits

• $39 million savings in automobile driving costs

 Conclusion

• Benefits exceed costs

• Building highway a good action

Subtlety: not just to whom but when costs (benefits) accrue



Act utilitarian evaluation of spam

 Spam sent to 100 million people

 1 in 10,000 buy product

 90% of people who buy product are happy with it, other 10% feel ripped off

 People who don’t buy product waste time and money, get annoyed, etc. - unhappy

 Spammer makes lots of money and is VERY happy

 9001 happy people, 99,990,000 unhappy people

 Conclusion: 99.991% of people are unhappy, so spam is wrong


Case for Act Utilitarianism

 Focuses on happiness

 Down-to-earth (practical)

 Comprehensive




Case Against Act Utilitarianism

 Unclear whom to include in calculations

 Too much work

 Ignores our innate sense of duty

 Susceptible to the problem of moral luck

Sometimes actions do not have intended consequences - Moral worth of action is dependent on consequences that may not be under control of moral agent



Rule Utilitarianism

 We ought to adopt moral rules which, if followed by everyone, will lead to the greatest increase in total happiness

 Act utilitarianism applies Principle of Utility to individual actions

 Rule utilitarianism applies Principle of Utility to moral rules



Anti-Worm Scenario

 August 2003: Blaster worm infected thousands of Windows computers

 Soon after, Nachi worm appeared

• Took control of vulnerable computer

• Located and destroyed copies of Blaster

• Downloaded software patch to fix security problem

• Used computer as launching pad to try to

“infect” other vulnerable PCs



Evaluation using Rule Utilitarianism

 Proposed rule: If I can write a helpful worm that removes a harmful worm from infected computers and shields them from future attacks, I should do so

 Who would benefit

• People who do not keep their systems updated

 Who would be harmed

• People who use networks

• People who’s computers are invaded by buggy anti-worms

• System administrators

 Conclusion: Harm outweighs benefits. Releasing anti-worm is wrong



Case for Rule Utilitarianism

 Compared to act utilitarianism, it is easier to perform the utilitarian calculus.

 Not every moral decision requires performing utilitarian calculus.

 Moral rules survive exceptional situations

 Avoids the problem of moral luck




Case Against Utilitarianism in General

 All consequences must be measured on a single scale

 Utilitarianism ignores the problem of an unjust distribution of good consequences.

• Utilitarianism does not mean “the greatest good of the greatest number”

• That requires a principle of justice

• What happens when a conflict arises between the Principle of Utility and a principle of justice?



Principle of Utility

(Greatest Happiness Principle)

An action is right (or wrong) to the extent that it increases (or decreases) the total happiness of the affected parties ??

We’ll deal with these issues later in economics, which is a mechanism for dealing with tradeoffs



Social Contract Theory

 Thomas Hobbes

• “State of nature”

• We implicitly accept a social contract



Establishment of moral rules to govern relations among citizens



Government capable of enforcing these rules

 Jean-Jacques Rousseau

• In ideal society, no one above rules

• That prevents society from enacting bad rules



James Rachels’ Definition

“Morality consists in the set of rules, governing how people are to treat one another, that rational people will agree to accept, for their mutual benefit, on the condition that others follow those rules as well”



People act out of self-interest w/out agreement

 Morality is the result of an implicit agreement among rational beings who understand that there is a tension between self-interest and the common good

 The common good is best realized when everyone cooperates

 Cooperation occurs when those acting selfishly suffer negative consequences

 Examples: Recycling, energy conservation


Kinds of Rights

 Negative right: A right that another can guarantee by leaving you alone

 Positive right: A right obligating others to do something on your behalf

 Absolute right: A right guaranteed without exception

 Limited right: A right that may be restricted based on the circumstances



John Rawls’s Principles of Justice

 Each person may claim a “fully adequate” number of basic rights and liberties, so long as these claims are consistent with everyone else having a claim to the same rights and liberties

 Any social and economic inequalities must

• Be associated with positions that everyone has a fair and equal opportunity to achieve

• Be to the greatest benefit of the leastadvantaged members of society (the difference principle)



Social contract theory evaluation of spam

 Everyone has right to free speech

• You can send email to anyone you want

• No requirement that people listen to your speech

• People can send you angry replies if they don’t like your email

 If 99,990,000 people are unhappy with a spam message, they should be able to send an angry reply to the spammer, which should have cost to spammer

 But spammers forge headers so they do not get angry replies

 This violates social contract, thus spamming is wrong


Case for Social Contract Theory

 Framed in language of rights

 Explains why people act in self-interest without common agreement

 Provides clear analysis of certain citizen/government problems




Case Against Social Contract Theory

 No one signed contract

 Some actions have multiple characterizations

 Conflicting rights problem

 May unjustly treat people who cannot uphold contract



Objectivism vs. Relativism

 Objectivism: Morality has an existence outside the human mind

 Relativism: Morality is a human invention

 Kantianism, utilitarianism, and social contract theory examples of objectivism



Mail Abuse Prevention System

 MAPS is a not-for-profit organization

 Contacts marketers who violate MAPS standards for bulk email

 Puts marketers who violate standards on a Realtime

Blackhole List (RBL)

 Some mail relays refer to RBL list

• Looks up email host name on RBL list

• If name on list, the email gets bounced back

 All email from blacklisted hosts gets bounced, even email from non-spammers



Was the creation of the RBL ethical?

 Utilitarian evaluation:

• ISP using RBL benefits by getting better network performance, fewer angry users

• But their users are unable to receive email from innocent users of blacklisted ISPs, reducing their utility

• Innocent users of blacklisted ISPs unable to communicate with ISPs that user RBL

• Conclusion depends on magnitude of benefit and ratio of blacklisted innocent users to total email users

 Kantian evaluation:

• MAPS puts ISPs on RBL with goal of getting innocent users to complain and pressure ISP to drop spammers

• Innocent users are treated as means to an end

• This violates Categorical imperative -> RBL is unethical


Research and Communication Skills

Finding info with search engines

 General purpose search engines

• Google, Yahoo, Altavista, A9, etc.

 Clustered searching

• Vivisimo, Dogpile

 Search CS research literature

• http://portal.acm.org

• http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/

• http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/

• http://scholar.google.com/

When you find a useful paper, look at its reference list for other possibly relevant sources, also use “cited by” features in search engines



Advanced searching

 Boolean searching

• Operators: AND, OR, NOT, NEAR

• Implied operators: AND is often implied

• Parentheses for grouping

• Wildcards

• Quotes

 Getting to know the ins and outs of your favorite search engines

• Many search engines do not use pure boolean searching

• Most search engines have some special syntax

• Search engines use different algorithms to determine best match



Advanced Googling

 See http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/G oogle.html

 Ranks results using PageRank algorithm, taking into account popularity, importance, word proximity

 Special syntax

• intitle, inurl, site, intext, filetype, daterange, numrange

• Boolean operators: OR, -

• Fuzzy searching: ~, .., *

• Exact phrases: “”

 10-term limit

 Special searches

 Definitions (define), calculator, area codes, flight searches, and more


CMU’s Library Resources

 Indices and Catalogs

• Articles – ArticleFirst, WebOfScience,

EICompendex, etc.

• Books – WorldCat, domain specific databases

 Full text resources

• Reference shelf

• Statistical

 InterLibrary Loan (ILL)

 Hoovers (financial and corporate)

 Lexis-Nexis (news and legal)



Applyyourself.com incident

 In March 2005, someone posted a message to the Business Week

Online message board that explained how a student who had applied to a business school using the application form at applyyourself.com could login to the site and find out early whether or not they had been admitted

• Procedure involved logging in using the student’s own username and password and then appending a special string to the end of a URL to view a page that had been posted but had not yet been linked in

 Dozens of students who had applied to several top business schools followed this advice

• Some were able to find out whether they had been admitted, others saw only a blank screen

• Students viewed early information that they would later have been authorized to see

 The press reported that the students had “hacked” into applyyourself.com

 Most of the business schools decided to reject all the students who tried this


Applyyourself.com continued

 It is generally agreed that:

• The students did not break any laws

• What the students did was not really hacking and did not require much technical expertise

 But, was it unethical? Did they deserve to be punished?


Class debate #1

 Software piracy is ethical in third world countries.



Creating a bibliography and citing sources

 Do you know how to create a properly formatted bibliography?

 Why is a list of URLs not a proper bibliography?



Importance of Proper Referencing

 Intellectual Property issues

 Intellectual honesty

 Substantiation

• Is this your opinion, well-accepted fact, or somewhere in between?

 Clarity for the reader

• Assumptions

• Methodology

 Disclosure of bias (implicit/explicit)

• Who funded the work (or institution)?

• Context matters



Citing sources

 Whenever you take words, images, or ideas from another source you need to cite that source

• Direct quotes and paraphrases

• Images,photographs, tables, graphs

• Ideas, measurements, computations

 Also use citations as evidence to back up assertions

 If you use somebody else’s words, you must quote them

• Short excerpts appear in quotes

• Long excerpts (3 or more lines) are introduced and then appear as indented text, often in a smaller font, single spaced

• If you leave out words in the middle use …

• If you leave out words at the end use ….

• If you substitute or add words, put them in square brackets []

• If you add italics say [emphasis added]

 Failure to cite sources = plagiarism



Paraphrasing

 Usually paraphrasing ideas is preferable to quoting unless

• Exact wording is important

• You are quoting famous words

• You are critiquing or comparing specific words rather than ideas

• The original words say what you want to say very well and succinctly

 Usually paraphrasing lets you convey an idea more succinctly because you can focus on the part of the idea most relevant to your paper

 If you end up using some of the original words in your paraphrase, use quotes around those words



Forms of citation

 Full bibliographic citation inline

• Typically used on a slide

 Footnote or endnote

• Used in legal writing, many books, some conferences and journals

 Inline short citation with bibliography, references cited section, or reference list

• Used by most technical conferences and journals, some books, most dissertations



Citations in text

 Format depends on style you are using

• Usually a number or author and date, sometimes a page number reference too

 Citation usually goes at the end of the sentence

• Privacy is not “absolute,” (Westin 1967).

• Privacy is not “absolute,” [3].

 If Author is mentioned, in sentence, name does not appear in citation

• Westin (1967, p. 7) claims that individuals must balance a desire for privacy with a desire to participate in society.

 Multiple citations can appear together

• [3, 4, 5]

• (Westin 1967; Cranor 2002)



Footnotes

 Used heavily in legal writing

 Usually used sparingly in technical writing

 Each footnote appears only once

 If you reference the same source multiple times you must repeat the reference information, however you can abbreviate it on second and subsequent references and use ibid to indicate same as previous reference



Creating a bibliography

 Similar rules apply to other forms of citation (footnotes, etc.)

 Pick an appropriate style and use it consistently throughout your paper

• Most conferences and journals have style requirements

• Popular styles: Chicago/Turabian, MLA, APA, APSA

 Complete bibliographic entry includes author, title, date, publisher, place of publication, pages, volume number, etc.

 Bibliographic entries should be ordered - usually either alphabetically or in order referenced in the text



Chicago/Turabian reference-list

 This is the format documented in The Chicago Manual of

Style and Kate Turabian’s A Manual for Writers of Term

Papers, Theses, and Dissertations

 Summarized many places online, including http://www.wisc.edu/writing/Handbook/DocChi_WC_artic le.html

 Turabian lists four formats for each type of citation - in this class use the parenthetical reference (PR) for the short citation in the text and the reference-list (RL) for the full citation in the reference list at the end of your paper

 Note that underline and italics are interchangeable back in the days of typewriters most people underlined, but now that we are all using computers with printers that can italicize, you should italicize instead

 Reference list should be alphebatized



Chicago/Turabian PR and RL example

Students who take computers and society are required to read Ethics for the Information Age

(Quinn 2006). For the second homework assignment, they must also read a paper by

Munro and Meeks (1997).

Reference List

Munro, Neil, and Brock N. Meeks. 1997. Debating (What

Once Was) the CDA. Communications of the ACM,

September, 25-28.

Quinn, Michael J. 2006. Ethics for the Information Age.

Boston: Pearson Addison Wesley.



Word processing tools

 Microsoft Word

• Word has built in support for footnotes and endnotes

• Use cross reference feature for numbered reference lists

• Third party bibliographic add-ons may be useful

 LaTeX

• Built in support for footnotes and endnotes

• Use Bibtex!


HW1 discussion

 http://cups.cs.cmu.edu/courses/compsocsp06/hw1.html

 Interactions with computers

• List

• Most significant changes if interactions took place without computers


Ethics Week 2 - January 24, 26 1

Ethics

Why study ethics?

Quinn 2, Scenario 4

Scenario 4

Subjective Relativism

Case for Subjective Relativism

Case Against Subjective Relativism

Cultural Relativism

Case for Cultural Relativism

Case Against Cultural Relativism

Divine Command Theory

Case for Divine Command Theory

Kantianism

Illustration of 1

Formulation

Case for Kantianism

Case Against Kantianism

Utilitarianism

Principle of Utility

(Greatest Happiness Principle)

Act Utilitarianism

Bentham: Weighing Pleasure/Pain

Highway Routing Scenario

Evaluation

Act utilitarian evaluation of spam

Case for Act Utilitarianism

Case Against Act Utilitarianism

Rule Utilitarianism

Anti-Worm Scenario

Evaluation using Rule Utilitarianism

Case for Rule Utilitarianism

Principle of Utility

(Greatest Happiness Principle)

Social Contract Theory

James Rachels’ Definition

Kinds of Rights

John Rawls’s Principles of Justice

Case for Social Contract Theory

Case Against Social Contract Theory

Objectivism vs. Relativism

Mail Abuse Prevention System

Was the creation of the RBL ethical?

Finding info with search engines

Advanced searching

Advanced Googling

CMU’s Library Resources

Applyyourself.com incident

Applyyourself.com continued

Class debate #1

Importance of Proper Referencing

Citing sources

Paraphrasing

Forms of citation

Citations in text

Footnotes

Creating a bibliography

Chicago/Turabian reference-list

Chicago/Turabian PR and RL example

Word processing tools

HW1 discussion

Related documents

Add this document to collection(s)

Add this document to saved

Suggest us how to improve StudyLib