Unmasking Your Software´s Ethical Risks

It´s difficult to fully address all our professional obligations as software engineers. Our training focuses on avoiding technical failures, but unfortunately our systems sometimes have unintended consequences. We need to develop products to avoid unintended negative impacts on society, people, and the environment. Professional responsibility requires that we identify the morally salient features of a situation. Some issues are relatively easy to spot; for example, we shouldn´t lie to clients, we shouldn´t bribe inspectors, and we should respect people´s privacy. But some ethical and social risks are harder to recognize. Even developers with the best intentions have walked into ethical traps. When we study technical problems, we apply the project´s constraints and priorities to find acceptable possible solutions and choose among them. Here are four suggestions for considering ethical constraints during that process, they are: look for human values in technical decision; identifying who will be affected; examining how stakeholders´ right and obligation will be affectedl; and reviewing relevant professional standards to help identify issues.