Professionals are more than just just code factories, they have a moral and professional obligation to ensure they behave ethically at their workplace.
Knowing what is ethical and what is not allows engineers to communicate their concerns to key stakeholders when they are tasked with unethical decisions.
Imho, the most important part of the whole code is in the preamble:
> The Code is not an algorithm for solving ethical problems; rather it serves as a basis for ethical decision-making. When thinking through a particular issue, a computing professional may find that multiple principles should be taken into account, and that different principles will have different relevance to the issue. Questions related to these kinds of issues can best be answered by thoughtful consideration of the fundamental ethical principles, understanding that the public good is the paramount consideration. The entire computing profession benefits when the ethical decision-making process is accountable to and transparent to all stakeholders. Open discussions about ethical issues promote this accountability and transparency.
There's no algorithm for ethics. People will have to weigh different aspects and make decisions. Others can and will disagree with the decisions that have been made. So, we need to think about our decisions and be prepared to defend them. The exercise alone will to make better decisions than just "going with the flow" or "yolo" or "I did what was asked of me", even if in the end we do decide to do what was asked of us.
Musicians and artists in general had careers before artificial scarcity (read: Copyright/IP) existed, so that's false (the usual path was via a patron of arts). Now, we can discuss whether artificial scarcity allowed them to have better careers. Or careers which could be planned better than before. And whether that upside weighs higher than the downsides of copyright.
That’s true, actually, since this is in the context of recordings. Prior to sound recordings becoming available musicians were reliably in demand because anyone who wanted to listen to music had to have a human play it. Copying another person’s work required a person with considerable skill and either permission or willingness to use someone else’s work.
Recordings completely change that and would absolutely have been a disaster without some kind of IP laws because people would’ve been competing against a now unlimited supply of recordings. That doesn’t mean we have the perfect balance of rules but we need something.
I think this is true for the sciences as well but it is more evident in math. Mathematicians could hypothetically exist in a system where they are funded by artificial scarcity. I don't know how practical that is but they tend to exist in a more patronage-like system. Outside of a number of areas of math that have applications where people will pay for their services, mathematical research is primarily a "patronage" system, where society is willing to pay for pure mathematical research at universities. There are a lot of examples of this in society.
I like the concept in theory, but I don't think's workable in the real world, because for the tricky edge cases (which are exactly why you'd want a code of ethics to begin with), nobody agrees on what is and is not ethical.
Is working for a defense contractor to build smart bombs and killer drones unethical? A bunch of people think so, but there are also a bunch of people who think we need these things to defend ourselves and come to the aid of e.g. Ukraine. The same goes for facial recognition (does it destroy privacy or help catch criminals and bring them to justice?), cryptocurrency (does it enable crime and uselessly waste heaps of power or help people subvert government tyranny?), high-frequency trading (does it enrich Wall Street by picking the pockets of individual traders or provide liquidity to the market?), ad tracking (is it an invasion of privacy or is it enabling people to get useful services for free?), and so on for almost any application you can name which might theoretically be prevented by a code of ethics.
Ethics are way too individual for this approach to be at all useful. A professional code of ethics either has to be so vague that anyone can interpret it however they want, or so specific that half the people who would be covered will disagree and ignore it.
A lot of people out there are doing things that they know are wrong but think that because they have a boss they no longer own the responsibility of behaving ethically. Check out all the testimony in the FTX trial for examples of this.
Since you've brought up drones and smart bombs: What constitutes a war crime is a highly ethical and contentious issue with many people disagreeing on the exact scope. Yet, we've managed to write laws about it and get court decisions. Even if we want to, some things in life cannot be neatly packed into correct/incorrect categories. And the process alone of discussing whether smart bombs and killer drones should be build is helpful in shaping decisions on how exactly they will be build or not.
A code of ethics is just a starting point for asking the right questions. It's not supposed to provide answers.
You mentioned some controversial technologies that have potential both for good and for ill. When you work on technologies like that, there is always a risk that your contribution to the society will be net negative. That the world would have been a better place without you. Is that a legacy you want?
Some of those technologies are a necessary evil. There will always be weapons of war, and there will always be people developing them. If you choose to make a career in such technologies, you should keep asking yourself the right questions. What are the specific choices your company is making, and are they making the technology better or worse for the society? Which choices are you personally advocating for? What is the actual impact of the technology you are developing in the field? Do you have faith in the leadership of the company and in the choices they are making? Should you continue at your job or quit?
You have some rights as a citizen of a free country. Those rights are balanced by responsibilities, because the government ultimately receives its powers from citizens like you. As a professional, your choices likely have more impact on the society than the average citizen. You should therefore take your responsibilities more seriously as well.
It isn't rhetoric, and I frankly don't care what some troll on the Internet thinks of my "quality." Professional ethics is something I deal with all the time. This ain't it.
The problem, as I see it, is with nebulous concepts such as "the public". Who is "the public" and how does one determine what they want? What happens when "the public" is divided on an issue?
In the Hippocratic Oath, by contrast, the physician and the patient are identifiable people.
I realize there's always someone who self-appoints themself to "speak for" "the public", but that's not actually helpful here.
In reality, "the public" is generally divided on any issue. Not always 50-50, but to a significant degree.
If you tell me I have to work in the interests of some poorly-defined "public" I'm going to ask you which "public", and who appointed you to speak for them.
This is splitting hairs and pretends like the meaning isn't well-defined, when it clearly is.
Literally every work I've ever read in political philosophy regards "the public" to be the general population or the citizens of a country.
By this rationale, things society has benefited immensely from, like "public health" are so arbitrarily defined that it cannot make any traction, which is counterfactual to reality. These efforts are some of the crowning achievements of human progress, and it's dissenters deserve intense derision if not outright contempt.
It also ignores other facts. For example, the USPTO requires patent lawyers to be educated at accredited universities. For professionals coming from computer science, virtually every student going to an ABET accredited university is taught the ACM's code of ethics.
> This is splitting hairs and pretends like the meaning isn't well-defined, when it clearly is.
No, it absolutely is not.
> Literally every work I've ever read in political philosophy regards "the public" to be the general population or the citizens of a country.
Then every work you've ever read in political philosophy is overly simplistic.
Pick any contentious political issue (abortion, gun control, socialized medicine, the list goes on and on). There are substantial (not fringe, substantial) portions of the populace on both sides (1) of those issues.
Which side is "the public"? Generally, it's whichever side the person who's appointed himself to "speak for the public" prefers.
(1) In actuality, pretending that there are only two sides itself is an oversimplification, of course.
> USPTO requires patent lawyers to be educated at accredited universities
And? Patent lawyers are ethically required to represent their clients (i.e., identifiable people), not "the public".
The word public derives from the Latin word publicus, which means the people, state, or community. It's also legally defined as such. [1][2]
Further, it's limiting to say there's only two sides to an issue, when in truth there's typically multiple dimensions and a gradient of positions along each of those dimensions.
I would love to continue, but it seems like you're only interested in discussing a strawman of the ACM's code of ethics. I implore you to apply the principle of charity rather than interpret the code of ethics in the worst possible light imaginable.
Your point is 100% correct: I think immediately of how effective altruism turned into a contest of how many billions of lives you could save a century from now.
I can't go as far as saying "public good as the primary concern is unethical", because there's so many ways to twist abstract words.
I think immediately of someone saying the same thing about the Hippocratic Oath, or the Order of The Engineer, and they'd be just as correct. But the correctness is surface level: it is _rational_, but it is not practical.
You bring up the Hippocratic Oath, so let's use doctors as an example. If the "public good" takes precedence over the individual patient, then any patient with a communicable disease with a fatality rate should be euthanized. Do you think that's ethical?
Elevating public good as the primary concern necessarily means pure utilitarianism. There isn't a society on earth today that accepts pure utilitarianism as a valid ethical system.
I see, thank you, that's also a really good explanation of why my mind must have jumped to effective altruism, and the 238 billion lives saved 347 years if you give me $10 for lunch.
I guess with the Hippocratic oath, I'm thinking a simile would be: "well, if first do no harm takes precedence literally 100% of the time, that could lead to 0 treatment because there's always a potential for harm"
I like it though, its simple and direct - do not harm your patient.
I like the software engineering guides that say things like "do no harm to your User" which is way less nebulous than having to consider all of society, while also stopping most of what I consider to be pretty severe ethical violations being done by big tech and the software engineers that work there
But that's not what the code does. There's a rule that says "avoid harm", which directly contradicts (imho) euthanizing someone without a very good reason (and no, I don't agree that "public good" is one). More importantly, there exists neither a rule nor a specific definition what public good means. You've taken your personal interpretation of the words from the preamble, ran with it and from that inferred that the code is unethical.
The reason would be to avoid that person spreading the fatal disease, thereby avoiding M deaths at the cost of 1 death. Killing the patient avoids a greater harm than letting them walk out of the healthcare facility. This isn't a personal interpretation, it's raw math, and it occurs in every society where the "public good" outweighs individual rights.
I think there are sufficient examples below, but just to be perfectly clear: the "public good" is a nebulous concept, which can either mean objectively assessed public good (utilitarianism) or subjectively assessed public good (personal policy preferences). The latter is particularly likely in light of the "ethics aren't algorithmic" cop-out.
Neither utilitarianism nor your own personal policy preferences should ever take precedence over your actual ethical obligations to your employers, your clients, and your users.
If at any point they do, then you have breached an ethical duty and possibly committed fraud.
This is all very commendable, skimming through it I couldn't find one point with which to disagree. But ... where do I get this sense of naïveté?
I tried to work that out but it became too complex, and overshadowed the positivenes of bringing ethics to the forefront, where it seldom is.
Suffice to say that ethical principles in the chaos of reality where wolf eats wolf are extremely difficult to uphold. Sometimes they even become a veil over an ugly underbelly. Not always, but it happens sufficiently often for warning bells to go off when someone cites their lofty ethics.
I wasn't prescribing anything, I was just trying to chart what feelings a code of conduct like this evokes in me, and I may be more sensitive to hypocrisy than average.
But I see no harm for people with a strong sense of ethics to expect some scrutiny of where they reside if they feel compelled to preach their moral code. That doesn't mean they shouldn't do it. But if, for example, they live in a glass house then it's only in their own interest that they hold off on throwing any stones until they have moved to another, less fragile place.
I don’t think it’s wrong to say that something is wrong even if you yourself are guilty of that thing.
A smoker who tells other people to not smoke is not necessarily being disingenuous. They might not be able to quit smoking, but they can also sincerely believe that smoking is a bad habit at the same time.
Agree, maybe not disingenuous, but definitely hypocritical. And hypocrisy have edge cases that may not be so bad, like the one you cited. But all in all, hypocrisy stinks.
People that preach honesty and reliability (cause you know, that sounds reliable) but turn turn out to be anything but will lose esteem, taint anything and anyone they have been in contact with, and once again prove the need for reasonable suspicion and double checks when it comes to people who cite their lofty ethics -it might simply be a vehicle for unethical behavior.
At my university (RIT) they made us all read this and do a report on its importance in the seminar class before we can go on internships. It's all well and good but I don't think it has any teeth without a culture to support its enforcement or a licensure process to require it.
In the subject of ethics, it driving me nuts that the ACM has a cookie banner including (opt-in) check marks for marketing and statistics. The should read their own ethics statement about user privacy.
54 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadKnowing what is ethical and what is not allows engineers to communicate their concerns to key stakeholders when they are tasked with unethical decisions.
Coincidentally, SQLite went with The Rules of St. Benedict for their code of ethics:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31886687
> The Code is not an algorithm for solving ethical problems; rather it serves as a basis for ethical decision-making. When thinking through a particular issue, a computing professional may find that multiple principles should be taken into account, and that different principles will have different relevance to the issue. Questions related to these kinds of issues can best be answered by thoughtful consideration of the fundamental ethical principles, understanding that the public good is the paramount consideration. The entire computing profession benefits when the ethical decision-making process is accountable to and transparent to all stakeholders. Open discussions about ethical issues promote this accountability and transparency.
There's no algorithm for ethics. People will have to weigh different aspects and make decisions. Others can and will disagree with the decisions that have been made. So, we need to think about our decisions and be prepared to defend them. The exercise alone will to make better decisions than just "going with the flow" or "yolo" or "I did what was asked of me", even if in the end we do decide to do what was asked of us.
Software Engineering Code (of Ethics) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32783007 - Sept 2022 (52 comments)
Does ACM's code of ethics change ethical decision making in software dev? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30528782 - March 2022 (1 comment)
ACM, Ethics, and Corporate Behavior - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30464247 - Feb 2022 (33 comments)
ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24533181 - Sept 2020 (1 comment)
ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13176325 - Dec 2016 (2 comments)
Software Engineering Code of Ethics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6827305 - Dec 2013 (35 comments)
ACM Code of Ethics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1949326 - Nov 2010 (6 comments)
There are 3 kinds of actions:
Good actions increase the public good. Helping a child is an example of this.
Neutral actions do not change the public good. Frivolously blowing money you earned is an example of this.
Negative actions decrease the public good. Enforcing artificial scarcity is an example of this.
Recordings completely change that and would absolutely have been a disaster without some kind of IP laws because people would’ve been competing against a now unlimited supply of recordings. That doesn’t mean we have the perfect balance of rules but we need something.
The history of the USA would be very, very different without a few rich manipulators controlling our culture.
Is working for a defense contractor to build smart bombs and killer drones unethical? A bunch of people think so, but there are also a bunch of people who think we need these things to defend ourselves and come to the aid of e.g. Ukraine. The same goes for facial recognition (does it destroy privacy or help catch criminals and bring them to justice?), cryptocurrency (does it enable crime and uselessly waste heaps of power or help people subvert government tyranny?), high-frequency trading (does it enrich Wall Street by picking the pockets of individual traders or provide liquidity to the market?), ad tracking (is it an invasion of privacy or is it enabling people to get useful services for free?), and so on for almost any application you can name which might theoretically be prevented by a code of ethics.
Ethics are way too individual for this approach to be at all useful. A professional code of ethics either has to be so vague that anyone can interpret it however they want, or so specific that half the people who would be covered will disagree and ignore it.
A lot of people out there are doing things that they know are wrong but think that because they have a boss they no longer own the responsibility of behaving ethically. Check out all the testimony in the FTX trial for examples of this.
You mentioned some controversial technologies that have potential both for good and for ill. When you work on technologies like that, there is always a risk that your contribution to the society will be net negative. That the world would have been a better place without you. Is that a legacy you want?
Some of those technologies are a necessary evil. There will always be weapons of war, and there will always be people developing them. If you choose to make a career in such technologies, you should keep asking yourself the right questions. What are the specific choices your company is making, and are they making the technology better or worse for the society? Which choices are you personally advocating for? What is the actual impact of the technology you are developing in the field? Do you have faith in the leadership of the company and in the choices they are making? Should you continue at your job or quit?
You have some rights as a citizen of a free country. Those rights are balanced by responsibilities, because the government ultimately receives its powers from citizens like you. As a professional, your choices likely have more impact on the society than the average citizen. You should therefore take your responsibilities more seriously as well.
In many cases, this code of ethics is unethical, such as elevating "public good" as the "primary" concern.
In the Hippocratic Oath, by contrast, the physician and the patient are identifiable people.
I realize there's always someone who self-appoints themself to "speak for" "the public", but that's not actually helpful here.
In reality, "the public" is generally divided on any issue. Not always 50-50, but to a significant degree.
If you tell me I have to work in the interests of some poorly-defined "public" I'm going to ask you which "public", and who appointed you to speak for them.
Literally every work I've ever read in political philosophy regards "the public" to be the general population or the citizens of a country.
By this rationale, things society has benefited immensely from, like "public health" are so arbitrarily defined that it cannot make any traction, which is counterfactual to reality. These efforts are some of the crowning achievements of human progress, and it's dissenters deserve intense derision if not outright contempt.
It also ignores other facts. For example, the USPTO requires patent lawyers to be educated at accredited universities. For professionals coming from computer science, virtually every student going to an ABET accredited university is taught the ACM's code of ethics.
No, it absolutely is not.
> Literally every work I've ever read in political philosophy regards "the public" to be the general population or the citizens of a country.
Then every work you've ever read in political philosophy is overly simplistic.
Pick any contentious political issue (abortion, gun control, socialized medicine, the list goes on and on). There are substantial (not fringe, substantial) portions of the populace on both sides (1) of those issues.
Which side is "the public"? Generally, it's whichever side the person who's appointed himself to "speak for the public" prefers.
(1) In actuality, pretending that there are only two sides itself is an oversimplification, of course.
> USPTO requires patent lawyers to be educated at accredited universities
And? Patent lawyers are ethically required to represent their clients (i.e., identifiable people), not "the public".
Further, it's limiting to say there's only two sides to an issue, when in truth there's typically multiple dimensions and a gradient of positions along each of those dimensions.
I would love to continue, but it seems like you're only interested in discussing a strawman of the ACM's code of ethics. I implore you to apply the principle of charity rather than interpret the code of ethics in the worst possible light imaginable.
1: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/public
2: https://thelawdictionary.org/public/
I can't go as far as saying "public good as the primary concern is unethical", because there's so many ways to twist abstract words.
I think immediately of someone saying the same thing about the Hippocratic Oath, or the Order of The Engineer, and they'd be just as correct. But the correctness is surface level: it is _rational_, but it is not practical.
Elevating public good as the primary concern necessarily means pure utilitarianism. There isn't a society on earth today that accepts pure utilitarianism as a valid ethical system.
And in countries that trend closer to pure utilitarianism, public policy is repugnant: https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-venezuela...
I guess with the Hippocratic oath, I'm thinking a simile would be: "well, if first do no harm takes precedence literally 100% of the time, that could lead to 0 treatment because there's always a potential for harm"
I like the software engineering guides that say things like "do no harm to your User" which is way less nebulous than having to consider all of society, while also stopping most of what I consider to be pretty severe ethical violations being done by big tech and the software engineers that work there
Neither utilitarianism nor your own personal policy preferences should ever take precedence over your actual ethical obligations to your employers, your clients, and your users.
If at any point they do, then you have breached an ethical duty and possibly committed fraud.
Too many jaded technologists throw their hands up and just ignore ethics. At least ACM are _doing something_ about it.
Sometimes leaving things the hell alone is the best policy.
That is why it can make sense for medicine and law but makes absolutely no sense for programmers since there is basically no barrier to entry.
That being said, I also wish society was better at punishing ethical lapses.
I tried to work that out but it became too complex, and overshadowed the positivenes of bringing ethics to the forefront, where it seldom is.
Suffice to say that ethical principles in the chaos of reality where wolf eats wolf are extremely difficult to uphold. Sometimes they even become a veil over an ugly underbelly. Not always, but it happens sufficiently often for warning bells to go off when someone cites their lofty ethics.
I wasn't prescribing anything, I was just trying to chart what feelings a code of conduct like this evokes in me, and I may be more sensitive to hypocrisy than average.
But I see no harm for people with a strong sense of ethics to expect some scrutiny of where they reside if they feel compelled to preach their moral code. That doesn't mean they shouldn't do it. But if, for example, they live in a glass house then it's only in their own interest that they hold off on throwing any stones until they have moved to another, less fragile place.
A smoker who tells other people to not smoke is not necessarily being disingenuous. They might not be able to quit smoking, but they can also sincerely believe that smoking is a bad habit at the same time.
People that preach honesty and reliability (cause you know, that sounds reliable) but turn turn out to be anything but will lose esteem, taint anything and anyone they have been in contact with, and once again prove the need for reasonable suspicion and double checks when it comes to people who cite their lofty ethics -it might simply be a vehicle for unethical behavior.
“If we build that we’ll need an insurance waiver.”
“We won’t be able to get cyber insurance if we do that.”
Etc.