15SE204

Professional Ethics and Software Economics

Unit –II
PROFESSIONALISM

Offered to the
Department of Computer Science & Engineering
B.Tech- Final Year
Prepared by : M.Senthil Raja & R.Subash
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UNIT II - PROFESSIONALISM

1 Accreditation-certification-licensing

Professionalism and Codes of ethics-Importance of Codes, Abuse of Codes,

2 Limitations of Codes, Ethical Relativism, Justification of Codes

3 Professional conduct: Professional Rights – Employee Rights.

Professional Concerns: Introduction, Environnemental Ethics, Computer

4 Ethics

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Moral Reasoning
⮚ Ethical (or moral) dilemmas are situations in which moral reasons come into
conflict, or in which the applications of moral values are unclear, and it is not
immediately obvious what should be done.
⮚ Steps in Resolving Ethical Dilemmas
1. Moral clarity: Identify the relevant moral values
2. Conceptual clarity: Be clear about key concepts
3. Informed about the facts: Obtain relevant information
4. Informed about the options: Consider all (realistic) options
5. Well-reasoned: Make a reasonable decision
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Accreditation-Certification-Licensing

⮚ Accreditation, licensing, and certification may vary by location and by

the entity providing the credential.

⮚ To check with your local jurisdiction to determine what is required.

⮚ Accreditation, licensing, and certification are not interchangeable

terms. They each have a unique meaning and implication.

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https://www.coablog.org/home/
2017/4/6/help-what-are-the-
differences-between-
accreditation-licensing-and-
certification
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Accreditation

⮚ Accreditation is both a process and a credential

⮚ The accreditation process is voluntary

⮚ Only organizations, agencies, or programs can be accredited

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Accreditation: Case Study
⮚ If an organization is accredited this means they conducted a thorough self-
assessment and compared themselves to recognized standards of best practice.
Accreditation means that the organization, agency, or program was able to
demonstrate evidence of implementation to all of the relevant standards. It is a
rigorous process conducted by a third party organization.
⮚ The process is voluntary; however regulating bodies often require
accreditation in order to be licensed or certified. The accreditation process
typically repeats every 2-4 years, depending on the accrediting body. Normally,
individuals or private practices are not able to become accredited; however,
some exceptions may exist.
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Example of Accreditation
⮚ The Council on Accreditation (COA) develops standards and guidelines for the
accreditation of services delivered by behavioral health and social service
agencies. The accreditation process is designed to assist agencies in
implementing organizational structures (i.e. financial management), and
processes of care (i.e. Case-management) that will help them achieve better
results in all areas, and ultimately improve the well-being of their clients.
Organizations use their accredited status to demonstrate accountability to
clients, funders and donors.

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Certification
⮚ Certification demonstrates the capability to provide a specialized
service or particular program

⮚ Typically, certification is voluntary, but sometimes regulatory bodies

require certification in order to provide a specific service

⮚ Individuals,facilities,programs, organizations or agencies can obtain

certification.

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 Certification: Examples
⮚ In some professions, certification is a requirement for employment or practice. Doctors,

teachers, Certified Public Accountants (CPAs), and pilots are examples. Professional

certification shows employers and clients that you are committed to your profession and

are well-trained.

⮚ Certifications at the organizational level can definitely vary, including the terminology.

Some structured evidence-based models require certification. In these cases, the

certification can be called “authorized provider” or “approved site.”

Reference : https://www.coablog.org/home/2017/4/6/help-what-are-the-differences-between-accreditation-licensing-and-certification

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Licensing
⮚ Licensing exists primarily for public safety and the
well-being of consumers

⮚ Typically, licensing is involuntary

⮚ Individuals,facilities,programs,organizations or
agencies can be licensed

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Needs of License
⮚ Individuals are often licensed by their respective state to practice counseling, social
work, or nursing. Organizations may need to be licensed in order to provide a specific
service such as services for substance use disorders or residential treatment.
Practitioners and programs are required to be licensed or face penalties, including
suspension or closing of agency.
⮚ Examples:
⮚ Under New York State law, no organization may operate an adult group home without a
license.
⮚ In most states, including New York, individual social workers must have a clinical license
in order to provide psychotherapy without supervision.
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Codes of Ethics
⮚ Codes of ethics state the moral responsibilities of engineers as seen
by the profession and as represented by a professional society.
⮚ Codes of ethics play at least eight essential roles:
1. Serving and protecting the public
2. Providing guidance
3. Offering inspiration
4. Establishing shared standards
5. Supporting responsible professionals
6. Contributing to education
7. Deterring wrongdoing
8. Strengthening a profession’s image
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Abuse of Codes
⮚ When codes are not taken seriously within a profession, they amount to
a kind of window dressing that ultimately increases public cynicism
about the profession. Worse, codes occasionally.

⮚ Preoccupation with keeping a shiny public image may silence healthy

dialogue and criticism.

⮚ The best way to increase trust is by encouraging and helping engineers

to speak freely and responsibly about public safety and well-being

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Limitations of Codes
⮚ Codes are no substitute for individual responsibility in grappling with
concrete dilemmas. Most codes are restricted to general wording, and
hence inevitably contain substantial areas and Codes of Ethics of
vagueness.

⮚ Other uncertainties can arise when different entries in codes come into
conflict with each other. Usually codes provide little guidance as to
which entry should have priority in those cases.

⮚ limitation of codes connects with a wider issue about whether

professional groups or entire societies can create sets of standards for
themselves.

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Ethical Relativism
⮚ Ethical conventionalism, which says that moral values are entirely relative to and reducible
to customs—to the conventions, laws, and norms of the group to which one belongs.
⮚ What is right is simply what conforms to custom, and it is right solely because it conforms
to customs. We can never say an act is objectively right or obligatory without qualification,
but only that it is right for members of a given group because it is required by their customs.
⮚ Ethical relativism also seems to allow any group of individuals to form its own society with
its own conventions, perhaps ones that common sense tells us are immoral. Again, an
engineer might be a member of one or more professional societies, a weapons development
corporation and a pacifist religious tradition, and the customs of these groups in matters of
military work might point in different directions.

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Justification of Codes
⮚ When these values are specified as responsibilities, they constitute
role responsibilities - that is, obligations connected with a
particular social role as a professional.

⮚ These responsibilities are not self certifying, any more than other
customs are.

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Professional conduct
⮚ A code of professional conduct is a necessary component to any profession to
maintain standards for the individuals within that profession to adhere. It
brings about accountability, responsibility and trust to the individuals that the
profession serves.

⮚ The importance of professional conduct in all areas of the corporation must be

backed by support for professionals who work according to the guidelines
outlined in professional codes of ethics.

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 Case Study:Code of Ethics
⮚ The short version of the code summarizes aspirations at a high level of the
abstraction; the clauses that are included in the full version give examples
and details of how these aspirations change the way we act as software
engineering professionals. Without the aspirations, the details can become
legalistic and tedious; without the details, the aspirations can become high
sounding but empty; together, the aspirations and the details form a
cohesive code.
⮚ Software engineers shall commit themselves to making the analysis,
specification, design, development, testing and maintenance of software a
beneficial and respected profession. In accordance with their commitment
to the health, safety and welfare of the public, software engineers shall
adhere to the following Eight Principles:

Reference : https://www.coablog.org/home/2017/4/6/help-what-are-the-differences-between-accreditation-licensing-and-certification
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Eight Principles
1. PUBLIC – Software engineers shall act consistently with the public interest.

2. CLIENT AND EMPLOYER – Software engineers shall act in a manner that is in

the best interests of their client and employer consistent with the public
interest.

3. PRODUCT – Software engineers shall ensure that their products and related

modifications meet the highest professional standards possible.

4. JUDGMENT – Software engineers shall maintain integrity and independence in

their professional judgment.

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Eight Principles (Cont..)
5. MANAGEMENT – Software engineering managers and leaders shall subscribe
to and promote an ethical approach to the management of software
development and maintenance.
6. PROFESSION – Software engineers shall advance the integrity and reputation
of the profession consistent with the public interest.
7. COLLEAGUES – Software engineers shall be fair to and supportive of their
colleagues.
8. SELF – Software engineers shall participate in lifelong learning regarding the
practice of their profession and shall promote an ethical approach to the
practice of the profession.

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Professional Rights
⮚ Engineers have several types of moral rights, which fall into the
sometimes overlapping categories of human, employee,
contractual, and professional rights.

⮚ Three professional rights have special importance:

1. The basic right of professional conscience

2. The right of conscientious refusal

3. The right of professional recognition

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Professional Rights
⮚ Right of Professional Conscience.
The right of professional conscience is the moral right to exercise professional
judgment in pursuing professional responsibilities. Pursuing those
responsibilities involves exercising both technical judgment and reasoned
moral convictions.
⮚ Right of Conscientious Refusal.
The right of conscientious refusal is the right to refuse to engage in unethical
behavior and to refuse to do so solely because one views it as unethical.
⮚ Right of Recognition.
Engineers have a right of professional recognition for their work and
accomplishments. Part of this involves fair monetary remuneration, and part
nonmonetary forms of recognition.

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Employee Rights
⮚ Employee rights are any rights, moral or legal, that involve the status of
being an employee.
⮚ They overlap with some professional rights they also include institutional
rights created by organizational policies or employment agreements, such
as the right to be paid the salary specified in one’s contract.

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Employee Rights
⮚ Privacy Right. The right to pursue outside activities can be thought of as a
right to personal privacy in the sense that it means the right to have a private
life off the job.
⮚ Right to Equal Opportunity: Preventing Sexual Harassment.

Unwanted imposition of sexual requirements in the context of a relationship of

unequal power. It takes two main forms: quid pro quo and hostile work
environment.

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Employee Rights
⮚ Right to Equal Opportunity: Non discrimination.
Perhaps nothing is more demeaning than to be discounted because of one’s sex, race,
skin color, age, or political or religious outlook.

⮚ Right to Equal Opportunity: Affirmative Action.

Affirmative action, as the expression is usually defined, is giving a preference or
advantage to a member of a group that in the past was denied equal treatment, in
particular, women and minorities.

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Employee Rights : Case Study

When the Personal Goes Public

⮚ These examples highlight an important issue: When employees post discriminatory,
harassing or otherwise inappropriate work-related content — even if it's on their personal
social media accounts — employers may be held liable.
⮚ According to the U.S.Chamber Institute for Legal Reform, in cases where an employer is
aware of discriminatory harassment through social media use.
⮚ Event if that harassment takes place on personal social media accounts and outside of work
hours, the courts may view that social media as "extension of the workplace for which
employers bear responsibility and may bear liability for hostile work environments,
depending on the facts and evidence in a particular case."

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Employee Rights : Case Study
Labor Law Issues
⮚ Imagine you have an employee who writes what you feel is an offensive post on Face
book. Perhaps the employees is describing their job or workplace in a negative manner,
or even using expletives to discuss their job or their supervisor.
⮚ While an employer's first instinct may be to simply fire that employee, keep in mind
that, in certain circumstances, social media posts may be protected by the National
Labor Relations Act or NLRA. 
⮚ The NRLA may protect employees who engage in concerted activity with the goal of
improving workplace conditions; employers may be liable if their actions prohibit,
interfere or chill employees' concerted activities.
Source: www.connexpartners.com/blog/social-media-in-the-workplace

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Environmental Ethics
⮚ Environmental ethics is the part of environmental philosophy which considers
extending the traditional boundaries of ethics from solely including humans to
including the non-human world.
⮚ It exerts influence on a large range of disciplines including environmental law,
environmental sociology, ecotheology, ecological economics, ecology and
environmental geography.
⮚ It refers to

1. The study of moral issues concerning the environment

2. Moral perspectives on those issues.

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Environmental Ethics
⮚ The Invisible Hand and the Commons
⮚ Engineers: Sustainable Development

⮚ Corporations: Environmental Leadership

⮚ Government: Technology Assessment, Incentives, Taxes

⮚ Market Mechanisms: Internalizing Costs

⮚ Communities: Preventing Natural Disasters

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Environmental Ethics

⮚ Environmental Moral Frameworks

Individual engineers can make a difference. Although their actions are
limited - within corporations, they share responsibility with many others
-they are uniquely placed to act as agents of change, as responsible
experimenters.
⮚ Human-Centered Ethics
Human-centered, or anthropocentric, environmental ethics focuses
exclusively on the benefits of the natural environment to humans and the
threats to human beings presented by the destruction of nature.
⮚ Sentient-Centered Ethics
One version of nature-centered ethics recognizes all sentient animals as
having inherent worth. Sentient animals are those that feel pain and
pleasure and have desires.

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Environmental Ethics
⮚ Biocentric Ethics
A life-centered ethics regards all living organisms as having inherent worth.

⮚ Ecocentric Ethics
A frequent criticism of sentient-centered and biocentered ethics is that they
are too individualistic, in that they locate inherent worth in individual
organisms.

⮚ Religious Perspectives
Each world religion reflects the diversity of outlooks of its members, and the
same is true concerning environmental attitudes.

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Computer Ethics
⮚ Computers have become the technological backbone of society.

⮚ Their degree of complexity, range of applications, and sheer numbers continue to

increase.

⮚ Computer ethics has special importance for the new groups of professionals

emerging with computer technology, for example, designers of computers,

programmers, systems analysts, and operators.

⮚ Some of the issues in computer ethics concern shifts in power relationships

resulting from the new capacities of computers.

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Computer Ethics

⮚ The Internet and Free Speech

1. Obscene pornography is pornography that is immoral or illegal in many
countries, and is not protected in the United States by the First Amendment
rights to free speech.

2. Two types of control of pornography and hate speech have been attempted: top-
down control by governments, and bottom-up controls by individuals and
groups in the marketplace.

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 Computer Ethics
⮚ Power Relationships

Computers and the Internet dramatically increase the ability of centralized

bureaucracies to manage enormous quantities of data, involving multiple
variables, and at astonishing speed.

1. Job Elimination
2. Customer Relations

3. Biased Software

4. Stock Trading

5. Military Weapons
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Computer Ethics
⮚ Property: The most troublesome issues about property and computers fall
under two general headings.
❖ Embezzlement
❖ Data and Software
⮚ Privacy: Storage, retrieval, and transmission of information using computers as
data processors has revolutionized communication.
❖ Inappropriate Access
❖ Hackers
❖ Legal Responses
⮚ Additional Issues
❖ Computer Failures
❖ Computer Implementation
❖ Health Condition
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Examples of computer Ethics
⮚ Avoid from use the computer to harm other people such as create a bomb or
destroy other people works.

⮚ Users also should not use a computer for stealing activities like breaking in to a
bank or company.

⮚ Make sure a copy of software had been paid by the users before it is use. This is
because software is an intellectual product.

⮚ People must also not use other people's computer resources without
authorization because it can be declared as hacking.
References: http://www.cmpe.boun.edu.tr/~say/c150/intro/lit10.html

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Examples of computer Ethics
Behavioral biometrics :
⮚ Forget PINs and passwords. More institutions are now using hand-eye coordination, the
angle at which you hold your device, finger pressure, hand tremors, navigation patterns,
and other hand movements to judge whether you're really you when you log into an app.

⮚ We all want to be protected from hackers, but we might also want to think about how this
information is being collected, stored, and used.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jessicabaron/2018/12/27/tech-ethics-issues-we-should-all-be-thinking-about-in-2019/#1d09b3b34b21

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Thank you

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