Enhancing Ethical Decision Support Methods: Clarifying the Solution Space with Line Drawing D. Gotterbarn Software Engineering Ethics Research Institute East Tennessee State University Box 70711 Johnson City, Tennessee 37614 USA
[email protected] +1 423 439 6849
Abstract Ethical decision support procedures have an underlying difficulty in that they do not clearly distinguish the varying impacts of the constituent features of the examined ethical situation. The failure to recognize these features and their varying impacts leads to two critical problems; the risk of removing positive ethical elements as well as negative ones when mitigating the ethical problem, and missing some viable alternative actions. A modified version of line drawing is presented as a way to address these two problems when it is used as an adjunct to already established decision techniques. Keywords: Ethical decision making, Line-Drawing, Computer ethics, risk mitigation 1. INTRODUCTION It is well know that rapidly changing computer technology generates significant ethical dilemma which require careful analysis. The goal of such analyses may be reactivedetermining the moral quality of an action- or proactive- determining a course of action. There are several approaches and interpretations of what constitutes ethical analysis M.J. van den Hoven talks of the goal of ethical analysis as achieving a cognitive state of wide reflective equilibrium (CEPE 1997) and others talk about the goal of ethical analysis as successfully completing a procedure yielding ethical decisions. Unfortunately sometimes the guidance for making ethical decisions and judgments is rather sparse. Consider for example the direction offered by (Whitbeck 1998) who talks about making and assessing ethical judgement by reviewing decisions made by various legal bodies but not to rely on those standards because of “real uncertainties. Many find this kind of insight into ethical judgment making unhelpful. Authors like Whitbeck offer collections of cases and point the reader to instances of some moral theory claimed to be the basis for the judgment or a moral theory buried in the judgment. These approaches are limited in that they do not show any of the variety of ways to make moral decisions. 2. PROCEDURES FOR MAKING ETHICAL DECISIONS There are numerous procedural approaches to making ethical decisions. Two significant types of approaches are heuristic based approaches and algorithmic based approaches. For example a heuristic approach is taken by (Bynum and Rogerson 2004) Chapter 3 “Ethical Decision Making “. It starts from a presupposition of a set of core values and takes an approach modeled on virtue ethics giving a sequence of steps calling for individual judgment based on ethical intuition. The (Collins and Miller, 1992)
SIGCAS Computers and Society, Volume 37, No. 2, November 2007
53
“Paramedic Method”, on the other hand, is an algorithmic approach which is keyed to a rights-obligations view of ethics. The method prescribes a series of steps identifying stakeholders and their mutual obligations and rights. The analyst then follows a series of steps to identify the best alternative action in the situation under consideration. Specific weaknesses in each of these methods have been addressed in (Gotterbarn 2005). There is however an underlying difficulty common to both methods. Both of these methods help to identify and integrate several elements of the ethical situation but they optimistically presume that the decision makers have a basic understanding and consensus about the nature of the ethical elements of the situation under consideration and understand the relative impacts of each of these elements. As we shall see this assumption does not apply in many complex cases, especially in those related to computer ethics. This problem of overlooking or missing the impact of the constitutive elements of an ethical situation is also present in the SoDIS process is also exemplified in an ethical decision support process to help identify potential ethical issues in the design and development of software. 3. PROBLEMS WITH DECISION METHODS There are two primary problems with these types of approach. First, many of the ethical questions that arise in computer ethics vary in significant ways from more traditional ethical concerns and correct results from applying these methods depends on a common interpretation of the nature of the problem. Second, following on the first, a limited or narrow understanding of the nature of the problem contributes to a blurring of the potential ethical tradeoffs associated with a particular decision. Many of the tradeoffs are not clear when applying these methods to a complex decision. After describing this problem as it is evidenced in the Software Development Impact Statement process, a technique for reducing this problem is described and evaluated. 3.1 Weaknesses with Software Development Impact Statement Analysis (Gotterbarn and Rogerson 2005a) defined the Software Development Impact Statement process to help identify and mitigate the negative ethical and social impacts of software. The procedure is based in part of research which shows that software projects fail to consider all relevant stakeholders and that software risk analysis does not include a consideration of the social and ethical impacts of the software. This procedural approach to ethical analysis has four basic steps: (1) the identification of the immediate and extended stakeholders in a software project, (2) the identification of the tasks in a project, (3) for every task, the identification and recording of potential ethical issues violated by the completion of that task for each stakeholder , and (4) the recording of the details and solutions of significant ethical issues which may be related to individual tasks and an examination of whether the current task needs to be modified or a new task created in order to address the identified concern. (Gotterbarn and Rogerson 2005a) use a method to help identify stakeholders based on Gert's moral rules (Gert 1988). The procedure includes a set of structured questions which employs imperatives from computer codes of ethics and codes of practice to relate the task and stakeholder. Many of the computing codes have similar imperatives. These have been reduced and categorized under general principles in the SoDIS process.
SIGCAS Computers and Society, Volume 37, No. 2, November 2007
54
Tests of the SoDIS procedure in industry and academe yielded bimodal results in the discovery of potential ethical risks and the identification of ways to mitigate these risks. Some of the problems leading to poor ethical risk analysis were identified. The first problem was that SoDIS analysts who are also computer technicians or technical specialist in other areas found it difficult to identify ethical concerns that were not immediately tied to the technical domain. This difficulty was faced in a SoDIS analysis of the U.K. initial proposal for electronic voting. By abstracting issues from numerous low level technical concerns analysts were able to identify a broader range of ethical concerns with the initial proposal as well as identify their potential solutions. These potential solutions later became the basis for a series of stipulations by the Office of the deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) for prospective vendors to meet when formulating the design and development of the system. (Clear, Gotterbarn, Kwan) Second, even after concerns about negative impacts were correctly identified, some analysts 1) had problems identifying ethical risk mitigation strategies or failed to see that some strategies they proposed might resolve the identified concern but their solution strategy would also 2) generate new problem. There was the further problem that there may have been alternative solutions which produced a 3) better result than the solution chosen by the SoDIS analyst. 3.2 The common problem By focusing on broad ethical issues significant constituent elements of the ethical issue are often overlooked. The ethical character of a situation may be changed by addressing a single element. The identification of an ethical problem often produces a lot of heat with very little light. This sometimes leads to decisions which remove both the positive ethical values and negative ethical values in a situation. The ethical heat sometimes blinds us to more narrow alternatives to solving ethical problems Many ethical decision guidelines focus on the situation as a whole and ask about ways to respond to the situation without identifying the elements that make up the situation and which of those elements contribute negatively and positively to the situation. The failure to identify how discrete parts contribute to the situation leads to the danger that any decision may remove positive elements and increase the impact of negative elements. For example, both the Bynum and the Collins methods ask the analyst to consider alternative actions and the consequences of those actions, but they do not provide a means to identify the significant elements in these alternative actions, an identification of which is needed to reasonably predict the consequences of the alternative actions. In complex situations there are no simple solutions but each varied element in the alternative can have multiple values; each one of which makes a significantly different solution. 4. ONE POSSIBLE SOLUTION - LINE DRAWING Even when all of the factual and conceptual issues are settled, there may be uncertainty about what ought to be done or decided. In this case the uncertainty of navigating the solution space generates moral problems. Line drawing, a method developed by (Harris 2000), is a procedural technique that helps to clarify the solution space.
SIGCAS Computers and Society, Volume 37, No. 2, November 2007
55
The concept of line drawing has its roots in casuistic techniques used to settle conceptual ethical disputes and in applied case analysis techniques. Line drawing was given new life in the Engineering Ethics textbook by Harris, Pritchard and Rabins 1997. In successive editions of the text the description of the approach has been modified to its current versions in (Harris, et al 2005) 4.1 Simple Line drawing At its most abstract level, line drawing can be described as a process to determine where a particular test case falls on a continuum between and ethical action and an unethical action. Consider a case where a student is accused of plagiarizing their term paper. The verdict in an honors court is stated unambiguously- Guilty of Plagiarism or Not Guilty of Plagiarism. The decision could be diagramed by drawing a line between the two decisions and indicating what the decision was (Figure 1). Not Guilty--▼-----------------------------------------------------------------------Guilty. Figure 1- result of a decision In reality the discussion of guilt of innocence included many feature which belong to a paradigm case of plagiarism, such as was there a complete absence of citation, a vague citation at the end of the paper, a citation which did not conform to standards, or a fully cited reference. Was there a standard of formal citations for this assignment or was this just to be an informal assignment? Did the student intentionally fail to make a citation, etc? The line drawing method models these constituent features under a positive paradigm of the case which is clearly acceptable and a negative paradigm of the case which is clearly unacceptable. A line is draw between each of these features and the features of the test case are placed on the continuums for each feature. Suppose our student had citations at the end of paragraphs which contained sporadic direct quotation from the work cited at the end of the paragraph. Further suppose that the instructor had asked for an informal outline of what they were going to address in their formal paper. The line drawing method would list feature of a paradigm case of Plagiarism and a paradigm of non plagiarism. Then the analyst would locate the test case on the continuum for each of these (Figure 2). Positive Paradigm Negative Paradigm Not Plagiarism Plagiarism ______________________________Test Case_________________________________ Positive feature 1 Negative Feature 1 Full Formal citation ------------------------------------------▼---------------No citations Positive feature 2 Negative Feature 2 No deception intended-----▼--------------------------------------------------Deceitful intent Figure 2 Plagiarism Line Drawing Feature one is placed because there was some citation and feature two is located so far to the left because although there was not formal citation there was citations in every paragraph of the work referenced in that paragraph. If both features were all the way to
SIGCAS Computers and Society, Volume 37, No. 2, November 2007
56
the right then the judgement would be that plagiarism was committed. The location of the features in this case more clearly express the uncertainty involved than does a simple announcement of the decision. It also might lead to a policy statement for the class about when formal citation is required. The method helps to layout the elements involved in the judgment to resolve the uncertainty. 4.2 Going Naked Line drawing helps us decide where a particular case falls It also has a significant function in helping us recognize where the primary problems are in a particular test case and develop alternatives to resolve or mitigate the ethical problems in the test case. Consider a simple example used by Quinn to illustrate line drawing. [Quinn, 2006] presents a highly charged issue related to the tension between values of privacy and security. “To reduce the chance of a passenger sneaking a weapon onto a commercial flight, an airport begins using a new x-ray machine to screen a randomly chosen subset of the ticketed passengers. The x-rays penetrate the clothing but bounce off the skin, producing an explicit black and white image of each passenger’s nude body. With clothing rendered invisible, the human operators of these machines can easily spot concealed objects. Some passengers complain that use of these machines violates their privacy rights. Is the airport use of this device unethical?” This is a case when initially presented generates a lot of heat and very little light. In an anti-terrorism environment the responses this question draws a very visceral reaction, in part determined by the responder’s commitment to deontological or consequential principles. Typical reactions to this example include: Deontological This is unethical because it violates the principle of privacy. This is ethical. It is the only Patriotic (loyalty) thing to do. Consequential Accept it and the government will do whatever they want (slippery slope) Accept it or else terrorists will repeat the events of September 11th (hasty generalization). Sometimes they turn into highly politicized assertions. “You need to give up rights to protect security”, “Live FREE or Die” “Revealing my naked body is against my religion” or “You just say this because you are a member of that other morally bankrupt political party“. Notice how these responses look at the whole event and do not pay any attention to the elements which compose this situation. They fail to look at the causes for the ethical tension and offer opinion as a response. A structured approach is needed to this problem. 4.2.1. Naked Line Drawing A simple way to create the paradigms is to focus on one paradigm and list the elements which make the case positive. Once these have been listed their negation constitutes the other paradigm. These positive negative element pairs are placed on opposite ends of a line representing the continuum for the positive to the negative case. Figure 3 represents Quinn’s line drawing analysis of the airport security case.
SIGCAS Computers and Society, Volume 37, No. 2, November 2007
57
Negative Paradigm Positive Paradigm Privacy violated Privacy honored 1 - Collect w/o knowledge of the individual No notification ------------------------------------------------▼-Agency informs that it plans to collect 2 - Does not consent to provide the information Involuntary -------▼----------------------------------------------Voluntarily supply info 3 - Agency collects information for its own benefit Private benefit--------------------------------------------------▼-Benefit individual or community 4 - Can link info to the individual providing it Person identifiable ----▼------------------------------------------Supplied anonymously 5 - Info is a permanent part of the person’s profileGenetic info----------------------------------------------------▼--Not permanent part of identity Figure 3 Airport Security [Quinn p.523] Quinn says that from the placement of the marks it is clear that the airport screening case is an example of a violation of privacy. The analyst can then look at the various elements and determines how to change the situation to get a significant element to move toward the positive paradigm side. In this instance Quinn suggests moving item 2 by offering passengers the option of using the machine or having a standard pat-down for security. This moves the analysis of line 2 to the privacy is honored side. The analyst can quickly see which elements need to be addressed to resolve the situation. The method seems to help reduce misdirected solutions which focus on prominent issues. 5. REQUIRED MODIFICATIONS OF LINE DRAWING On the surface it looks like this method will function as a useful adjunct to algorithmic and heuristic decision procedures by helping to isolate critical features of the test case and enabling the identification of alternatives to be considered. 5.1 Unqualified Claims of Virtues of Line Drawing Line drawing provides a visual map of the degree of impact of individual factors contribute to an ethical situation. Line drawing helps us understand the underlying elements of the ethical problem. When the alternatives are then considered in a heuristic or algorithmic analysis those alternatives can be further examined to determine how they alter the contributing factors identified in line drawing. The goal in this further analysis is not to remove factors which positively contribute to the situation. Line drawing can also be used as a kind of ethics audit, such as the Software Development Impact Statement process, to evaluate in what ways particular actions are consistent with ethical values and it provides direction on how to redirect that action if it violates some ethical standard.
SIGCAS Computers and Society, Volume 37, No. 2, November 2007
58
5.2 Modifications Required: start from culled paradigms and rank impacts of test case features (Harris, et al 2005) recognize that the choice of exactly where to draw the line is subjective. The initial description of line drawing makes it appear that deciding about the test case is simple. At the end of the airport security case (Quinn 2006) says “we must determine whether the test case being studied is more similar to the negative paradigm case or the positive paradigm case. But the guidance stops here. We could simply look at the Figure 3 with many negative and few positive features would fall toward the negative side of the continuum and so it is judged a violation of privacy. But simply looking at the number of elements proximate to one side or the other is misleading because some elements may be irrelevant and others may carry more moral weight than others. To see these two problems we consider another case. 5.2.1 Cheating on an examination I have used this case as an exercise in line drawing. Students were asked to assume no facts beyond what are given in the case description. “Pat got hold of the questions that were going to be on the exam before taking the examination. Pat then asked others about the answers and looked up the answers his friends did not know. Pat took the examination. After achieving the highest grade on the examination he was accused of cheating based on his actions before the examination.” We can use the line drawing method to determine if this is a case of cheating on an examination. Typical student responses decided that this was a case of cheating. They included in their paradigm of cheating; asking other students about answers, knowing the questions ahead of time, getting the highest score. These features were all marked close to the cheating paradigm. The common judgment was that this was a case of cheating. One of the problems is that they included in the paradigm features that did not fit the essence of the issue. For example ‘achieving the highest grade’ and ‘looking up answers ahead of time’ were included in the cheating paradigm. It is assumed that all of the critical elements have been identified. If there are irrelevant factors included in the diagram this will skew the results. The same is true is critical elements are missed. [Keefer 2001] has shown that the elements analysts suggest are related to their background. This provides some evidence for arguing that line drawing is better with multiple participants doing the analysis. The factors have to be ‘morally relevant facts’. Part of the problem that the students had is that they started the analysis from the description, the ‘facts’, of the story rather than identifying the morally relevant features of the appropriate paradigm. Included features should be ones whose presence or absence makes a difference to your decision? This exercise was given in a class where students were provided with a list study questions for each topic and the answers to the study questions were in the textbook and discussed in class. The examination questions were a subset of the list of study questions. The data in the story is shown in Figure 4 and tends to indicate that there was no cheating but merely effective studying.
SIGCAS Computers and Society, Volume 37, No. 2, November 2007
59
Cheating Not Cheating 1 - Motive unfair advantage-----------------------▼- all have equal opportunity 2 - Access to question rules violate rules------------------------------▼-follow rules 3 - Access to answers rules violate rules------------------------------▼-follow rules 4 - Openness keep secret ------------------------------▼-done openly Figure 4 - Cheating Line Drawing 5.2.2 Relevance and Weight Sometimes all of the relevant factors are not included. Let us return to the cheating case and add a single detail- “The answers were brought into class and used against the rules during the examination”. This would add a fifth feature to our analysis (Figure 5). Cheating Not Cheating unfair advantage-----------------------▼- all have equal opportunity 2 - Access to question rules violate rules------------------------------▼-follow rules 3 - Access to answers rules violate rules------------------------------▼-follow rules 4 - Openness keep secret ------------------------------▼-done openly 5 - Recording responses violate rules-▼----------------------------follow rules 1 - Motive
Figure 5 - Cheating Line Drawing with rule violation If all factors have equal moral weight we would say this is still a case of not cheating. There is a problem with the assumption that all factors included have equal moral impact. Moving one element all of the way from one side to the other side may have less moral impact then moving a different factor a short distance toward the other side. (Harris et al 2005) does encourage indicating which features are important by circling the mark. But it does not provide a way of ranking the impact of a feature. Some features may carry significantly more weight than others; feature 5 is the deal breaker- even if all other items on the cheating example were on the left, because ‘surreptitious use of the answers during the examination’ was true we would call this cheating. To address this concern in the development of software to facilitate line drawing we had to build in a method of allowing the analyst to judge the relevant impact of each factor. The software assigned numerical values and used these different weights to calculate which paradigm the test case was closest to based on these figures. The location of the X on the continuum does not carry enough information by itself. This means that line drawing is very context sensitive. The impact weights on features will change in different test cases. This means that one gets a more accurate decision for an individual case but it also means that line drawing does not provide a good foundation generalize a solution. 5.3 The Wrong Paradigm Sometimes the identification of the critical issue – the paradigm used to examine a caseis wrong. . Often the nature of the problem seems clear but we may be focusing on the SIGCAS Computers and Society, Volume 37, No. 2, November 2007
60
wrong problem. A basic underlying problem is that when looking at a situation we may diagram the wrong ethics concept or diagram only one concept when we needed to analyze more. In the case of airport security above the issue examined was the potential violation of privacy and not the trade-off between security and the potential physical harm caused by repeated use of an x-ray of frequent flyers. To see this consider a situation that occurred in a computer security class 5.3.1 Forgery A university professor wanted his students to experience a variety of the security problems they would encounter as network administrators. He carefully organized an exercise which would only use a very narrow network of computers within his control. He educated students about the laws applying to this activity and had them sign agreements that they would not use this method outside of the controlled network. After teaching students how to spoof the sender’s name in an email he then required that they use the controlled network to send an email with the name ‘
[email protected]’ as the “from address.” Students completed the assignment successfully. Unfortunately one of his students also sent an e-mail to a friend at a local company. The president of the company became aware of this and raised vigorous concerns with the university president that it was being unethical teaching students how to commit fraud. He would not hire people who were being trained to commit fraud. The professor maintained that if the students did not experience these security loopholes that he would not have done a good job teaching them and they would be less effective as network administrators and security analysts. Is it morally permissible (required) for the teacher to train these students in this way? Other security professors have their students attempt to break into secure networks around the world. The responses to this case again take one of two extremes. Again visceral responses are easily divided. Typical reactions to this example include: Deontological The decision is the teachers because he has a right to academic freedom Deceit is wrong and students should not be taught what is morally wrong. Consequential Teaching student what is wrong will lead them to criminal behavior. Leaving the students ignorant will put networks they defend at risk Some respondents in this case do recognize the existence of an ethical tension and declare their allegiance to one side or the other. To counteract these problems one can take a formal ethics decision making approach. Was this a case of teaching and requiring forgery? A line drawing analysis might include Fraud factors like: attempt to deceive, done for some benefit or personal gain, done to obtain something of value, caused some harm, was believable, and signed an agreement not to do it. Using these features this does not look like a case of Fraud. The student did not intend to deceive his friend. There was no financial gain. The sender did not anticipate any harm in sending the message. Using the name Santa Claus made the sender field unbelievable. Not causing any harm, making threats, or accessing financial or government information it probably does not violate the US Computer Fraud and Abuse act. Line drawing seems to have resolved this question. But it is obvious the company
SIGCAS Computers and Society, Volume 37, No. 2, November 2007
61
president would not be satisfied by the demonstration that the test case did not involve fraud. The identification of what paradigm to examine is not always clear. The problem is that the company president’s concern may be a more general issue. Perhaps the more appropriate question is “Was this an example of an unethical way to train people about how to handle dangerous things?” This question is relevant for many professions such as police officer, locksmith, and network security consultant. The features in this line drawing would probably include at least the use of a controlled environment which minimizes potential harm. So we do not require security analysts to break into the Department of Defense. The use of the method is discouraged outside of the controlled environment. In this case perhaps sanctions should have been imposed as well as a signed agreement. There may still be other line drawing analysis that should be done of this situation. In a particular case there may be several different issues. One of the limits of the line drawing method is that it does not provide a way to with integrate the various analyses. 6. CONCLUSION In spite of these limitations the modified line drawing method as presented here can serve as a useful adjunct to other ethics decision procedures. Starting with paradigm cases gives the analyst the opportunity to think about what features or attributes of an activity positively or negatively affect its ethical impact. Creating a spectrum for each feature helps analysts identify dimensions to a complex problem. Analysts can take values or principles from many sources when constructing paradigm cases. Some features may be oriented around duties or rights, other features may have a benefit/harm orientation, and still others may reflect virtues. Case-based analysis results in charts that match the intuition that there are ethical gray areas. Sometimes an aspect of an action may not be completely bad or completely good, but somewhere in between. The overall activity may be good in some respects, but bad in others. The identification of these elements is critical in ICT ethics and the practice of ICT. Insight into the negative and positive elements of a system facilitates modification of a system’s design and development to promote ethical value and reduce potential negative ethical impact of ICT systems. Acknowledgments I began exploring the usefulness of case-based analysis after hearing a presentation by M Quinn (Quinn 2006) at SIGCSE'06, March 1-5, 2006, Houston, Texas, USA. References Bynum, T. and Rogerson, S. (2004) Computer Ethics and Professional Responsibility (pages 60-85) copyright Blackwell Publishing Clear, T.; Gotterbarn, D.; Kwan, C. (2006) “Managing Software Requirements Risks with Software Development Impact Statements” New Zealand Journal of Applied Computing , Collins, R. and Miller, K. (1992) “Paramedic Ethics for Computer Professionals,” Journal of Systems and Software, 17, 1 Gert, B. (1988) Morality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
SIGCAS Computers and Society, Volume 37, No. 2, November 2007
62
Gotterbarn, D. (2007) “Ethical Decision Using the Back of the Envelope,” in Proceedings of Ethicomp 2007, Meiji University Press Tokyo Gotterbarn, D. (2005) “Spam or Sender-id: Reducing the Fog of Ethical Decision Making. Once More into the Breech!” in Proceeding of Ethicomp 2005 Gotterbarn, D. and Rogerson, S. (2005a), “Responsible Risk Analysis for Software Development: Creating the software development impact statement”, Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 15 article 40 June 2005 Gotterbarn, D. and Rogerson, S. (2005b) “Software Design Ethics for Biomedicine” S. Nagl and R. Begent (Eds.), Cancer Bioinformatics: From Cancer Biology to Therapy Design and Treatment, London, Wiley & Sons. Harris, C.E. Jr, Pritchard, M.S., and Rabins, M.J. (2005) Engineering Ethics: Concepts and Cases. 3rd ed. Wadsworth (2003) “The Government's Response to the Electoral Commission's Report: The Shape of Elections to Come – A Strategic Evaluation of the 2003 Electoral Pilot Schemes”, (No. Cm 5975). London: Office of the Deputy Prime Minister Maner, W. (2002) “Heuristic Methods for Computer Ethics”, Metaphilosophy 33, 3, pp. 339-365 Available at http://csweb.cs.bgsu.edu/maner/heuristics/maner.pdf. Quinn, M. J. (2006) Ethics for the Information Age Second Edition, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA Tavani, H. M. (2004) Ethics and Technology: Ethical Issues in an Age of Information and Communication Technology John Wiley and Sons, Hoboken, NJ, Whitbeck, C. (1998) Ethics in Engineering Practice and Research, Cambridge University Press Biography Don Gotterbarn, the Director of the Software Engineering Ethics Research Institute at East Tennessee State University, is also a visiting professor at the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility in England and a Professorial Fellow at Auckland University of Technology He worked as a computer consultant on software projects for the U.S. Navy and for the Saudi Arabian Navy. He also worked on the certification of vote counting software and missile defense systems. He has written some on computer ethics and developed software to help in ethical decision making. He was awarded the “Making a Difference” award by the ACM’s special interest group on Computing and Society and in 2005 received the Outstanding Contribution award from the ACM for promoting ethical behavior of professionals and organizations.
SIGCAS Computers and Society, Volume 37, No. 2, November 2007
63
