Ambo University Woliso Campus

School of Technology and Informatics

Department of Information
Technology

Social, Professional and Ethical issues in

Information Technology(ITec4142 )
 Chapter 1
Morality, Ethics, Justice, Rights

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 Introduction
• Information Technology continues to transform
all aspects of socioeconomic transaction
including
– employment, education, recreation,
reproduction and the likes.
• However, an advancement of Information
technology offers opportunities for unethical
behavior due to ease of collecting and
disseminating information (i.e., increase of
cybercrime, cyber fraud, identity theft, and
intellectual property theft). 3
 Introduction
• Therefore, this course is intended
to equip you with concepts of
differentiating ethical issues from
unethical issues and how you
have to behave in order to respect
your profession.
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 What is Critical Analysis?
• Critical Analysis is the ability to think
disapprovingly and objectively about an
issue and to present a well-constructed
argument.
• Critical Analysis is a careful examination
and evaluation of a text, image, or other
work to understand the interaction of
particular elements that contribute to a
work’s power and effectiveness before using
it. 5
 What is Ethics?
• Ethics is the branch of philosophy concerned with the
meaning of all aspects of human behavior.
– Theoretical Ethics, sometimes called Normative
Ethics, is about discovering and delineating right
from wrong;
• it is the consideration of how we develop the rules
and principles (norms) by which to judge and guide
meaningful decision-making.
– Theoretical Ethics is the rational reflection on what is
right, what is wrong, what is just, what is unjust, what
is good and what is bad in terms of human behavior.
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 What is Ethics?(cont’d…)
• Ethics can be defined as the standards,
values, morals and principles which
guide one's decisions or actions.
• Information Technology Ethics is related
to the standards of conduct governing
individual, institution’s, societies’ & or
international use of information
technology.

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 What is Ethics?(cont’d…)
• Ethical theories:
– Utilitarian Ethics (outcome based): says it is possible to
determine the rightness or wrongness of actions by examining
its consequences.
– Deontological Ethics (duty based): says it is possible to
determine the rightness or wrongness of actions by examining
actions themselves, without focusing on their consequences.
– Virtue Ethics (character based): says an action is only right
if it is an action that a virtuous (honest) person would carry
out in the same circumstances.
– Communitarian Ethics (community based): considers right
and wrong action as it pertains to the group or community.

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 What is Ethics?(cont’d…)
• All four Ethical approaches have common
elements, such as:
– Impartiality: weighting interests equally
– Rationality: supported by reasons a rational
person would accept
– Consistency: standards are applied similarly to
similar cases
– Reversibility: standards that apply no matter who
“makes” the rules

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 What are “Values”, "Morality" and
"Ethics"?
• Values: represents the degree of importance of
something or action, with the aim of
determining what actions are best to do or
what is best to live, or to describe the
significance of different action.
– Example: someone who values friendship
drops everything to help a friend.

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 What are “Values”, "Morality" and "Ethics"?
• Morality: refers to social conventions about
right and wrong that are so widely shared that
they become the basis for an established
agreement.
– However, individual views of what is moral may
vary by age, culture group, ethnic background,
religion, life experiences, education, and gender.
– Example: person's value of honesty: cheating is bad.
Someone who values success more than honesty
may behave by another moral: cheating is fine.

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 What are “Values”, "Morality" and
"Ethics"?
• Ethics: are moral values in action.
– A person, whose morality is reflected in his
willingness to do the right thing, even if it is hard
or dangerous, is ethical.

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 Profession and Professional
• Profession is a commitment to a designated
and organized occupation by virtue of being an
authority over a body of knowledge with
requisite skills acquired through specialized
training.
• Professional is an expert belonging to a
specific profession.
– It could be anyone who has undergone long years
of advanced training and acquired specialized
knowledge and experience.

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 Professionalism
• Professionalism is the status of a professional which
implies certain attitudes or typical qualities that are
expected from professional.
– It is defined as the conduct, aims or qualities that
characterize or mark a profession or a professional
person.
– It is also defined as the practices of the knowledge
of moral ideals.
• Pillars of Professionalism are: commitment, integrity,
vision, love, responsibility and accountability.

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 Professional Ethics
• Professional ethics is a code of conduct that govern how
members of profession deal with each other and with
third parties.
– It is concerned with the standards and moral conduct that
govern the profession and its members.
– It examines issues, problems, and the social responsibility of
the profession.
• Professional ethics is guidance for people working in a
particular profession that tells them what they supposed
to do and what they are not supposed to do while
working there.
– It defines how people belonging to given profession should
behave.
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 Professional Ethics(cont’d…)
• People from different professions have to follow
different ethics. However, some ethics are universal.
• Ethics to be followed by every profession includes:
– time management,
– being honest in work and
– serving the people along with responsibility,
– respecting others,
– Keeping confidentiality of organization,
– accountability,
– abiding by the rules and
– avoiding harming anyone.
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 Professional Ethics(cont’d…)
• Features of Professional Ethics:
– Keep yourself from causing harm to others.
– Be good to others.
– Be a well-wisher to others.
– Respect individual freedom.
– Ensure justice to all, without discrimination.
– Respect law and code of conduct.
– Follow noble practices like honesty, integrity, truthfulness
etc.
– Free and fair to all.
– Help the people in need.
– Help the poor.
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 Professional code of ethics
• Professional code of ethics is a document that
outlines a set of acceptable behaviors for a
professional.
– It is made up of a set of socially acceptable
principles to help a business to govern its
decision-making and distinguish right from
wrong.
– These principles outline the mission and
values of an organization, how the
professionals within the organization are
supposed to approach problems. 18
 Professional code of ethics(cont’d…)
• Professional code of ethics is designed to:
– ensure employees are behaving in a manner that is
socially acceptable and respectful of one another.
– establish the rules for behavior and sends a
message to every employee that universal
compliance is expected.
– provide the basis for a preemptive warning if
employees break the code.
• A code of ethics can be valuable not just internally as
a professional guide but also externally as a
statement of a company’s values and commitments.
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 Mill's Liberty Presumption
• Several ethical frameworks have been
suggested to:
– guide the development and implementation
of an innovation and to ensure that it will
not be harmful.
• Innovation Presumption states that we
should invent, adopt and use new
technologies.

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 Mill's Liberty Presumption(cont’d…)
• Four principles supporting the innovation
presumption are:
– Mill's Liberty Presumption: we should be free to innovate
so long as it is not harmful to others.
– Harm Principle: The only purpose for which power can be
rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized
community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.
– Technological optimism: Technology improves and will
continue to improve human lives.
– Technological Determinism: Technological advancement is
inevitable.
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 Discussion of Mill's On Liberty
• Mill rests his argument against restriction on
two reasonable premises.
• The first is that humans are fallible.
– We are always capable of getting things wrong
and we can never be completely sure that we have
anything right.
• Mill’s second premise is that we are
corrigible.
– Experience and critical discussion can improve
our opinions.

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Discussion of Mill's On Liberty(cont’d…)
• Being fallible,
– we can never be sure that any particular change
of mind takes us closer to the truth,
– experience may have misled us, or
– we may have made some error of logic.
• But the only way to correct such mistakes is
yet more experience and critical discussion.
– Our best hope of improving our opinions is to
make them public, so that others may show us our
errors.

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 Discussion of Mill's On Liberty(cont’d…)
• Mill laid out his argument for freedom of
expression in the second section of On Liberty
(‘liberty of thought and discussion’).
• The core of his argument is that restriction
prevents us from correcting errors by critical
discussion.
– If a forbidden opinion is true, we lose the
opportunity to learn of its truth.
– If a forbidden opinion is false, we lose the
opportunity to remind ourselves why it is false.

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Discussion of Mill's On Liberty(cont’d…)
• The role of his second premise (that we are
corrigible) is obvious.
– If it were not possible to correct false opinions by
discussion, there would be little point in
maintaining on the freedom to try.
– Mill need not claim that free criticism will always
lead towards the truth.
• All he needs to claim is that free discussion is
our best hope of correcting error.

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 Liberty-limiting principles
• Liberty-limiting principles are conditions under
which a government may be morally justified in
passing laws that limit the liberty of its citizens.
– Harm Principle: liberty limiting laws are allowable in
order to forbid individuals from causing harms to others.
– Offense Principle: liberty limiting laws are allowable in
order to exclude individuals from offending others.
– Legal Paternalism: liberty limiting laws are allowable
in order to prohibit individuals from harming themselves.

– Legal Moralism: liberty limiting laws are allowable in

order to protect common moral standards.

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 Comparative Justice and Distributive Justice
• Justice is a term which has been used to represent a number of
ideas, including fairness, equality, and lawfulness.
– Comparative justice: is concerned with the distribution of
benefits and burdens in society. Balancing the competing
interest.
– Distributive justice: explores the morally best means to
distribute scarce or limited resources amongst individuals or
groups.
• If two workers performed exactly the same job for exactly
the same length of time with a similar amount of
experience, then if distributive justice is at play, both
workers will be able to acquire the same amount of
goods.
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Nature, Kinds and Grounds of Rights
• Rights are legal, social, or ethical principles of
freedom.
• Rights are the fundamental rules about what is
allowed for people or allocated to people
according to some grounds of rights including
legal system, social convention, or ethical
theory.
• Some grounds of human rights are:
– Race, color, place of origin, religion, etc.

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 Human Rights, Derivative Moral Rights
• Human rights attach to all persons equally, by
virtue of their humanity, irrespective of race,
nationality, or membership of any particular
social group.
– They specify the minimum conditions for
human dignity and a tolerable life.
• Human rights are those rights inherent to all
human beings, regardless of race, sex,
nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, color,
language or any other status.
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Human Rights, Derivative Moral Rights
• Human rights are basic moral guarantees that
people in all countries have simply because of
they are people.
– All individuals are entitled to these rights
without any discrimination on any grounds.
– All these rights are interdependent,
interrelated, indivisible, cannot be taken
away, legally protected, universal, and
protect individual and groups.

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 Human Rights, Derivative Moral Rights
• Human rights include Civil, Political, Economic,
Social and Cultural rights.
o Civil: the right to be treated as an equal to anyone else
in society
o Political: the right to vote, to freedom of speech and to
obtain information
o Economic: the right to participate in an economy that
benefits all; and to desirable work
o Social: the right to education, health care, food,
clothing, shelter and social security
o Cultural: the right to freedom of religion, and to speak
the language, and to practice the culture of one’s choice
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 Derivative Moral Rights
• Moral rights are those rights which are based on human
consciousness.
– They are rights of creators of copyrighted works generally
recognized in civil law jurisdictions and, to a lesser extent, in
some common law jurisdictions.
• Moral rights include the right of attribution, the right to have a
work published anonymously and the right to the integrity of the
work.
• To respect the moral rights of the creator of a work, we should:
– Give credit to creator whether or not they own copyright
– Not falsely credit someone else as the creator
– Not alter the work in a way that would have a negative
impact on the creator’s reputation
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 Derivative Moral Rights
• If any person violates any moral right, no legal
action can be taken against him.
– The state does not enforce these rights.
– Courts of law do not recognize these rights.
• Moral rights include rules of good conduct,
politeness, and moral behavior.
– These stand for the moral perfection of the people.

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 Kant's Ethical Formalism and Rawls Social Justice
• Ethics Kant’s Ethics (Formalism): Kant believed that
certain types of actions (including murder, theft, and
lying) were absolutely forbidden, even in cases where
the action would bring about more happiness than the
alternative.
• There are two questions that we must ask ourselves
whenever we decide to act:
– Can I rationally will that everyone act as I propose to act? If
the answer is no, then we must not perform the action.
– Does my action respect the goals of human beings rather than
merely using them for my own purposes? Again, if the
answer is no, then we must not perform the action
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 Kant's Ethical Formalism and Rawls Social Justice
• Rawls: Justice as Fairness: All citizens should share
in a society’s prosperity and be given equal economic
opportunities.
• In a just society, rational individuals under a mask of
ignorance about their original position in the society
should endorse a theory that:
– gives everyone as much liberty as possible
– allows for the unequal distribution of wealth only
when the existence of such inequalities benefits
everyone and is accessible to everyone

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 Computer Ethics
• Ethics is a set of moral principles that governs the
behavior of the group or individual.
• Computer Ethics is a set of moral principles that
regulates the use of computers.
– It deals with the procedures, values and practices that
govern the process of using computing technology and
its related discipline without damaging or violating the
moral values and beliefs of any individual,
organization and entity.
• Computer ethics essentially protect individuals online
from the breach of privacy, identify theft, interference
with work, and unlawful use of proprietary software and
the likes.
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 Ethical Issues in IT
• Wherever the technology goes, ethical issues can be
found.
• Few of ethical issues raised in information technology
are mentioned below:
– Plagiarism: it’s where the work of others is copied, but
the author presents it as his or her own work.
– Piracy: the illegal copying of software is a very serious
problem, and it is estimated that approximately 50% of
all programs on PCs are plagiarized copies.
– A hacker: is an individual who is knowledgeable
enough to gain access without authorization to computer
systems to identify security flaws.

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 Ethical Issues in IT(cont’d…)
• Computer crime: includes fraud and embezzlement,
using imaging and desktop publishing to create copy or
alter official documents and graphic images.
• Malicious code: computer programs that were created
with the intention of causing data loss or damage.
– The three main types of malicious code attacks are viruses,
Trojan horses, and worms.
• Cybercrime: is an attack on information about
individuals, corporations, or governments.
– Although the attacks do not take place on a physical body, they
do take place on the personal or corporate virtual body, which is
the set of informational attributes that define people and
institutions on the Internet.

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 Ethical Issues in IT(cont’d…)
• Identity theft and Attack of privacy: for example, use of
stolen identity card to get loan from a bank or to register for a
new SIM card.
• Internet fraud: schemes to cheat customers abound on the
Internet.
• ATM fraud: criminals have developed means to intercept both
the data on the card's magnetic strip as well as the user's PIN.
– In turn, the information is used to create fake cards that are then used
to withdraw funds from the unsuspecting individual's account.
• Child pornography
• File sharing and piracy: illegal duplication of copyrighted
materials and sharing them.

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 Ethical Issues in IT(cont’d…)
• Code of Conduct: What Ethics can be
followed in IT?
– Utilizing the IT in a Manner to Get Benefits Only
– Follow Up the Social Character
– Verify Websites Who Deal with Payments
– Never use computer to harm other people
– Do not use a computer to steal
– Do not use other people's computer resources
without authorization

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 Ethical Issues in IT(cont’d…)
• Code of Conduct: What Ethics can be
followed in IT?
– Think about the social consequences of the
program you write
– Use a computer in ways that show consideration
and respect
– Never Steal Information online for Reproduction
– Never Create a False Evidence
– Never Do Fake Activities

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 Ethical Issues in IT(cont’d…)
• Code of Conduct: What Ethics can be
followed in IT?
– Never Give Misguided Information
– Never interfere with other people's computer work
– Do not eavesdrop around in other people's files
– Do not use proprietary software for which you
have not paid.

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 Ethical Issues in IT(cont’d…)
• What will the World be After Following
Ethics in IT?
– Stress free growth becomes possible
– We can save up to 40% or more time and money
– IT will grow ten times more than what it is today
– Confidence of Online Activities will grow more

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Thank you!

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