SUNY Geneseo Department of Computer Science

Ethics

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Ethics and Ciphers

Reading summary: IEP ethics article

• 3 areas
  • Metaethics: where ethics comes from
    • God’s will, or other extra-human source
      • Ethics is universal, permanent
    • Individual standards
    • Cultural standards
  • Normative: define right vs wrong
    • Virtue: cultivate “good habits”
    • Duty
      • Ross: 7 duties
    • Consequentialism: weigh good vs bad outcomes
  • Applied: examine specific issues from ethical point of view

Examples: are the following ethically acceptable, and why?

• An online discussion forum keeps its file of user passwords encrypted.
  • OK, to keep passwords safe
  • Utilitarian (a form of consequentialist ethics that judges a decision based on whether the benefits to everyone outweigh the harms): benefits of security, e.g., against hackers, outweigh costs of encryption
  • Duty: to prevent harm to others, protect privacy (important that duties in these arguments have some wide acceptance among ethicists, you can’t invent them to suit the problem)
• Privacy on wifi networks depends on communication being encrypted. Soon after the first wifi encryption standard (WEP) was introduced, researchers showed how to break it and tools for doing so became widely available. Many wifi manufacturers kept using it for years afterwards, and some still provide it as an option.
  • Ethical egoism (a consequentialist theory that judges a decision based on how the benefits and harms to the decider balance) argument: manufacturers make money by continuing to sell stock, and save money by not upgrading
  • Ethical altruism (a consequentialist theory that weighs costs and benefits to everyone but the person making a decision): wrong to sell WEP because it harms consumers
  • Utilitarianism: weigh cost to manufacturers of upgrade vs cost of unhappy customers vs risk & cost of being hacked to customers; long- vs short-term. (Note that this is much more complicated than the less balanced consequentialist arguments.)
  • Golden Rule (duty ethics): wrong to sell WEP because manufacturers wouldn’t want to use it themselves
  • Note that different theories lead to different conclusions here; need to find a conclusion supported by most theories, or to discount the applicability of some theories (e.g., ethical egoism and ethical altruism are less appropriate here because many parties have interests to balance, whereas those two theories tend to be one-sided).
• In one of my other courses, I introduce students to digital images by teaching them to steganographically hide images inside each other.
  • Act utilitarian (a form of utilitarianism that looks at the harms and benefits of individual actions): how many graduates use stego for good vs for crime vs not using it at all
    • But I can’t actually use this to decide about my course because I can’t know the consequences until after I’ve taught the course
  • Rule utilitarian (utilitarianism based on defining and following rules whose foreseeable benefits outweigh their harms): teaching “dark arts” is OK because number of students who use for good or neutral exceeds number who use it badly
  • Kant: categorical imperative, 4 forms, common to all seems to be the idea that no-one has privileged ethical standing relative to others
    • Don’t surbordinate students’ interest in knowledge and their free will (free will being another big element of Kant’s thinking) in using that knowledge to teacher’s (or school’s) fear of consequences

Ethics essay

• Handout

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Picking a position to argue (thesis)

Read TSIS introduction and chapter 4