Undirected Musings about Ethics

Why bother?

Everyone thinks they're doing good most of the time. Ethical codes help -guide that sense into alignment with the surrounding social and political -context: doing good for whom, why, and with what kinds of caveats.

It's not about engineering, it's about people

An ethical code for software development should not waste too much space -talking about engineering practices. Certainly there is value in getting -more developers and systems people to follow good engineering practice, but -an ethical code should focus on the interaction between trustworthiness, the -greater good, the personal good of all the participants in the system, and -software itself.

(This comes up in Ethics for Programmers, above.)

It's no good to build a wonderfully-engineered system that is cheap to run -and easy to integrate with if it systematically disenfranchises and abuses -its users for the benefit of its owners, and that's a problem we actually -have via Facebook, Github, Twitter, and numerous others.

Ethical codes are fundamentally extrinsic

Ethical codes exist so that others can judge our behaviour, not so that we -can judge our own behaviour.

Ethical codes must be constraining

Ethical codes do not exist in a vacuum. A code that authorizes its adherents -to behave in any way they see fit, subject only to their own judgement, is no -ethical code at all. We already have that and the results have not been great.

This is important - a meaningful ethical code for software would probably -cripple most software business models. An ethical code that prioritizes -active consent, for example, completely cripples advertising and analytics, -and puts a big roadblock in buyouts like Instagram's. This may well be good -for society.

Integrity is not about contracts or legislation

Ethics, personal integrity, and group integrity are tangled together, but -modern Western conceptions of group integrity tend to revolve around “does -this group break the law or engender lawsuits,” not “does this group act in -the best interests of people outside of it.”

Assumptions

I've embedded some of my personal morality into the “ethics” articles in this -section, in the absence of a published moral code. Those, obviously, aren't -absolute, but you can reason about their validity if you assume that I -believe the “end user's” privacy and active consent take priority over the -technical cleverness or business value of a software system.

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This has some complicated downstream effects: “active consent” means -something you can't handwave away by putting implied consent (for example, to -future changes) in an EULA or privacy statement. I haven't written much that -calls out this pattern because it's pervasive.

The “end user is the real product” business model most social networks -operate on is fundamentally unethical under this code. It will always be more -valuable to the “real customers” (advertisers, analytics platforms, law -enforcement, and intelligence agencies) for users to be opted into new -measurements by default, assuming consent rather than obtaining it.

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