Ethics in Software Engineering: Are they important?

30 Nov 2017

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Ethics are an interesting topic within software engineering. At first, ethics isn’t something that comes to mind when talking about software engineering. However, whenever they are people involved in the creation of something, morality and ethics will become an issue. To me, ethics in software engineering is similar to ethics in medicine. Decisions that you make should be for the better of mankind, to better others and not cause any harm to them. There are many gray areas in ethics, but for me personally, if a decision you have to make does not feel 100% clear, then you should take the team to do clarify and research before making a decision.

Ethics has many different viewpoints depending on who you ask. But for the most part, I believe people will agree on certain issues with little to no conflict. An example we discussed in class involved coding a quiz for a particular drug, but unless the test taker was allergic to the drug or was already on it, the result would recommend taking the drug. The developer of the quiz felt guilty of this, and later quit his job over it. He had doubts regarding the quiz in the first place, but decided to code it anyway. Personally, I believe he should of refused the task after he had doubts in the first place, but then again, someone else would have just coded the quiz instead. These types of implications make ethics in software engineering difficult to interpret at times, but when in doubt, there are bunch of resources online that can help educate you in making a decision.