Ethics in the Software Development Process: From Codes of Conduct to Ethical Deliberation

TL;DR

This paper critically examines the limitations of Codes of Ethics in guiding software engineers ethically and advocates for embedding ethical deliberation within development teams to improve ethical decision-making.

Contribution

It analyzes the normative shortcomings of Codes of Ethics in software engineering and proposes ethical deliberation as a more effective approach.

Findings

Codes of Ethics are insufficient for normative guidance in software development.

Codes tend to trigger reactive and gut-feeling based ethical behaviors.

Implementing ethical deliberation can enhance ethical decision-making in teams.

Abstract

Software systems play an ever more important role in our lives and software engineers and their companies find themselves in a position where they are held responsible for ethical issues that may arise. In this paper, we try to disentangle ethical considerations that can be performed at the level of the software engineer from those that belong in the wider domain of business ethics. The handling of ethical problems that fall into the responsibility of the engineer have traditionally been addressed by the publication of Codes of Ethics and Conduct. We argue that these Codes are barely able to provide normative orientation in software development. The main contribution of this paper is, thus, to analyze the normative features of Codes of Ethics in software engineering and to explicate how their value-based approach might prevent their usefulness from a normative perspective. Codes of Conduct cannot replace ethical deliberation because they do not and cannot offer guidance because of their underdetermined nature. This lack of orientation, we argue, triggers reactive behavior such as "cherry-picking", "risk of indifference", "ex-post orientation" and the "desire to rely on gut feeling". In the light of this, we propose to implement ethical deliberation within software development teams as a way out.