Ethical decision making in technology development: a case study of participation in a large-scale information systems development project

Abstract

There are also serious problems associated with the lack of support available to technologists who have ethical concerns about the systems they are developing, the methodologies employed or other aspects of their work. For example, it is very hard for engineers to 'blow the whistle' on projects, and 'heresies' (new paradigms) and 'dissidence' (challenges to existing paradigms and/or engineering power structures) are often actively discouraged, both in higher education and the work place (Stapleton and Hersh (2004)

The Use of an Axiological Lens to Review Globalised Automation and Control Systems Projects

“…Consequently, engineers were rarely trained to understand complex value systems and did not have the expertise to assess the value impacts of a series of methodological techniques. Furthermore, engineers did not have the expertise to scrutinise the appropriateness of the techniques themselves, which were heavily value laden (Stapleton (2007); Rogerson, Weckert & Simpson (2000)).…”

“…These studies have tended to argue that this requires new approaches to ethics and has tried to set out new trajectories for the ethics of engineering (c.f. Stapleton (2007)). However, any particular ethical stance reflects some set of values which underpin it.…”

“…Recently, a series of papers in the automation and control systems literature have called for a revised perspective of engineering ethics (c.f. Stapleton (2007); Hersh 2002; Hersh & Moss 2004; Bitay, Brandt & Savelsberg (2005)).…”

Guest editorial

“…Future research could focus on embedding ethical ISD and ethical decision-making within new ISD methodologies in order to empower ISD teams rather than leaving such concerns to professional bodies and organisations. Addressing this gap in knowledge is important as ethical ISD has received limited attention from the IS community in recent years (Smith and Hasnas, 1999;Davison, 2000;Stapleton, 2008;Chatterjee et al, 2009;Vartiainen, 2010;Mingers and Walsham, 2010;Myers and Klein, 2011;Robertson et al, 2019). Future research can examine the role of ISD and emerging technologies (e.g.…”

A Review of Contemporary Work on the Ethics of Ambient Assisted Living Technologies for People with Dementia

“…A complete list of the usage frequencies of ethical terms is presented in Figure 4. Various ethical theories were applied in the publications for the analysis of AAL technologies: John Rawls' theory of justice (Doorn, 2010), Amartya Sen's capability approach (Coeckelbergh, 2010;Coeckelbergh, 2012;Toboso, 2011;Vallor, 2011), ethics of care of Carol Gilligan (Stapleton, 2008), Nel Noddings (Vallor, 2011), Joan Tronto (van Wynsberghe, 2012, and a criticism of evolutionary theories (Foddy, 2012).…”