Supporting ethical problem solving

Abstract

The objective of this research was to investigate the use of decision aid technologies to support ethical problem solving. The decision aid developed for the exploratory study described in this paper was web-based and provided content that summarized and simplified much of moral philosophy (i.e. normative ethical theory) [3,5,11,13,18,24,26]. The ethical dilemma was posed in case format.Participants were asked to write, and revise as necessary, a solution to the case. The decision aid was developed to address five constructs in the research model: (1) Perceived Ethical Problem, (2) Perceived Alternatives, (3) Deontological Evaluation, (4) Teleological Evaluation, and (5) an Ethic of Care. Results from analysis showed that participants that used the decision aid identified the case's main issue, personal information privacy, more frequently than participants that did not use the decision aid. Individuals with support of the decision aid discussed the need to respect equal individual rights more often. Mixed results were found concerning use of other concepts from moral philosophy. An analysis technique was used that generated and statistically analyzed graphs that described how users navigated through decision problems. First, the participants' movements were captured as they went from page to page. These data were then used to construct depth-first-search trees (a particular type of graph). Characteristics of these trees were compared statistically, and the results showed no difference in the way control or treatment users navigated. Web-based ethical decision aids can be built and used, and can improve the solutions developed by students solving cases in a laboratory environment.