This course is intended to prepare you to deal with ethical situations that you are likely to encounter as a computer professional. One aspect was to make you aware of the kinds of ethical issues that are associated with IT. Another aspect was to make you aware of the issues that the professional associations have focused upon in building a code of ethics for computer professionals. A third aspect was to demonstrate areas and arguments that have been presented by ethicists as matters of concern. A forth aspect has been to develop a basis for analyzing situations and discerning whether an ethical issue is present and who it affects. A fifth aspect has been illustrating how to rationalize and justify a course of action based upon principles that have been developed by philosophers and ethicists in our society.

The authors we have read make that case that computer ethics--concerns about the applications of IT--present new problems regarding fairness and benefit to humankind that are different from those posed by previous technologies. As a consequence, computer professionals need to exercise great care lest their creations spawn a host of unintended consequences. From the beginning the argument has been that there are policy gaps regarding what behaviors in Cyberspace are ethical because such behaviors were never possible previously.

On the final you will be asked to analyze one or more scenarios and to write about some of the following:

• What are the 8 principles of behavior that the SE code of ethics requires of computer professionals and what are the ethical, philosophical, or religious bases for them (what validity do they have)?
• What does the SE code have to say about
1. privacy in cyberspace?
2. activities on the Internet?
3. intellectual property?
4. democracy?
• What is the relationship of a society's laws to professional ethics (what in the code of ethics justifies a computer professional in America to break any of the few US laws that pertain to IT)?
• What in the SE code of ethics mandates that the computer professional advocate or denounce any particular computer application that may be proposed by some commercial or governmental entity?
• Identify a policy gap in Cyberspace (some area of application that "good people" might differ as to whether more harm or good was attached to a particular application in that area)and explain how a governing policy should be established.
• Suppose you are assigned to design a new IT application. What questions would you ask to determine if this application was entirely ethical (be thorough)?
• How does automating an activity considered benign when conducted manually raise ethical concerns (give examples)?
• Discuss some practices that may be part of the IT workplace (within companies that provide computer products and services) that are ethically questionable.
• IT applications exist in all companies and most companies have IT workers who support those applications. Are such workers in non-IT companies computer professionals and do any of the 8 principles of the SE code apply to them (justify your conclusions)?
• Assume two employees in a large bank, one with an accounting degree and one with an information science degree. Both support the bank's website, one by developing products and services offered electronically to customers, the other by insuring that the webpages, the webserver, and the database function properly. Are one, both, or neither employees bound by any or all of the 8 principles of the SE code of ethics (explain)?
• List some ways in which the intellectual circumstances and environment of the IT workplace for IT professionals differ from the workplace of other knowledge workers (stock brokers, librarians, teachers, industrial managers, military strategists, lawyers, etc.). Relate these differences to the unique responsibilities that IT professionals bear.

The Final exam will be in two parts: You may turn in before receiving the exam a one page, handwritten, open book response for each of any two of the bulleted questions from above. You will then be asked to write closed-book on two questions that I choose. The four one-page essays will count 80% of the final. The 32 essays will be graded by assigning each to one of eleven piles and then ranking each pile, assigning a score <=20 to the highest ranked response, and deducting from that score appropriately for the lesser quality of the lower ranked responses.