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Ethical Education in Software Engineering: Responsibility in the Production of Complex Systems

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Abstract

Among the various contemporary schools of moral thinking, consequence-based ethics, as opposed to rule-based, seems to have a good acceptance among professionals such as software engineers. But naïve consequentialism is intellectually too weak to serve as a practical guide in the profession. Besides, the complexity of software systems makes it very hard to know in advance the consequences that will derive from professional activities in the production of software. Therefore, following the spirit of well-known codes of ethics such as the ACM/IEEE’s, we advocate for a more solid position in the ethical education of software engineers, which we call ‘moderate deontologism’, that takes into account both rules and consequences to assess the goodness of actions, and at the same time pays an adequate consideration to the absolute values of human dignity. In order to educate responsible professionals, however, this position should be complemented with a pedagogical approach to virtue ethics.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments that enabled us to improve the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Informática, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Avda. Universidad 30, Leganes, Madrid, 28911, Spain

    Gonzalo Génova & Anabel Fraga

  2. Departamento de Teoría e Historia de la Educación, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, C/ Rector Royo Villanova, s/n, Madrid, 28040, Spain

    M. Rosario González

Authors
  1. Gonzalo Génova
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  2. M. Rosario González
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  3. Anabel Fraga
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gonzalo Génova.

Additional information

This research is supported through the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología, Project TIN2004-07083, “GPS: Plataforma de Gestión de Procesos Software: modelado, reutilización y medición”.

A preliminar version of this paper has been published as “Ethical Responsibility of the Software Engineer”. Second International Workshop on Philosophical Foundations of Information Systems Engineering. Luxembourg, 5 June 2006. Held in conjunction with The 18th Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering-CAiSE 2006. Proceedings of CAiSE’06 Workshops and Doctoral Consortium, pp. 727–736.

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Génova, G., González, M.R. & Fraga, A. Ethical Education in Software Engineering: Responsibility in the Production of Complex Systems. Sci Eng Ethics 13, 505–522 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-007-9017-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-007-9017-6

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