[Informatics] Ethical dilemmas

[ken price]

Some additional dilemmas arise with things like mandatory reporting of
child abuse by certain professions eg teachers, medical staff etc when
those staff also have administrative access to computer systems under a
"cannot make use of any information you encounter". This occurs in schools
from time to time where teachers do sysadmin tasks, and have the dilemma of
whether to ignore the information as required by their Sysadmin conditions.

Another relates to copyright - where an employee creates something in work
time (eg an interactive Gantt Chart model in a spreadsheet package) and
then distributes it as their own property.

A third is historical, and I am assured is factual (though it actually
doesn't matter for the purposes here)

In WW2 the Nazi regime was very keen to find out how to treat its military
air crew and submariners if they were in a serious medical situation as a
result of no oxygen or drowning. To research this, they subjected Jewish
POWs to such things as drowning, asphyxiation etc in laboratories. They
found, amongst other things, that you could submerge someone in VERY cold
water and still be able to resuscitate them after 20 minutes or so of
apparent death. This was at odds with prevailing medical wisdom, which was
that after 10 minutes (or some similar time) underwater you were deemed
unresuscitatable. In fact they got pretty good at resuscitating people and
pushed the limits, frequently of course exceeding them and resulting in
deaths of Jewish POWs. If you visit Dachau you will hear about this.

Now fast forward to the Falklands War. The British Navy had numerous
situations where ships sank and sailors were underwater in cold water for
long periods of time. The military medical advice was that after 10 minutes
they were deemed unresuscitatable and thus left to die. However some
doctors knew of the Nazi research and that in fact there was a
well-documented way of recovering these sailors. BUT the research was
obtained through torture, and thus deemed "not existent" from an ethical
perspective.  So they were morally obliged not to use this evidence
obtained through torture of POWs

The end result was that people died despite there being a high chance of
them living if the results of torture were admissable as medical research.
And some British families were pretty angry at losing sons and daughters as
a result.

kp

On Thu, Sep 1, 2016 at 4:03 PM, Mark <mark at vceit.com> wrote:

> Hi, ethicists
>
> We all know how badly students do with ethical dilemma questions.
> I've been trying to compile a list of sample case studies for...
>
> ITI U402 KK04 - ethical dilemmas arising from information management
> practices
>
> Some thoughts were...
>
> - A media distributor (e.g. Netflix, BBC) restricts access to their media
> to specific countries. Is it immoral for people in other countries - who
> would pay for the media, if they could - to use a VPN to gain access to the
> material?
>
> - A network manager discovers illegal activity by the owner of her
> company. Her employment contract has strict "non-disclosure" conditions
> that forbid her to tell anyone of her discovery. What should she do?
>
> - A person discovers a website promoting illegal or immoral activities.
> The person knows of several easy ways to take the site down, such as
> raining down a DDOS attack upon it, or imploding the site with a
> well-placed zero-day exploit. Should the person attack the site?
>
> - Anu has been looking for a good domain name. He thought up a good name,
> but it turned out to be registered by MrX in Belgium. Anu emailed MrX,
> asking whether the domain name might be for sale. MrX said it might be, but
> the price quoted was far too high for Anu. Nevertheless, MrX and Anu struck
> up a friendship and corresponded and collaborated for a couple of years on
> various projects they had in common. In one email, MrX mentions that he
> needs to renew his domain name really soon because it has just expired. Anu
> could register the domain name. What is Anu's dilemma?
>
> - Sue works in IT. Her employer is notoriously greedy, and often expects
> staff to work beyond their normal work hours and on weekends, saying "Well,
> if you're not willing to do some extra unpaid work, there are a lot of
> other people who would be happy to take your job."  Sue suffers in silence
> because she needs the money. One day, she discovers a bug in the company's
> accounting software that would let her give herself secret bonuses and pay
> rises that would never be discovered. She could reimburse herself for the
> hundreds of hours of unpaid work she has been forced to give her employer.
> What should she do?
>
> - Naz works for a company whose terms of employment forbid the use of
> company computers for entertainment, time-wasting behaviour, or seeking
> alternative employment. Naz's pay is so low that he cannot afford an
> internet connection at home. He learns of a good job at another company,
> but he would have to use his work computer to apply for the job. What is
> Naz's dilemma, and what should he do?
>
> - Arnold's company forbids the use of the LAN for non-work purposes. One
> day, Arnold has a brilliant idea and finishes a project several hours
> early. He has nothing to do for the rest of the day. He thinks he might
> bend the rules, since he's been so clever and productive, and play an
> online game. Is he being unethical?
>
> Can you suggest scenarios that test a grey moral decision rather than a
> black/white lawful one?
>
> Regards,
> Mark
> --
>
> Mark Kelly
>
> mark at vceit.com
> http://vceit.com
>
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-- 
-- 
Dr Ken Price MACS(Snr) CP ACCE Professional Associate.
Immediate Past President, TASITE http://www.tasite.tas.edu.au
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