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posted by martyb on Tuesday November 22 2016, @08:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the "code"-of-ethics-needs-debugging? dept.

Earlier this week, a post written by programmer and teacher Bill Sourour went viral. It's called "Code I'm Still Ashamed Of."

In it he recounts a horrible story of being a young programmer who landed a job building a website for a pharmaceutical company. The whole post is worth a read, but the upshot is he was duped into helping the company skirt drug advertising laws in order to persuade young women to take a particular drug.

He later found out the drug was known to worsen depression and at least one young woman committed suicide while taking it. He found out his sister was taking the drug and warned her off it.

By sake of comparison, take a look at the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct (Adopted by ACM Council 10/16/92.)


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  • (Score: 2) by jelizondo on Wednesday November 23 2016, @03:17AM

    by jelizondo (653) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 23 2016, @03:17AM (#431639) Journal

    Illegal does not mean immoral, slight distinction but very important.

    I done some bad things, even technically illegal, but not immoral. But if you work with me, you will get a good manager who actually cares about you; so much that even people I fired, will greet me if I meet them in the street.

    I foregone raises in order to give one to the people who work with me and never, ever, I have blamed an underling for a screw up. I own ALL screw ups, I should have avoided them and I didn’t. Whoever made the mistake, in my mind, is not responsible (other than being willfully negligent); I am: I failed to supervise, promote or train them properly.

    You want to make a difference? Don’t worry about people you don’t know, people in Afghanistan or Africa, worry about the guys surrounding you all day at work.

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  • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday November 23 2016, @04:13PM

    by tangomargarine (667) on Wednesday November 23 2016, @04:13PM (#431883)

    Good point. I would further mention ethical vs. moral. [grammarist.com]

    I may be wrong, but it seems like saying something is unethical is less judgmental than saying it's immoral? Morality is underlying reasons like religion, vs. ethics which can be more generally agreed on by people with different foundations.

    IANAPhilosopher

    --
    "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"