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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 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?"
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