A Rationale for the Proposed Revision of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Code of Professional Conduct - An Approach to Revision of the Code - The Research Center on Computing & Society

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Ronald E. Anderson

An Approach to Revision of the Code

To begin the task of drafting a revised code of ethics, we collected the codes from similar professional associations including IEEE, IFIP, ISTE, EDUCOM, ASIS, ICCP, and the Data Processing Management Association (DPMA). In general we found these codes, including ACM’s, were deficient in several ways. They tend to be difficult to read, excessively impersonal, needlessly abstract, possess little sense of priority, more negative than positive, proactive, and to forget the autonomy of the individual professional, to neglect audiences other than employees, to offer little rationale, and to omit references to moral principles. While it is impossible to overcome all of these deficiencies, in drafting a revision of the ACM Code we sought to minimize them. The directions taken are outlined below.

(1)	Inclusiveness. All of the basic ethical principles from the ACM Code were retained in the draft revision. Additional ethical imperatives were added from the codes of other professional computing associations, such that the draft revision encompasses all these codes with these exclusions: teacher-specific items in the ISTE Code; several employer-oriented items in the DPMA Code; and some items in the IFIP Code pertaining specifically to international law.
(2)	Semantic simplicity. We found nearly universal consensus that Bylaw 17, the ACM Code of Professional Conduct, should be restated in more informal, less difficult language. The language, structure and format were borrowed from the ABA Code of Professional Conduct. However, in 1983 the ABA changed its Code to “Model Standards,” which include the “Model Rules of Professional Conduct” and a “Model Code of Professional Responsibility.” Neither statements use the categories “Disciplinary Rules” and “Ethical Considerations” as a structure. In revising the Code, both the structure of the code and specific phrases have been extensively revised in order to make it simpler and more readable.
(3)	International, Multicultural Orientation. Perhaps the most thorough code of ethics for computing has been drafted by the IFIP Ethics Project. Under the leadership of Harold Sackman, IFIP released an official Draft Code of Ethics. This IFIP Code offers a model for resolving some of the issues that face the computing community, particularly trans-national issues. The draft revision of the ACM Code takes an international rather than a national perspective, although the term “international” is not used extensively.
(4)	Personalizing the Code. Some codes are unreadable except by lawyers or authors of constitutions. Filling a code of ethics with formal expressions, such as “I shall” in our judgment emphasizes the theoretical and exaggerates the impersonal. We believe that the codes should be written in the first person, so that the statement implicitly becomes a personal ethical commitment. Other forms of expression imply that the principle applies to others and not necessarily oneself. In the revised draft of the code the first person expression, “I shall…” is stated only once within each section. Thus each principle is stated both as a personal covenant or vow and as an imperative or directive. The existing ACM Code is highly formalized in expression, and its language is more consistent with the official ACM Bylaws. With the proposed change in form of expression, the ACM Council may choose to publish it separately rather than as one of the bylaws as the Code is now.
(5)	Minimizing the negative. Many ethical statements are “thou shalt nots,” but not all must be expressed in the negative. We have attempted in a number of instances to express the imperative in positive or proactive language.
(6)	Recognition of the autonomy of the individual professional. If an ethical principle is stated in an explicit form with all of the conditions completely specified, there is no discretion left for the individual professional to make an ethical judgment. It is impossible to write an ethical code for computing that is completely definitive because of the rapidly changing nature of the field. Some authors such as Wolfson (1990) have attempted to move in that direction, but in this draft we have avoided trying to specify all the relevant conditions to applying any given ethical principle. We believe that what is most needed at this time is a clear, straightforward statement of the basic ethical precepts for computing. This approach is the one most compatible with the concept of the professional as autonomous and professional groups as self-regulatory.
(7)	Focusing upon moral principles. Typical ethical computing codes are so cerebral that they may implicitly give us excuses to ignore the ethical issues. By neglecting morality and human emotion, they seem to trivialize the consequences of ethical violations. In drafting a revised code we attempted to rectify this problem by organizing the main ethical principles around more basic moral principles. Given this approach we have called the draft a “Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct,” whereas the existing code is called a “Code of Professional Conduct.”

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