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

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Ronald E. Anderson

Structure of the Code

The draft code is divided into four sections with the first section giving a set of general moral considerations, the second identifying additional ethical principles applying to computing professionals, the third section pertaining to organizational leaders, and the final section dealing with issues of general compliance with the code.

There are some important considerations embedded within this structure, especially some commonly held notions of priorities. The first section contains items that are implicitly given higher priority because they are closely linked to moral considerations. The imperatives in the other three sections are not devoid of moral or ethical considerations, but involve additional types of considerations. Within each section the individual items are ordered to some extent with the more critical ones appearing before the less important ones. We do not know to what extent it will be possible to come to consensus on these priority rankings, but within each section the ethical premises generally were ordered in descending priority.

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