Computer Ethics on Campus
Leslie Burkholder
Consider the plight of Pimli College’s Computing Advisory Committee. (Pimli is, of course, a fictitious college. It is a middle-size private college with a middle-size reputation, located somewhere to the east or west or north or south of here.) There have been several incidents of computer abuse on campus. Computing staff have been reading other people’s electronic mail. Students have been experimenting with computer viruses on public cluster machines. Faculty have been copying licensed software for use at home. As a consequence, the committee has been asked by the head of Academic Computing to do something. His suggestion is that the college should have a Code of Computer Ethics, a set of standards regarding the proper use of its computing facilities. Is this a good idea? Where do they begin? What topics should they include? Should they do something else besides writing up a code? Indeed, should they even bother to struggle with composing such a code at all?
Sensibly enough, the committee asks first questions first. Why, committee members ask one another and the head of Academic Computing, should we have a computer ethics code? What is it supposed to do?
One answer the committee gets, from the head of Academic Computing, is that it will encourage reasonable behavior with computers on campus. It will reduce, though it won’t guarantee to eliminate, computer abuse. Of course, he says, it will have to be put into student, staff, and faculty handbooks to have that effect. Perhaps it will have to be distributed or lectured on at orientation sessions for new members of the college community. Perhaps everyone will even be asked to sign a statement saying that they have read and agree to abide by the code. But improved ethical behavior is what the head of Academic Computing plans to get from the code. (The response is not unique to computer misuse, of course. An informal survey at Carnegie Mellon University recently uncovered lots of cheating on exams and class assignments. One response was: institute an Honor Code, it will reduce the incidence of these events. (The Tartan, 29 April 1991.)
Committee members, some of them skeptical scientists, wonder: How will a code do this? In fact, is there any evidence that codes do this sort of improving thing?
So the head of Academic Computing elaborates. People may misuse campus computing facilities because they know no better or because they aren’t motivated to do better. The code, he says, will either make members of the campus community more knowledgeable or more motivated.
Sometimes people do wrong because they haven’t realized that certain activities are wrong and harmful. Perhaps staff read other people’s electronic mail because it is so easy to do that it is hard to realize that it’s wrong. In that case, the code can, as the jargon has it, raise their consciousness or awareness. Sometimes people are puzzled about what the right course of action is. May a researcher, for example, look at files recording a student’s revisions of his essays, without that student’s permission, in order to complete a study of how a writing tool is used? The code can, at least sometimes, provide the answer and so put the puzzled person on the right path.
Sometimes people know, for example, that copying licensed software or reading another’s files is thought to be wrong. Sometimes they are even pretty sure in their own minds that these are wrong. But like someone who is pretty sure that eating that pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is not really the best of things to do, temptation can win. A code, especially a code with punishment for violations, says the head of Academic Computing, can provide an extra boost of motivation to do what’s right.
In addition, he points out, disciplining people for computer abuse without an explicit code or other warning can itself sometimes be wrong. What people, especially students, often are heard to say when disciplined is, “No one told us we shouldn’t do it. No one told us we would be punished. No one bothered us about it before.” If so, how can they be justly disciplined? Of course, the reasoning here may sometimes be a little suspect. A person is excused from punishment if he can sensibly have thought his actions were innocent of wrongdoing. If you find yourself at a software vendor’s booth at a computer show, in front of what all the signs suggest is a stack of free demo disks, no one can complain if you help yourself. But can it really be true of students or faculty or others who copy licensed software for home use that they have no reasons to think it a bad act? On the other hand, at least if it’s said in the college computer ethics code that it’s wrong and punishable, then the excuse of innocent ignorance is unavailable.
By now, other members of the committee have thought of reasons for having a code.
One member, a user consultant who spends her time out in the clusters, has thought of a dark reason. Sometimes, she says, people know what’s right and would like to do it. They are not tempted by their own independent desires to do wrong. What happens is that they are pressured by their superiors or circumstances to do wrong. We all hear about this sort of thing in industry, she says, but it happens in schools and universities too. A student assistant is told by a professor to look through computer files the professor hasn’t permission to look through. The new and nervous manager of computer clusters is told to make sure that there are sufficient copies of a statistics package but is not given a big enough budget to achieve this. Even if these people would like to do what’s right, can they resist the pressure that might be put on them to do something that’s wrong? Perhaps, she hazards, a code can help. They can point to its provisions when refusing to comply with such requests.
The software acquisitions manager and the college’s legal counsel jump in. The software acquisitions manager says she thinks it would be easier to work with software vendors, could she give them some assurance that their software wasn’t being pirated. She believes the college’s adoption of a code, with appropriate discipline for illegal software copying, would help. At least, she says, it would show them that Something Is Being Done. The college’s lawyer is worried about liability matters (cf Johnson, Olson, and Post, 1989). While he can’t predict what might happen with certainty, he is worried that a software company might sue for illegal software copying or that a business or private individual might sue for damages caused by a loosed computer virus started on campus or for damages caused to files by student hackers snooping from campus machines. In any of these cases, he says, the courts might treat a member of staff or faculty or even a student as an agent of the college, as someone acting with its permission. The lawyers then would go after the college because it has deeper pockets. Having a code might help protect the college. He, the college’s lawyer, could argue in court that it had taken precautions against just such actions by its members. The computer abusers were not acting as agents of the college and so, whatever their personal prospects, the college itself shouldn’t be held liable.
Perhaps, says one of the skeptical scientists on the committee, what the software acquisitions manager and the college’s lawyer say are true. No doubt they have the knowledge and experience to judge. The head of Academic Computing certainly has a nice theory about the benefits of a code. The user consultant certainly tells a terrible tale. But will a code help? Does anybody know whether it will have the good effects claimed for it?
A business ethics professor has an answer. Many businesses have codes of conduct, he explains. Lots of companies adopt them after misconduct by employees at various levels is uncovered (Lee, 1986). Do they have a good effect? Do they reduce misconduct? Well, he says, there are lots of testimonials by High Company Officials that they do. But these aren’t really worth much more as proof of their effect than testimonials from famous athletes about the benefits of breakfast cereals or training shoes. There is the case of the bribery scandals in the ’70s. Lots of US companies, after they were discovered to have been bribing government officials in foreign countries for one reason or another, adopted codes forbidding bribes. Bribing incidence fell. Did the codes cause that? Maybe, but too much else was going on, government action on bribery and a public outcry, for example, to tell.
On the other hand, he says, there is something pretty solid. Two professors ran some experiments at about the time of the ’70s bribery scandals (Hegarty and Sims, 1979). They wanted to determine, among other things, the effect of ethics codes on willingness to use bribes. The subjects were business school students. They were divided into two comparable groups. Members of both groups were to act as sales managers for a company. Both were told that bribes would increase business. One group was told that unethical behavior was against company policy. And the researchers were reasonably sure, from prior questioning, that all their subjects thought it wrong, unethical, to give bribes. The group told that unethical behavior was against company policy bribed less.
Home > Teaching Resources > Computer Ethics Issues in Academic Computing > Computer Ethics on Campus
HOME | IN
THE NEWS | RESEARCH
RESOURCES
TEACHING RESOURCES | STUDENT
RESOURCES | LINKS
The Research Center on Computing & Society
at Southern Connecticut State University
501 Crescent Street | New Haven, CT 06515
Director: (203) 392-6790 | e-mail: webmaster@computerethics.org
© 2000 – 2004 – Research Center on Computing & Society