Day 7- Ethics

Figure 1:Ethics (Ethics.ukzn.ac.za, 2009)

Today's discussion was about ethics. According to Landauer et al. (2011) ethics has defined as "the branch of study dealing with what is the proper action for man". In other words ethics explains what is correct and what is wrong. Ethics are important for humans. Because person's day to day life goes or depends on the ethics that own by him/her.

Mr. Eranjan our module lecturer started the discussion with asking from the class "What is the meaning of ethics?" Students gave different answers, but from those answers the real definition did not come out. Because of that Mr. Eranjan started to explain what are ethics. There are mainly two components that directly affect on ethics. They are religion and law. 

• Religion-Programming of our mind. When we do a particular work tell whether it is right or wrong.
• Law- Set of guidelines

Religion covers certain spectrum like say what is right and wrong. Remainder is discussed in law like actions of people etc. Ethics change country to country, society to society and culture to culture. This statement proves from following example.

1. Public Affection- Public affection is allowed in western countries. It is ethical for those countries but in Asian countries like Sri Lanka public affection is not allowed means unethical.
2. In Sri Lanka if we do not look after our parents we think it is unethical but in western countries like US parents do not depend on their children.

The reason for unethical problems is people do not have morale values. People need to have morale values to be a good citizen. Lecturer further explained about moral values. "Morale values that guides someone life acting as a decision maker to high light what is right and wrong." From this statement it explains, famly background, the society that a person belongs to will affect on the ethics that person owns.

After explained about the general ethics, lecturer started discuss about the relationship of IT and ethics. According to lecturer IT creates loads of unethical problems.

Following mention issues have five moral dimensions,

• Information rights and obligations
• Property rights and obligations
• Accountability and control
• System quality
• Quality of life

One of the main unethical problems in IT is privacy of users. Organization take information about users without the knowledge of users. In-order to improve their market concepts and programs they observe the behavior of people. As an example they get records of links a certain person daily use or visit, get information from email accounts etc. This is unethical because the user does not have any idea about this.

After that he discussed about the connection of intimacy and the ethics. More information you share with someone you have more intimacy with that person. As an example More the organization serves the customer, customer relationship will build up in a better way. This is why organization track on peoples' behavior or actions.

After that the lecturer discussed about the basic concepts in ethics.

• Responsibility- The person acts more ethically is more responsible. When doing something look at the consequences of particular action. All the actions will be accountable.
• Accountability- Responsibility on the action or decision made.
• Liability- All legal procedures to find out a person is guilty or not for an unethical action. If the person found as guilty he gets a punishment according to the law.

After that lecturer gave a task to groups. The task was to have a role play on the topic of "How to handle ethical situation". Our group did the role play on the scenario of APIIT dress code. From our group Cindy, shavindra and Sumedha did the role-play.

Figure 2:Role Play

From today's lecture I learnt mainly about the unethical problems that people get with the development of the IT. The values of cultures and ethics and how the external factors affect on ethics. I found today lecture was interesting and there were lots of things that I can add and improve my-self.

"Ethics is not definable, is not implementable, because it is not conscious ; it involves not only our thinking, but also our feelings."- Valdemar W. Setzer

References:-

Ethics.ukzn.ac.za. (2009). Ethics. [Online] available at:

http://ethics.ukzn.ac.za/Libraries/Default_Image_Library/ethics-9651.sflb.ashx [Accessed 23rd July 2012]

Sezter. W. (2012). Quotes of Ethics. [Online] available at:
http://thinkexist.com/quotes/valdemar_w._setzer/ [Accessed 23rd July 2012]