CISC 499 Industry Software Ethics

Ethical obligations have both a professional and a personal dimension. Each are essential to consider; without a sense of personal ethics, one would be indifferent to their effect on the lives of others in circumstances where one’s professional code is silent. So personal ethics helps us to be sure that we take full responsibility for our moral choices and their consequences. This course teaches the students how to gain knowledge and understanding of a number of aspects of this claim, including: the types of harms the public can suffer as result of this work; how software engineers contribute to the food life for others; who exactly are the “public” to whom the engineer is obligated; why the software engineer is obligated to protect the public; what other ethical obligations software engineers are under; how software engineers can actually live up to ethical standards; what is the end goal of an ethical life in software engineering; what are the professional codes of software engineering ethics.