Case Analysis on Professional Ethics
Bill Sourour has been a programmer for most of his life as he found his niche at the age of 6. Throughout his young life, the skill of programming opened doors to many great opportunities. He eventually landed a great paying programming job at the young age of 21 at a marketing firm that had many clients that were large pharmaceutical companies. Since there were laws in Canada against advertising pharmaceutical drugs to the public, these companies had general information websites to provide information about the drugs and their possible symptoms. While Sourour was working for this company, he was assigned to program an online quiz that was to evaluate a user’s input and then make it appear to give a knowledgeable recommendation of what kind of drugs they should take based on the results. However, the quiz was programmed to always recommend the clients’ drugs no matter what the user’s input was. What made it even more troubling is that the intended targeted audience was teenage girls. Later, Sourour discovered a news report about a young girl who had committed suicide. She had taken the drugs from the pharmaceutical website that he had helped build. Turns out that the drug had side effects of depression and suicidal thoughts. In the article, we can see how Sourour struggles to process what had happened. He questions if it is his fault or if he had any part in it at all. In this Case Analysis I will argue that the ethics of care shows us that the code was morally problematic because it ignores the impactful relationship between professionals and the public and that Sourour should have done things differently because his actions might have persuaded adolescence to take harmful drugs.
Code of Ethics
The AMC Code of Ethics focuses on how all humans have fundamental rights of well-being and that professionals that work on computational systems need to recognize that they must ensure that these systems do not have harmful consequences on humanity. This ethical code promises to avoid harm to others as they acknowledge the relational claim between computing professionals and their environment -which has shifted from the local to the global. The code includes ways to avoid harm by considering the “potential impacts on all during the design and implementing phases” to evade unintentional harm. This requires professionals to develop a sense of morality as this code of ethics states: that “members must obey existing laws unless there is compelling ethical basis not to do so” while “policies and procedures of the organization in which one participates must also be obeyed.” There is a tension here that “compliance must be balanced” with the understanding that laws can sometimes be considered “Immoral and must be challenged” (AMC). However, at the same time, the code states that laws can be “immoral” as they need to be challenged, it conveniently leaves out the fact that corporate policies can be immoral too and thus they also need to be questioned.
Using this code of ethics to analyze the case study, we can see how Sourour did not break any laws by writing the persuasive program, but that he did fail to realize that he held special trust of the public as a computer professional. When Sourour reflects on that time of the project, he states, “I wish I could tell you that it felt wrong to code something that was basically designed to trick young girls. But the truth is, I didn’t think much of it at the time. I had a job to do, and I did it.” Sourour was so focused on the task at hand that he failed to consider the possible ramifications that could play out when programming code to simply tick people into believing that a quiz did provide credible information. According to the code of ethics, he was honoring his contract with the client of a pharmaceutical company by ensuring the element of the quiz performed as intended. Sourour had little to no thought about the possible consequences of this program design. He was honoring the contract, which at the time to him, seemed to be the right thing to do.
Now, let us turn to the tool of ethics of care and see how it applies here. These codes of ethics state a sense of ethics of care within their declarations of protecting humanity above all else. They highlight the important roles professionals with special trust play in society and the obligations that go along with it. There are certain standards that professionals with special trust must be held to, to ensure the safety and welfare of the public. All these considerations incorporate ethics of care. There is a relational aspect between professionals of special trust (such as doctors, lawyers, and engineers) and the public. The public needs to trust that these types of professionals will uphold a standard of care and adhere to a set of principles to ensure that their work does not harm society. The pharmaceutical company (that is considered a profession that does hold special trust -as it is a part of healthcare) that Sourour created a website for did not uphold ethics of care, as it intentionally targeted and manipulated young audiences to use their drugs to make a profit. The youth is a vulnerable group, as they are very impressionable. They could have used that website’s quiz to help them decide whether to go on a certain drug because they believed that the organization held trustworthy information. Since it was a profession of special trust, we can see how they thought they were making an educated decision based on that quiz. The pharmaceutical company and Sourour failed their relationship with the public by not applying ethics of care when implementing a website that created misleading information designed to look like a credible resource for society.
Armstrong
Certain professions require certain expertise and because of that, Armstrong’s main concept was that these professionals hold a special trust within society. For example, a patient with a broken leg needs to trust that the doctor performing the surgery is competent. The doctor holds a special knowledge that took years of education and experience to gain. Armstrong states that because these types of professions (medicine, law, engineering, etc.) require special knowledge, they in return, hold a type of monopoly. “With great power (knowledge) comes great responsibility.” These professions greatly impact the society in which they conduct their work and because of this, there needs to be a standard that is upheld to eliminate potential harm to society. This is why all professions have a code of ethics. It is in hopes to provide a service ideal: a promise to conduct work that will not harm, but benefit society. However, Armstrong questions the obligatory confidentiality that is often required in these professions. Confidentiality can be seen within these professions as between a doctor with a patient, a lawyer with their client, or an engineer with their employer. To conduct work properly, confidentiality is required in these relationships. However, what if the layer of confidentiality is causing some type of overall harm to the public interest? Armstrong provides many cases where breaching confidentiality is seen as necessary to protect public safety. She argues that there can no longer be absolute confidentiality within these groups of knowledgeable professionals. Their work doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and their actions, or lack of them, affect all parts of society.
In this case study, Sourour upheld confidentiality with his employer and their client, the pharmaceutical company. All parties held special knowledge -Sourour with his programming engineering knowledge, the marketing company with their knowledge of psychology and sociology, and the pharmaceutical company with their knowledge of medicine. The three professions combined their knowledge of expertise and created a mechanism that might have manipulated adolescence to take dangerous drugs. These actions had helped to advance their interest and not the public. We can see here that confidentiality in this situation conflicts with the idea that these professions are supposed to be of service to society, not the other way around.
Now, let us turn to the tool of ethics of care and see how it applies here. If the pharmaceutical company valued the ideal of service for their customers, they would have asked Sourour to create a credible quiz for their users, not a quiz that only had one result. If Sourour realized the ethical concerns this quiz raised, he could of voice those concerns and could have refused to program this part of the website. However, that is not what happened. There was no ethics of care towards the public with this quiz. There was only care about making profits, even at the cost of others. Confidentiality here only served those with special knowledge. To benefit the public in this situation, someone needed to raise moral questions about the ethics of care being violated by this quiz.
Conclusion
In this paper, we explored professional ethics when examining different professionals’ codes of ethics by applying them to this case study. Sourour took part in programming an online quiz that he knew was targeted at adolescence. Oblivious to it or not, he broke the ethical code of care. He failed to recognize the impactful relationship his work had on the society that interacted with the programs he created. This seemed to have an impactful influence on Sourour as he realized the magnitude that his work did have on society. As we find our daily lives ever emerging with the digital, it is important to periodically revisit our codes of ethics and reformulate these codes when necessary. The landscape is changing rapidly, so we need robust ethics to follow suit to ensure that we as a collective are striving for the best interest of everyone.
Reference:
AMC Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct. (2018). AMC Ethics
Armstrong, M. (1994). Confidentiality: A Comparison across the Professions of Medicine, Engineering, and Accounting,71- 87.
Sourour, B. (2016). The code I’m still ashamed of, freeCodeCamp.org