In the article The Code I’m Still Ashamed Of, by Bill Sourour, Bill explains a story of a time from his early adulthood. This story addresses some ethical concerns about a website that he coded for a pharmaceutical company. Within this website was an embedded quiz that “tested” the patient in question, teenage girls, and suggested them a cure, or in this case a drug. However, the problem with the quiz was that all roads except one led back to a particular drug. This drug had severe negative side affects that caused depression and suicide thoughts. The day that the website launched, there was a new article of a young girl killing herself because of the drug that was being pushed from that website. In this Case Analysis I will argue that Utilitarianism shows us that the code was morally problematic because it suggested only an option on two drugs as a cure, and that Sourour should have approached this issue differently because the website ended up being more of an advertisement for the drug then the road to a cure for affected teenage girls.
If we compare the IEEE Code of Ethics to Bill’s story, we can see many ethical concerns. The first code in IEEE’s Code of Ethics states, “To hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public, to strive to comply with ethical design and sustainable development practices, and to disclose promptly factors that might endanger the public or the environment”. Another code that can be related to this case analysis is “To avoid injuring others, their property, reputation, or employment by false or malicious action”. If we apply these codes to Bill’s scenario, we can see obvious implications of ethical error. We can see that both rules have not been followed as they should have been. As a professional coder, Bill should have followed a professional guide of ethics when implementing this website.
This “quiz” is an obvious breach of one’s safety and health. The reason for this is because the way that the quiz is suggesting only two drugs. The main drug that is being pushed and a counter drug in case the person is allergic. However, these drugs might not be the best drugs for a teenage girl to take. This quiz is not taking all the medical aspects of a person’s health into consideration when suggesting a cure. Instead it’s just suggesting that everyone take the advertised drug unless they are allergic. It is not stated in the article, but I would imagine that there were many more teenage girls that got negative health benefits from taking the suggested drug. The website did not uphold people’s safety or health, nor did it avoid injuring people. Nothing about this quiz and website was morally right.
As a professional, Bill should have expressed his concerns about the website and the quiz in question. By coding the website and allowing it to be published Bill has gone against his professional code of ethics. Bill should address his concerns with the website to his boss or the company that was providing the design for the website. If the customer disagreed to change the design of the website Bill should have declined to do the job. However, if they did fancy his offer for a website rework this could have been achieved in an ethical manner.
One way that this code could have been implemented in a more ethic manner would have been to do a complete rework of the quiz. The quiz originally only suggested two different drugs, however if they upped the number of drugs that the quiz can suggest this could lead to an increased greater good for the greatest amount of people. The suggestion of just two drugs is a severe cripple for the good of the people that are visiting the website looking for health guidance. Increasing the number of suggested drugs and the complexity of the quiz would yield greater results for the right cure to the visitors of the website. Now, this would obviously only work if the quiz was designed the right way. This in turn would help more people instead of just helping the people that needed the original drug in the first place.
By reworking the website and the quiz they are upholding the safety of the visitors, the health of the visitors, and are also complying with a more ethical design that would prove less danger to the public. It is hard to relieve something of all the danger that can come with it, especially in the medical health field. However, by ensuring that the quiz can suggest a broader range of drugs you can target a more specific audience and suggest a more specific cure based on the symptoms.
By reworking the code by the above suggested methods, Sourour would have been taking a Utilitarian approach of ethics. By leaving most bias out the window and allowing for a site that can reach more people and suggest more cures, we are able to ensure that more people are happy and safe as a result. This in turn is going to align promptly with a more rule based Utilitarian approach. The rule based Utilitarian approach allows us to fine tune how the solution is implemented to increase the happiness of the greater good without leading down a road that suggests violence.
In Mary Armstrong’s, A Comparison across the Professions of Medicine, Engineering and Accounting, Mary is stating how professions are just a group of people with expertise. Having these professions can lead to a monopoly in that area of study, which is why professionals must carry themselves within the publics best interest. With these ethical guidelines there can be many practices that completely deter from the normal ethical compass. It has been suggested that a lot of these careers need professional autonomy or confidentiality to conduct themselves in the manner that they do. This can be seen through the eyes of doctors and lawyers. If doctors had to report crime to the police every time they got a patient that admitted to doing a crime no criminal would see doctors, and this would result in many people dying because of that.
Mary’s article goes on to say that professionals have prima facie duties. These prima facie duties state that professionals have a duty to uphold unless there is a more ethical overriding factor like confidentiality or public safety. As a coding professional you have a prima facie duty to make your best work and uphold the safety of the people that are exposed to this work. For example, you have a prima facie duty to code a secure website so that people are protected on this website. It would be going against this duty if you coded a website that was purposefully malicious and stole peoples data. However, you can override your prima facie duty when some ethical concern is on the line. If your company came to you and made you code a purposefully malicious site, this could override your prima facie duty. At that point you would be reporting the situation to a higher power and doing what they call whistleblowing.
In the case of Bills code, Bill had a prima facie duty to uphold the professional ethics of coders. These professional ethics are in place to protect the safety of the public and the corporation in question. However, with Bill’s company making Bill code a website that did not take into consideration the publics safety, Bill has disregarded his prima facie duty to his profession. Instead of coding the website Bill should have addressed these ethical concerns and reported them to a higher up official within the company.
Because Bill worked for the company, Bill has a duty to uphold the privacy of the company. However, this privacy trust can be broken when the safety of the public is in question. Typically, the action of reporting issues like this to a higher power than your company would result in criticism from the company and a derogatory mark to yourself in future job endeavors. Therefore, they created whistle blowing to ensure that there are less negative side effects to reporting ethical issues with big businesses like this. Bill should have refused to do the code the moment he realized that the quiz was suggest 99% of the time the drug that the company was pushing instead of suggesting other cures. Instead, Bill should have whistle blown and ensured that the project was stopped immediately, and the problem been remediated with a different set of code.
The quiz completely disregarded the safety of the individuals that would be visiting the website daily. My justification for this is the lack of variety on the website and the lack of complexity within the quiz. By adding more complexity to the quiz and varieties of drugs for solutions, they would be able to suggest a better cure for individuals while also taking out the bias of the company’s drug. By doing this solution they would be able to provide the greatest amount of good for the greatest amount of people.
By either, refusing to code the website or by changing the code of the website to incorporate more drugs and solutions, Sourour would have been aligning with a Utilitarian approach to solve this issue. By refusing to code the website he would be preventing the all the negative affects this drug could have on anyone that would have originally been exposed to the website. By changing the website code, they could suggest better cure for people that are visiting, increasing the number of cured patients. Both solutions help more people than it does harm. This allows both solutions to be aligned with a Utilitarianism approach.
In summary, by changing the code of the website entirely we could create a better solution for everyone involved. The code of the website would create a more complex quiz for the applicants allowing a more fine-tuned understanding of the symptoms the person is experiencing. With this information the quiz would suggest a drug to take. However, instead of only suggest two drugs, there would be a database of drugs, allowing a greater rate of actual solutions.
There could be a great amount of backlash with a solution like this, however. Creating a “solve all” quiz would be nearly impossible without tons of research. Another negative aspect of this is that the company that suggested the website in the first place really would not want to upfront the money to create a website that is going to push more drugs than just their own. The website would need to be sponsored by the government to create a website that does not contain bias. By having the government sponsor a website like this it would create an ethical and professional environment for all that are employed on the project.
Another alternate view that could come from changing up the website like this is that it is completely disregarding the original website purpose. The original purpose was to push the drug over all others. However, the new website would create a fairer chance at actual cures versus pushing the drug in question. Creating a solution for this problem using Utilitarianism might not be the best approach for this scenario. However, there can be a solution using this ethical approach it just might take a lot of time and money, which is not necessarily a bad thing.