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June 2, 2009
This seminar is concerned with Rawl’s Theory of Justice
see
also How Good is Good Enough paper of Collins, et al.
This paper is available from the Papers page of the course web site. Please study this paper before attending your seminar.
In the seminar you should consider the following:
This seminar deals with dataveillance, which is the basis of a lot of modern surveillance.
It should be an objective of this seminar —indeed all seminars— to build well structured ethical arguments. A common weakness in ethical arguments is to identify that some broad activity clearly presents ethical issues, and then the argument becomes concerned with whether the broad activity is ethical or unethical. It is rarely that simple.
Roger Clarke (ANU) coined the name ”dataveillance” in the late 1980 and he has a large website at http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/DV/ on dataveillance.
Get a copy of
More information can be found at http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/DV/.
Discuss the contents of Dataveillance — 15 Years On.
When is a Surveillance Society OK?
http://www.practicalethicsnews.com/practicalethics/2008/06/lex-orwell-when.html
Lex Orwell
IP: copyright, patents, licensing, etc
Most people will have a view on these things as they can’t be avoided.
I suggest that seminars commence by discussing individual attitudes to IP:
At that point, it will be worth looking at
This paper is chapter 3 of the Brian Martin’s book “Information Liberation” by Brian Martin. The complete book can be found at http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/98il/.
A review of the book can be found at http://dannyreviews.com/h/Information_Liberation.html.
This discussion drifts easily into open source development and the free software movement.
A few comments are added here on copyright and patent, as some students are unclear about the distinction.
You might like to have a look at http://progfree.org/Patents/industry-at-risk.html
and decide whether somehow software is different to other manufacturing industry to which patents have applied for 200 years.
Consider:
I’ll leave it to classes to work out issues to be discussed, but you might like to tackle the following.
On the one hand much software looks like mathematics, so should we patent mathematics? Patents were never intended to cover ideas.
But on the other hand, if we take the concept of Software Engineering seriously then surely an engineering process should allow for some patent capability?
This gets to perhaps the nub of the issue: how do we —or if you like, do we— provide for some form of ownership of invention within software engineering? Of course, you can take Brian Martin’s approach and broaden this question to all areas.
Some other possible questions:
Objectives
to get a clear picture of
In week 5, with all the above understood, the objective is to do a more thorough ethical analysis of the case.
Material for discussion
You should bring a copies of the Leverson investigation paper to the seminar. This report has very full pages. To print, use acroread or gv and print at 90%.
You should also consult the teaching material at computingcases.org.
This week’s seminars will begin discussion of the Killer Robot story. This story consists of 9 articles that can be found here and also on the Other Sites page of the class web page . This story forms about half of the Killer Robot book, by Richard Epstein. The book contains extra material that is not online, and contains much interesting ethical discussion and references.
The seminar discussion will be based on the first 6 articles. Please read the articles and bring copies of all 9 articles to the seminar. Please come prepared.
There are some differences between the book and public version of the Killer Robot story.
If you only look at the public version, please also look at the extra prelude articles to the above .
Discuss the case as though it is real. It’s not hard to do.
Remember that this story if being revealed through newspaper reports, and therefore possess all the attributes of a real life incident and its investigation. You are not necessarily getting the truth, or at least not the whole truth.
You might pursue the following points of discussion, but facilitators can proceed however they wish:
Instruction to facilitator: This can be developed into a quite serious discussion. Any person in the class could be charged with manslaughter. Put it to them. You’ve been charged with manslaughter. How do you defend yourself? What would you need to have done to defend yourself against such a charge?
Each student in the class should be able to provide a potential cause. All answers can be written on the board, as for the answers to the above questions.
Try to ensure that the answers are coming from all the articles and not being concentrated on just a few articles. If the latter is happening, look for new reasons.
As well as noting the issues, carry out some discussion of the points.
Which are consequences rather than causes? Try to identify significant causes. If the consequences are undesirable, what would you do to prevent them?
The seminar this week is concerned with Codes of Ethics and professional issues arising from such codes.
Scan the codes looking for any points that distinguish the codes and deserve discussion. Such items might be:
This exercise might be best done by splitting the class into, say, 5 small groups, each of which are assignment two codes.
To handle this part of the seminar, again it is suggested that the class splits into 5 small groups with the following roles:
The chosen cases can be based on known examples or they can constructed “on the spot”, none of the discussion is intended to be prearranged, that is the discussion can be created spontaneously and the teams should defend the charges or justify their behaviour.
Particular moral maze: The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), Tuesday 17/03/09, reprinted an obituary on Konrad Dannenberg, first printed in The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/mar/10/space-exploration-secondworldwar), a PDF will saved here.
Dannenberg worked, during WW2, in Germany as a rocket scientist/engineer on the the development of V1/V2 missiles. These missiles were used on various cities in Europe, many on London and other UK cities.
After the war Dannenberg moved to the USA where he worked on rocket development for the US space program. Finally, he was the manager of the Saturn program that produced the rocket that took the first astronauts to the moon.
It could be interesting to examine how the CoE and CoC contribute to a discussion of the moral dilemmas to be found in Dannenberg’s case.
For the first seminar, please print the Engineering and Software Engineering .
Read the document before the seminar and bring it to the seminar. There are other linked documents and you may wish to print some of those also. In particular, the “Are Software Engineers Engineers” document should be read and perhaps printed.
This is a very wide ranging seminar. Please form your own list of topics that you would like to discuss. That way you can affect the agenda for your seminar.
We will organise the seminar discussion using the Six Thinking Hats, so please read the short summary document on that.
Please remember one thing: you are not coming to the seminar to be supplied information from you facilitator. You are coming to take part in a discussion and that should include initiating discussion.
Also, in general, there are no “right answers”. But this course is very much about your future, so there may be “right questions” for you.