In this module you will learn and practice three frameworks designed to integrate ethics into decision making in the areas of practical and occupational ethics. The first framework divides the decision making process into four stages: problem specification, solution generation, solution testing, and solution implementation. It is based on an analogy between ethics and design problems that is detailed in a table presented below. The second framework focuses on the process of solution testing by providing four tests that will help you to evaluate and rank alternative courses of action. The reversibility, harm/beneficence, and public identification tests each "encapsulate" or summarize an important ethical theory. A value realization test assesses courses of action in terms of their ability to realize or harmonize different moral and nonmoral values. Finally, a feasibility test will help you to uncover interest, resource, and technical constraints that will affect and possibly impede the realization of your solution or decision. Taken together, these three frameworks will help steer you toward designing and implementing ethical decisions the professional and occupational areas.
Two online resources provide more extensive background information. The first, www.computingcases.org, provides background information on the ethics tests, socio-technical analy sis, and intermediate moral concepts. The second, http://onlineethics.org/essays/education/teaching.html, explores in more detail the analogy between ethics and design problems. Much of this information will be published in Good Computing: A Virtue Approach to Computer Ethics, a textbook of cases and decision making techniques in computer ethics that is being authored by Chuck Huff, William Frey, and Jose A. Cruz-Cruz.
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