Solution Evaluation Tests
- REVERSIBILITY: Would I think this is a good choice if I were among those affected by it?
- PUBILICITY: Would I want to be publicly associated with this action through, say, its publication in the newspaper?
- HARM/BENEFICENCE: Does this action do less harm than any of the available alternatives?
- FEASIBILITY: Can this solution be implemented given time, technical, economic, legal, and political constraints?
Harm Test Set-Up
- Identify the agent (=the person who will perform the action). Describe the action (=what the agent is about to do).
- Identify the stakeholders (individuals who have a vital interest at risk) and their stakes.
- Identify, sort out, and weight the expected results or consequences.
Harm Test Pitfalls
- Paralysis of Action-considering too many consequences.
- Incomplete analysis-considering too few results.
- Failure to weigh harms against benefits.
- Failure to compare different alternatives.
- Justice failures-ignoring the fairness of the distribution of harms and benefits.
Reversibility Test Set-Up
- Identify the agent
- Describe the action
- Identify the stakeholders and their stakes
- Use the stakeholder analysis to select the relations to be reversed.
- Reverse roles between the agent (you) and each stakeholder: put them in your place (as the agent) and yourself in their place (as the target of the action
- If you were in their place, would you still find the action acceptable?
Reversibility Pitfalls
- Leaving out a key stakeholder relation.
- Failing to recognize and address conflicts between stakeholders and their conflicting stakes.
- Confusing treating others with respect with capitulating to their demands (Reversing with Hitler).
- Failing to reach closure, i.e., an overall global reversal assessment that takes into account all the stakeholders the agent has reversed with.
Public Identification Set-Up
- Set up the analysis by identifying the agent, describing the action under consideration, and listing the key values or virtues at play in the situation.
- Associate the action with the agent.
- Identify what the action says about the agent as a person. Does it reveal him or her as someone associated with a virtue/value or a vice?
Public Identification Pitfalls
- Action is not associated with the agent. The most common pitfall is failure to associate the agent and the action. The action may have bad consequences and it may treat individuals with disrespect but these points are not as important in the context of this test as what they imply about the agent as a person who deliberately performs such an action.
- Failure to specify the moral quality, virtue, or value of the action that is imputed to the agent in the test. To say, for example, that willfully harming the public is bad fails to zero in on precisely what moral quality this attributes to the agent. Does it render him or her unjust, irresponsible, corrupt, dishonest, or unreasonable?
Gray Matters in Hughes Exercises
Please view or download it at GM Hughes V2.doc
These exercises present three decision points from Hughes, solution alternatives, summaries of ethics and feasibility tests, and a solution evaluation matrix. Carry out the exercise by filling in the solution evaluation matrix.
This timeline is taken from the Computing Cases website developed and maintained by Dr. Charles Huff at St. Olaf College. Computing Cases is funded by the National Science Foundation, NSF DUE-9972280 and DUE 9980768.
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