Ethics, morals and watnot!

Ethics - (from Greek ἦθος meaning "custom") is the branch of axiology, one of the four major branches of philosophy, which attempts to understand the nature of morality; to define that which is right from that which is wrong. The Western tradition of ethics is sometimes called moral philosophy. – Wikipedia.

Humanity is based on some very fundamental and basic guidelines of which “morals” is a major component. Morals can be defined as “that which is right from that which is wrong”. But how do we define by whose morals should we adhere?

To further confuse the issue most people take guidance from different fields, like religion, politics, race, community, gender etc. Since no man belongs to just one of these field the outcome was total and disastrous complications and misunderstandings.

For example: - In India, a father, Muslim by religion who religious morals did not allow the consumption of alcohol was forced to save his daughter’s life by allowing the doctors to use medicines with alcohol content. Being the resident of a very old and conservative community and a Quazi or religious cleric, he was shunned by his community for this humane and moralistic act.

To understand or differentiate the various morals, man introduced the concept of ETHICS or “That which attempts to understand the nature of morality.” Or “that which tries to understand what composes moral behavior” There are many different fields and institutions that make up the human world. Some fields can be categorized as personal and some professional, therefore the divisions of ethics into professional or work ethics and personal or individual ethics.

Personal Ethics:

That which a person’s heart feels is right or wrong towards his friends, family etc based on a personal and intimate level. For example: - Britain, in the olden days, held strong ideas of moral behavior by women. Such as, it was considered immoral for a woman to show her ankle in public or to be seen dancing more than twice with the same man. Such moral ethics are still based on societal rules. As we have seen, over the decades since that time, it is no longer immoral for women to attend nude beaches or wear bikinis that show off nearly all of their bodies. This again is rules by society’s laws.

Mona Lisa Smile greatly captured the progression of women in the early 50’s in America. A free-thinking art professor teaches conservative 50's Wellesley girls to question their traditional societal roles. According to the movie, the women of that era were taught to be good housewives and how to please their husbands. Julia Roberts, as a new age progressive thinker, shows the girls how to live life, though it was against the rules or societal morals of that time. As the tagline famously goes “In a world that told them how to think, she showed them how to live.”

Another kind of personal ethic can be regarding True and False. For example: To a sibling it is unethical to speak out against his brother or sister no matter what lies he needs to adopt. However for the same person it is ethical to advise his parents that another has lied to them.

Examples of personal ethics in different situations:

A friend would try to respect and adhere as much as possible to his friend’s different religious ideas.

For example, I share an apartment with my friends, and they are vegetarians and I am not, so I respect and adhere not to cook anything in their vessels, as it would be a breach to their religious morals.

Professional Ethics:

That which a worker feels is right or wrong in his work environment on a professional level.

For example: In a company that pays on commission basis, it is unethical or wrong professionally to try to interfere and take a colleague’s sale as your own. On the other hand it is ethical to advise your employer that an action taken by a fellow colleague is affecting the company’s reputation or business.

Most professionals can feel uncomfortable in making decisions that might affect their colleagues’ employment status negatively. The dilemma for them is whether to adhere to their professional ethics or morals or to adhere to their personal ethics or morals.

Examples of Professional Ethics in different Fields:

Artistic Ethics: - An artist would consider it deceitful and unethical to copy fellow artists’ ideas.

Musical ethics: - A musician would consider it unethical to copy or insert a fellow musician’s individualistic song or tune.

Similarly a writer would not write a story that hints a connection or similarity to another author’s writing.

An architect would not like to build using another colleague’s idea.

All these fields have defined ethics or morals based on their profession and their individualistic need to create that which is characteristic to their personality or unique ideas.

Ethics, as defined, refers to the rules and standards governing the conduct of an individual with others. As technology and computers became more and more a part of our everyday lives, we must understand that the problems that have always plagued business and conduct will continue to be a problem. In fact, a new medium can provide even more difficult questions of judgment. In other words, since the introduction of the World Wide Web, the definition of ethics has evolved, too. A new type of ethics known as computer ethics has emerged. Computer ethics is concerned with standards of conduct as they pertain to computers.

Computer ethics has come a long way, ever since it has emerged. The most pressing of them are the ones related to Privacy, Copyright and censorship. And there are other issues like Internet piracy, Big brother (a term which means the organization is snooping on the employees), file sharing, pornography, SPAM in a broader prospective.

Some years ago, the file sharing site, Napster, was sued and the creator taken to court by some well known music companies. The creator of Napster was just creating a technology or a program for users who connect to his network to share files among them selves. He was slapped with huge fines and jail sentence, while the main culprits, the seven hundred thousand odd users, went scot-free. But have they been able to stop it? The answer is NO; Napster gave way to other file sharing programs like Ares, kazaa, Limewire and many others.

Another ethical issue is Music sharing. I know and am a member of many forums and sites which give free music downloads. How ethically correct is banning sharing of music? It is true, the artists are losing money, but how far are they correct is trying to stop it? Their music is good, listen-worthy; hence many people are sharing it or downloading it. And the artists earn enough when they go on the big stage shows, more than enough I can say. To quote from a well known television series, South park, “…because that’s what real artists do, people are always gonna find a way to copy our music or swap it for free..if we were real musicians we should play and make songs so that people can listen…….”

Privacy, from the basic system administrator to the large amount of data the government has about us, everyone has some way of getting into users data, their personal details, their professional data, and a lot of other stuff. How do we decide how much of it is ethical and how much of it is not? How safe are our bank details, our shopping tastes, our private lives and we ourselves?

While I was working as a system administrator, I had full access to everyone’s files and information including their passwords, secret questions, answers, and company data. How much of it am I supposed to know, as part of my job? And how much of the information that I now know should I not have known?

Computers are taking over millions of jobs, as we speak; they are used in place of people in the form of ATM’s, aircraft controls, machine operators etc. Is this ethical? Computers do work faster and more efficiently than humans, it doesn’t mean we fire our employees and rely totally on computers.

Censorship is a big concern and an ethical issue which needs to be addressed. Much of the shady part of the internet, which is banned from hosting in many countries, is being hosted by other European countries. How ethical are the country’s laws in hosting such material?

What about SPAM? A good amount of advertisement is always good, but where do we draw the line? And spam spreads because, the companies whom we trust with our email addresses, and the programs which we trust and use, contain bots and snoop ware, which finds out our lifestyle and sends advertisements in bulk to our mails.

A Spam mail which promises the user some millions in money are considered unethical where as a random pyramid system or network marketing which fools people by promising them the same is considered ethical by law.

When Bill Gates included Internet Explorer in the new versions of windows, most of the computing community considered it unethical of him to do it. His decisions drove Netscape towards bankruptcy and further more towards its extinction. For him it was a strategic business decision, for others it was unethical.

Computers are a great way of using technology, but where does morality come into picture? Morality must play catch-up to technology that has leap-frogged ahead. Without knowledge about computer ethics, we are not fully equipped to enter the new world of online society – and you will need to enter that world, whether you choose a career in art, business, programming or anything else.