Midterm 2 Flashcards
State Michael Davis’s definition of ethics.
A set of morally permissible standards of a group that each member of the group (at his/her rational best) wants every other member to follow even if their doing so would mean that he/she must do the same.
According to Michael Bayles, the consensus view is that any profession does what three things?
Any profession…
… requires extensive training
…involves significant intellectual effort
…provides an important service to society
According to Michael Bayles, what three features are common to most professions?
- certification or licensing
- organization of members
- autonomy in one’s work
Who is in charge of the Good Works Project?
Wendy Fischman
How does the Good Works Project define a profession?
Any career in which the worker is awarded a degree of autonomy in return for services to the public that are performed at a high level.
What is the Good Works Project?
A large research project examining how young people deal with ethical problems in their professions.
How are Bayles’s definition of a profession and the Good Works Project’s similar?
“Services to the public” and “performed at a high level” from the Good Works Project are similar to the characteristics identified by Bayles
How are Bayles’s definition of a profession and the Good Works Project’s different?
The definition used by the Good Works Project would include a number of occupations that lack Bayles’s necessary attributes, for example a carpenter.
According to John Kultgen, a profession does what?
7 pts
A profession…
…involves a skill based on a theoretical foundation.
…requires extensive education.
…requires passing an exam.
…is organised and represented by one or more professional organisations.
…adheres to a code of conduct.
…provides altruistic service.
…requires members to assume responsibility for the affairs of others.
According to John Kultgen, what are the core characteristics of a profession? (6 pts)
Core characteristics of a profession:
- is indispensable for the public good.
- members are licensed so their work is sanctioned by the community
- members are independent practitioners serving individual clients
- members do their best to serve their clients impartially without regard to any special relationship
- members are compensated by fees or fixed charges
How does Michael Davis define a profession?
In terms of moral issues, a profession is a number of individuals in the same occupation voluntarily organised to earn a living by opening serving a certain moral ideal in a morally permissible way beyond what law, market, and morality would otherwise require.
According to Davis, what is a moral ideal?
A moral ideal is a state of affairs that, though not morally required, everyone* wants everyone else to approach, all else being equal.
- every rational person at his/her rational best
Davis: “A professional puts profession first”. What does this mean?
When a conflict arises between the professional’s code and the policy of an employer or perhaps even the law, the professional’s code must take precedence.
According to Davis, what is professionalism tied to?
A code of ethics.
According to Davis’s model, ethical standards may take the form of what?
Rules, principles, or ideals.
In ethical standards, what are “rules”?
Rules tell us certain things we must do (obligations) and certain things we must not do (prohibitions).
In ethical standards, what are “principles”?
Principles are truths that are to be consistently maintained unless there is a compelling reason to do otherwise.
In ethical standards, what are “ideals”?
Ideals are goals that are inherently good to achieve. However, failure to achieve them is not necessarily wrong.
What are the three definitions of privacy generally given by dictionaries?
1) seclusion
2) secrecy or concealment
3) freedom from intrusion
How do Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren define the right to privacy?
The right to be free from intrusion, or the right to be let alone.
What exactly is meant by “the right to be let alone”?
Freedom from intrusion–a conception of privacy that focuses on the grievance felt by the harmed party and on actions that directly make them feel harassed, embarrassed, or exposed
What is a “right”?
A right is an entitlement owed to a person, and an obligation to respect the rights of others.
What is the technological imperative?
Because a particular technology means that we can do something, then this action either
a) ought to be undertaken (as a moral imperative)
b) must be undertake (as an operational imperative), or
c) inevitably will (in time) be undertaken.
What does Judge Richard Posner think about privacy?
Privacy as concealment. He believes that there is no fundamental right to privacy and that people are interested in privacy only because they want to conceal their own wrongdoing or prevent embarrassment.
What are the three main points of Judge Posner’s argument that privacy will eventually be obsolete?
- It is perfectly natural for people to live with little to no privacy, as pre-modern peoples had no privacy.
- Contemporary people do not value individual privacy as we are willing to give up private information in return for very small financial incentives or improvements in convenience.
- Since concealment is most useful to criminals and least useful to honest people, privacy is mostly a social harm that reduces safety, not a social good.
What is the problem with the traditional approach to defining privacy?
Top-down: Starting with a single clear definition, and then discovering that not all privacy problems are covered by that definition.
What is Daniel Solove’s approach to defining privacy?
Bottom-up: Starting with a list of the common kinds of privacy problems, and then building a definition upwards.
What are the four items in Solove’s hierarchy, the Taxonomy of Privacy?
- Information collection
- Information processing
- Information dissemination
- Invasion
Which two items fall under Information Collection?
Surveillance and interrogation
Which five items fall under Information Processing?
Aggregation, identification, insecurity, secondary use, and exclusion
Which seven items fall under Information Dissemination?
Breach of confidentiality, disclosure, exposure, increased accessibility, blackmail, appropriation, and distortion
Which two items fall under Invasion?
Intrusion and decisional interference
What is the main idea of Solove’s approach?
Rather than endlessly debate what is or is not “privacy”, we ought to get on with the business of solving privacy problems. His taxonomy names the problems so that we can deal with them. It also provides tech makers with a list of things to think about when analyzing their products for potential dangers.
What is libel?
Libel means publishing or broadcasting false statements about another person, usually with the intent of harming the other person’s reputation.
Define “chilling effect”
A situation in which one feels pressure not to do something, even though it is legal to do so, because of fear or prosecution.
What is the Panopticon?
A prison designed by Jeremy Bentham. It allowed for a small number of guards to maintain order over a large prison population. It also dampened the ability of prisoners to organize or riot.
What is Panopticism?
An essay by Michel Foucault that used Bentham’s Panopticon as a metaphor for the role of surveillance in modern society. It explores the influence of persistent
surveillance on society, comparing modern society to the modern prison
What is the point of Panopticism?
It encourages self-discipline through the surveillance or the implication of surveillance. In institutions that follow panoptic design, people simply refrain from doing wrong because they know they are being watched. They engage in self-discipline.
Define piracy.
The intentional illegal copying of copyrighted material.
What is the purpose of intellectual property law?
To make sure that people with good ideas can profit from those ideas, even after the idea is known to everyone.
What is the difference between piracy and theft?
With theft, the original item goes missing. With piracy, a copy is being taken without consent.
What is copyright?
It is the main mechanism for protecting creative works such as art, music, and writing.
What does copyright protect?
Protects “original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression” in the areas of literature, music, drama, pantomime, graphic art, sculpture, motion pictures, sound recordings, and architecture
What does copyright NOT protect?
It does not protect ideas, facts, or common knowledge, and it does not cover creative works until they appear in a tangible fixed form.
What are the five key questions to consider with intellectual property protections?
- What type of thing can be protected?
- What right are reserved for the creator of the work?
- What rights are reserved for the public?
- How does one obtain the protection for a work?
- How long does the protection last?
What is “fair use”?
According to US Code, the fair use of a copyrighted work…for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.
What are the four factors used when considering fair use?
- The purpose and character of the use
- The nature of the copyrighted work
- The amount of the work used in relation to the whole work
- The effect of the use on the value of the work.
What is the doctrine of first sale?
It states that authors are not entitled to a second royalty.
What does DRM stand for?
Digital rights management
What is DRM?
A collection of technologies that work together to ensure that copy-righted content can only be viewed by the person who purchased it.
What does DMCA stand for?
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act
What is the DMCA?
A law passed by US Congress in 1998 to deal with modern copyright issues
State the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA?
No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
What is the problem with the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA?
It makes exercising one’s right of fair use and first sale legally impossible, even though copyright law explicitly gives the public these rights.
What is contributory infringement?
This occurs when an infringement committed by another person would not have happened without your help.
What is vicarious infringement?
This involves an infringement that occurs in an area
under your supervision, and when you should have
been policing and preventing such acts
What is an invention?
Any new and useful process, machine, [article of]
manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement there of.
§ Distinct from an artistic or
creative work
§ Protected by patents
What are the two criteria for patentable inventions?
Novelty and nonobviousness.
What is a trademark?
A legally registered word, phrase, symbol, or other item that identifies a particular product, service, or corporation
What is a floating point number?
A number that is, in general, represented approximately to a fixed number of significant digits (the significand) and scaled using an exponent in some fixed base. The name comes from the fact that the decimal point can “float”, and is thus similar to scientific notation.
How might a computer fail to meet expectations?
- Hardware errors (malfunction)
- Software errors (bugs)
- The computer solves the wrong problem
- Misuse
- Communication failure
- Malice
What is safety-critical software?
Software that may affect someone’s safety if it fails to work properly
What is a decision point?
A place in computer code where the next instruction executed depends on input data
What are control programs?
Programs that control some sort of machinery
What are multiprocess programs?
Programs that execute at the same time as one or more other programs
What is the single most important component of reliable software?
The people who create it
What are the three major tasks of software development?
Requirements, specification and design, and implementation
What are requirements engineers?
Specialists who ensure that clients needs are identified and understood
What is Brooks’ Law?
“Adding people to a late project makes it later.”
What is malware short for?
Malicious software
What are the five most prevalent types of malware?
Worm, virus, spyware, Trojan horse, and rootkit
What’s a worm?
A program that makes copies of itself and propagates those copies through a network to infect other computers
What’s a virus?
Like a work, but which resides in another program that must execute for the virus to propagate itself.
What is spyware?
A computer program that is secretly installed for the purpose of collecting information about the computer user(s)
What is a Trojan horse?
A piece of software that masquerades as an innocent program, but that is actually designed for a malicious purpose.
What is a rootkit?
A program that embeds itself into a computer’s operating system and acquires special privileges that would normally be available to the operating system.
What is a hacker?
Someone who writes and deploys malware.
What is a phishing scam?
It’s a scam that attempts to fool or frighten a person into revealing key information.
