Programmer's Oath

30 Nov 2017

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Ethics

In today’s society, everything has an ethical aspect; people can’t just do things willy-nilly because there are explicit and implicit ethical codes to adhere to. The most basic ethical rule is that you should never harm or cause harm to anybody or anything. Like how doctors’ follow the Hippocratic Oath, I believe that programmers also have code of conduct to follow, when they are doing their jobs. It should be a programmers moral responsibility that none of their programs should put someone in danger or cause them harm.

The Code I’m Still Ashamed of

Although there are a lot of cases in which ethical standpoints are black and white, inthiscase, there are a lot of gray areas. The developer was assigned the task to develop a quiz that determines what drug should be prescribed to the user, however, the client wanted all the answers to lead to one drug. Although, the client is happy with the end product, it is revealed that a girl had committed suicide due to a side effect of the drug and the developer is ashamed because he felt could have prevented the situation. Was this program unethical? Probably. Was the developer unethical? No.

First of all, the developer didn’t have the intention to cause harm to anybody, he was just trying to complete the task that was assigned to him. The program that the client wanted him to produce was unethical because no matter what the user has picked, the answer would always lead to the same drug. Second of all, even if he had chosen to not take on that task, the client could’ve easily found someone else to do the job. I think even if he had told the client of the consequences of the program, the client wouldn’t have listened anyway because the goal was to sell that particular drug. The drug did have bad side effects, but so does every other drug on the market. In conclusion, I don’t think the developer did anything wrong.