Comparing Three IS Codes of Ethics - ACM, ACS and BCS

Professional Codes of Ethics serve to embody the commitments made by members of that profession. Such Codes are designed to guide ethical decision-making, yet they provide little assistance in the identification and resolution of ethical dilemmas. In the IS global arena, Codes of Ethics tend to be national in scope, thereby increasing the complexity of international decision-making for IS practitioners. Three major IS Codes of Ethics, each with different but overlapping in jurisdiction, are considered and compared in this paper. The Association for Computing Machinery, the Australian Computer Society, and the British Computer Society Codes of Ethics have much in common, but some significant areas of difference. To expedite this comparison process, a tool has been devised by mapping a grammatical model of ethical analysis onto a rich picture soft systems inspired IS model. The findings have implications for global IS ethics.