Responsibility and the Work of IT-Professionals: From Academia to Practice

Unlike most computer-ethics discussions on issues like hacking, software piracy, or “big” ethical issues, we want to discuss the routine work of ITspecialists and the context in which it is situated. The work of creating and facilitating use of IT-systems offers many routine opportunities to “do the right thing” and many contextual factors hindering this. Thus our analysis starts looking at everyday practice, and re-constructing “responsibility”. With this approach we hope to expose new ethical issues. Using the rich structure and history of the term “responsibility” as a resource, we learn to use essential notions like intention, voluntariness, autonomy, obligation, possibility of foresight, causal influence, (care) responsibility, and attribution and discuss how these relate to the practice of IT practitioners. This discussion aims to give some structure to the messy entanglement of practice, pointing to general problems and issues like: workplace and computing culture, the ability for ethical judgement, showing how global and local actions, collective and individual choices supplement each other.