Transcript CSCI102_02b_MethodsT..

Methods & Tools of Analysis
CSCI102 - Systems
ITCS905 - Systems
MCS9102 - Systems
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Ethics & Morality
• Ethics
– From the Greek ethos
• Morality
– From the Latin mores
• Both refer to character, habit and behaviour
• Ethics is the Study of Morality
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What is Morality?
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There is no agreed definition
Rules of human conduct
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Two kinds of rules of conduct
1.
Directives to guide individuals (microlevel)
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2.
Social Policies (macrolevel)
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Eg: do not steal, do not kill
Eg: software should be protected, respect privacy
Moral Systems
• A system whose purpose is to prevent harm and evil
– Bernard Gert (1998)
• … and should promote human flourishing
– Louis Pojman (2001)
• Are Public & Informal, Rational & Impartial (Gert)
– PUBLIC:
everyone must know the rules
– INFORMAL:
there is no authority enforcing it
– RATIONAL:
based on the principles of logic
– IMPARTIAL:
apply equally to all
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Deriving & Justifying a Moral
System
• Grounds for justifying a moral system
– Religion
• Obedience to divine authority
• Difficult in a pluralistic heterogeneous society
– Legal
• Obedience to a legal system
• Laws not uniform across national boundaries
– Philosophy
• Ethical theory
• Appeal to logical arguments to justify claims and positions
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Cultural & Moral Relativism
• Cultural relativity:
– Different cultures may have different concepts of
right & wrong
– Can right and wrong in a society only be
determined by members of that society?
• Moral relativity:
– Says, no universal standard of morality is possible
because different people have different beliefs
about what is right & wrong
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Why do we need Ethical Theories?
• Why not just use the so-called ‘Golden Rule’ or simply
‘follow your conscience’?
• Golden Rule:
do unto others as you would have them do unto you
– Assumes what you’d accept or desire is what others would
accept or desire!
• Follow your conscience
– Conscience is subjective, and is therefore neither rational or
impartial
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Structure of Ethical Theories
• Must be coherent and comprehensive
• Cannot contain ad hoc, patchwork components
– The “Bork Bill”
• Judge Robert Bork was nominated for the Supreme Court.
• Reporters went to a video store to find out what kinds of movies
Bork rented.
• The US Congress was incensed and passed the Video
Protection Act
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Consequence-Based Ethical
Theories
• Some argue the ends are the best test,
as ethical systems are designed to
produce desirable outcomes
• Utilitarianism: act for the greater good
– People desire happiness, happiness is
therefore good
– If one action makes more people happy
than another, it must be better than the
other
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Consequence-Based Ethical
Theories
• Act utilitarianism
– ‘greatest good’ results for the majority may require
very bad results for a minority
• Rule utilitarianism
– Establish ‘good rules’ to benefit society, and
actions that lie within that rule are acceptable
• Critics dismiss utilitarianism because it is
grounded in consequences and happiness
… “I wont help you with your problem because it wont make me
happy”
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Duty-Based Ethical Theories
• Duty and obligation (Immanuel Kant
1724-1804)
• It is right that we must do our duty, even
it it makes us unhappy
– Humans are essentially rational in nature
and can recognize obligations to each other
– Humans are an “end” in themselves – ie: no
human may be a “means to an end”
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Contract-Based Ethical
Theories
• Contractual agreements between individuals
– Rational beings see the advantage of co-operation
to gain a better life (Thomas Hobbes 1588-1679)
• Social-contract theory criticized as minimalist
– ie: only applies where rules and formal
contracts exist
– Leads legalistic behaviour, remember Telstra and
the teletypewriter?
– No requirement to do good, merely a rule to do no
harm
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Contract-Based Ethical
Theories
• Rights based contract theories
– Negative rights:
right not to be interfered with,
eg: right to own a computer ~ no one is obliged to
provide one, but no-one may prevent you from
having one
– Positive rights:
very rare! And controversial …
eg: US right to receive an education … so does
that mean they must receive the tools and
equipment etc? ‘net access?
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Character-Based Ethical Theories
• Virtue ethics.
– Focus on character development and
acquiring good traits from their habits (Plato,
Aristotle c.400BC, Alasdair MacIntyre 1981)
• Being a moral person
– Requires the right training to acquire the
right qualities
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Character-Based Ethical Theories
• Acquiring correct habits
– When ‘good behaviour’ becomes habit, it
no longer requires a conscious decision
– Difficult to put in place in a large
heterogeneous society
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A Comprehensive Theory?
• James Moor’s just-consequentialist theory (1999)
– What kind of conduct do we want ethics to regulate?
• ID a set of ‘core values’ common to all cultures
• A desirable objective of ethics is to support justice, rights and duties
– IF all we had to do was ‘do no harm’ and perform our duties, ethics
would be easy to understand … BUT … we have to be able to
decide between conflicting options
– Decision process has two steps:
• Deliberation
– Use an impartial standpoint
• Selection
– Weigh the good and bad consequences of the choices
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Tools for Evaluating Cyberethical
Issues
• As we have seen, logic forms a basis for
rational and impartial theorising about
ethics
• We can begin to evaluate ethical issues
by testing the logical validity of claims
and statements
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Logical Arguments
• Structure of a logical argument:
– PREMISE 1
– PREMISE 2 (optional)
– PREMISE 3 (optional)
– …
– PREMISE n (optional)
_________________
– CONCLUSION
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Identifying Logical Fallacies
• Fallacy refers to “faulty reasoning”, not
“being wrong” … as a fallacious
argument can be constructed out of all
true statements!
• Next we see ten ‘informal logical
fallacies’ to assist you to identify
fallacious arguments
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Identifying Logical Fallacies
• Ad hominem argument
– Attack directed to the person rather than to
the substance of the person’s argument
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Identifying Logical Fallacies
• Slippery Slope argument- “edge of the wedge”
– “X could possibly be abused, so we should not allow X”
– “swords can kill, so lets remove them all from society before
we all get killed”
– Fallacy in assuming that the worst consequence will
inevitably follow … the argument itself contains no evidence
to that effect
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Identifying Logical Fallacies
• Fallacy of Appeal to Authority
– PREMISE 1: X is an authority in Y
– PREMISE 2: X said Z
______________________
– CONCLUSION: Z
– An expert chef may have an opinion regarding a brand of
oven, but are they necessarily an expert in electrical design
etc?
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Identifying Logical Fallacies
• False cause fallacy
(post hoc ergo prompter hoc – after this, therefore because of this)
– Just because X preceded Y, does not mean that X caused Y
– Circular logic:
the truth of the premise presupposes the truth of the
conclusion, rather than supplying the evidence for the
conclusion
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Identifying Logical Fallacies
• Begging the question
– The premise presupposes the truth of the conclusion it is
trying to establish (circular logic again)
– Eg: “OO programming languages are superior to non
structured programming languages because OO languages
are structured”
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Identifying Logical Fallacies
• Fallacy of Composition
– Confuses the characteristics that apply to
the parts of a whole, with the characteristics
of the whole itself
• Eg: “Brand X PC is the best because it has the
fastest processor and twice the RAM and
comes with a better suite of software than any
other”
• Eg: “this film has academy award winning stars
in it – so it must be an academy award winning
film”
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Identifying Logical Fallacies
• Fallacy of Division
– Infers attributes that apply to the whole
must apply to the parts
• Eg: “This was voted the best computer in 2002,
so it must have had the most advanced
graphics card”
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Identifying Logical Fallacies
• Fallacy of Ambiguity
– One or more terms used ambiguously
• Eg: “humans think and computers think, so computers are
human”
• Eg: ‘Computers have memory. Memory allows us to
remember our childhood. So, Computers can recall their
childhood”
• NO – because the terms “think” & “memory” are
ambiguous, the ‘thinking’ each of these entities does is
not the same thing, and the ‘memory’ is not of the same
kind
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Identifying Logical Fallacies
• Appeal to the People (Argumentum ad Populum)
– Assumption that there is strength in numbers
– “greatest album ever! 50 million Elvis fans cant be wrong!”
– “slavery is cool, 100 million slave owners cant be wrong!”
– “its OK to pirate music, everyone does it!”
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Identifying Logical Fallacies
• The Many / Any Fallacy
– PREMISE 1: many items of kind A have feature B
_______________________________________
– CONCLUSION: any item of kind A has feature B
– “There are many acceptable ways to travel from Sydney to
Hong Kong, therefore it is acceptable to travel from Sydney to
Hong Kong by bicycle”
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Identifying Logical Fallacies
• The Virtuality Fallacy
– PREMISE 1: X exists in cyberspace
– PREMISE 2: cyberspace is virtual
____________________________
– CONCLUSION: X (or effect of X) is not real
– Virus attacks?
– Pornography?
– Paedophilia?
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Constructing an Argument
• Arguments are used to justify things, to convince
people of things etc.
• Generally arguments will succeed or not depending
on how well constructed they are, and on their
“argument strength”
• How do we determine argument strength?
– Need to understand difference between valid & invalid
arguments
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Valid & Invalid Arguments
• We can use an informal system developed by John
Nolte (1984).
– Don’t need to know anything about the truth of the claims in
the argument, we determine if the arguments conclusions
would necessarily follow from its premises (when they are all
assumed to be true)
– To demonstrate an argument is INVALID, we need only find
one counterexample
• This isn’t enough though: for “sound” argument,
we need to test IF the premises are true in the real
world …
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Sound Arguments
• Soundness is a test of the truth in the
real world of the premises in an
argument.
• A valid argument can be sound or
unsound.
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Invalid Arguments
• Has at least one counterexample, even if the premises and
conclusion are true in the real world.
• PREMISE 1: all CEO’s of major US software corp’s have been
US citizens
• PREMISE 2: Bill Gates is a US citizen
______________________________________
• CONCLUSION: Bill Gates is CEO of a major US software corp.
• Try substituting “Julia Roberts” or “George Bush” ?
This is invalid because there are counter examples
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Inductive Arguments
• Not all invalid arguments are weak however
• Some are inductive
– These may not guarantee the truth of their conclusions, they provide
a high degree of probability for their conclusions.
– PREMISE 1:“75% of people who own iMac’s previously owned
Apple IIe computers”
– PREMISE 2: “my friend has an iMac”
________________________________
– CONCLUSION: “My friend owned an Apple IIe”
– Clearly invalid, but the “75%” makes it far stronger than the Bill
Gates argument … (there are very few US software corp CEO’s, but
250+million US citizens!)
– Inductive invalid arguments can be stronger than valid, but
unsound arguments!
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Argument Strength
Arguments
Valid
Unsound
WEAK
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Invalid
Sound
Inductive
STRONG
Fallacious
WEAK
CSCI102 Week 2(b)
• Thank you to Bob Brown who prepared
the material for this lecture.
• Main Reference:
– Herman T. Tavani. Ethics & Technology:
ethical issues in an Age of Information and
Communication Technology. Hoboken, NJ:
John Wiley, 2004.
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