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Sibylla Bostoniensis
I'd hammer out danger, I'd hammer out a warning
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How Professional Ethics Work [soc, law/ethics/morality, Patreon]
Jul. 1st, 2023 02:59 am
siderea: (Default)
[personal profile] siderea
Canonical link: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1817931.html
0.
The topic of professional ethics in software development is
circulating on social media again, this time precipitated by AI.
As a psychotherapist, I am subject to professional ethics; in my long
ago training in engineering, I also brushed up against the
professional ethics of engineering. Furthermore, I've been taking an
interest in comparative professional ethics for some time.
I think that the field of software development having professional
ethics is an excellent idea. I am strongly in favor. But this present
discussion, like all previous iterations, reveals that most people
have a grave misunderstanding of how professional ethics work, or
what they even really are. Professional ethics don't work the way
most people think they do. Especially the way most people who work in
software think they do.
The first thing to understand is that professional and personal
ethics are very different things.
Personal ethics are, bluntly, opinions an individual person holds.
They are opinions as to what constitutes right or wrong conduct.
These opinions the individual adopts out of their personal judgment
about such things. The individual is free to change their mind about
what personal ethics they abide by.
Professional ethics are not that.
Now, you can have personal opinions about your profession and what
constitutes ethical conduct in it. Those aren't professional ethics.
Those are still your personal ethics concerning your profession (or
some profession). That is not what is meant by "professional ethics"
in any profession that has an ethical code.
For one thing, professional ethics are received. You don't decide
what your professional ethics are. You are told what the ethics of
your profession are. Indeed, they are part of terms of participating
in that profession, more on which below.
Now, you may get to participate in the development and refinement of
your profession's code of ethics, and even convince others to adopt
your personal ethics concerning your profession into the profession's
ethics, but that's precisely because they are collective not
individual. They are a set of ethics that is universal to a
population of professionals. They are not an opinion an individual
has, they are facts - the fact there is a codified standard of
conduct incumbent upon the individual - that the individual is aware
of.
Those are some pretty big differences, just right there. But there's
more that are even more consequential.
Professional ethics are codified, and because they are codified, they
can be enforced. Indeed, professional ethics are codified so that
they can be enforced.
For some - maybe all - professions, their professional codes of
ethics have the force of law. You are not free to decide not to
follow them, so long as you belong to one of those professions.
This is what makes professional ethics powerful to change the conduct
of professionals. And the fullness of that power is not obvious to
those who are not subject to them.
You see, the purpose of professional ethics is not just to make
professionals not chose to do bad things. A far more important
purpose of professional ethics is to make professionals resistant to
being coerced into doing bad things by others.
Professional ethics does not do this by educating professionals as to
what is right and wrong, though it does do that. It does not do this
by inspiring professionals and moving their hearts to be sympathetic
to those who would be harmed by transgressing professional ethics,
though it does that too. It does not do this by imbuing professionals
with courage or consciences, though it can do that too.
Professional ethics makes professionals resistant to being suborned
by setting up a situation involving the might of the state in which
the consequences for the professional of doing wrong are vastly worse
than any pressure a private citizen can bring to bear.
Professional ethics are the system by which professionals take
themselves hostage.
And the way it does this is by means of licensure.
1.
I'm sorry, software developers. You're not going to like what I have
to tell you.
I am well aware that the idea of there being professional licensing
of software developers is wildly unpopular among programmers. People
who program for a living trend hard to the libertarian and want not
to be subject to the government.
That's fine. But then you can't have professional ethics.
Professional ethics is entirely, absolutely, and wholly bound to the
concept of professional licensure.
It's understandable why programmers would reject licensure out of
hand: if you have no idea what licensure of a profession gets you,
and you see no up-side at all, why allow a government to intrude in
your business and mess with your livelihood?
And don't get me wrong, as a licensed professional, I'll be the first
to affirm: oh my god having the government involved in your
profession is awful. If you think you know for injustice and
government overreach, you know nothing until you have a professional
license. The down-sides are, shall we say, considerable.
I'm still in favor.
Now, some of you are going to assume that the benefit I find in it is
a kind of protectionism, that by limiting practitioners to those with
licenses wages for practitioners is kept higher. Nope, not in my
profession in my state. Here in Massachusetts "psychotherapist" isn't
a controlled term. Anybody can legally hold themselves out to the
public as a psychotherapist and charge for providing psychotherapy.
Furthermore, licenses in my profession aren't limited in number.
Anybody who can fulfill the requirements gets licensed. These aren't
like liquor licenses, where there's only so many to go around.
There's no attempt to constrain the number of people in the
profession.
Well, then (I can hear somebody thinking) it must be because
licensure is a way to keep up the quality of service provided by
members of a profession? Not primarily. Plenty of sucky licensed
psychotherapists. Licensing does very little to make sure you're good
at your job. You have to be pretty catastrophically terrible for your
license board to have much to say about it.
No, the real benefit of licensure is professional ethics. Licensure
is what turns the common ethical sentiments of a bunch of
professionals into professional ethics - by giving those ethics
teeth, and putting the might of the state behind them.
It works like this.
2.
To understand why professional ethics and professional licensure are
tightly coupled, first you need to know what licensure even is, and
why we have it.
Professional licensure is a way of safely building exceptions into
the social contract.
For instance, the social contract holds that you don't get to go
around stabbing people - and, commensurately, other people don't get
to go around stabbing you. You forfeit the behavioral option of
solving problems by stabbing people in exchange for not getting
stabbed by people. The state, for it's part in the social contract,
forbids anybody to do any stabbing, and if anybody gets stabby, the
state will use its monopoly on violence to enforce the prohibition on
stabbing people.
But! What if you really wanted to stab people... for good? What if
there were a way that stabbing people could benefit the people you
stabbed? What if they would die if they didn't get stabbed? In that
case, a general prohibition on stabbing means that there will be
people who die for want of getting stabbed. While free-for-all
stabbing seems obviously socially undesirable, preventing beneficial,
life-saving stabbings seems also socially undesirable.
What possible sort of stabbing could be beneficial? Oh, a ceasarian
section. The amputation of a gangrenous limb. The excision of a
tumor.
You know: surgery.
But just because some medical problems can be solved by stabbing
people doesn't mean that every attempt to solve medical problems by
stabbing people is going to be successful. It's actually pretty hard
to solve medical problems by stabbery. It generally requires a lot of
training in how to stab precisely and carefully. It generally
requires not just stabbing people to get them open, but stabbing them
further with a needle to sew them back up afterwards. It generally
entails skills and practices beyond the stabbing itself, such as
successful implementation of asepsis and infection control, and
post-stabbing care.
If a society says, "oh, well, I guess stabbing isn't forbidden if you
mean well when you do it", that society winds up with a whole bunch
of gnarly failure modes. You get well-meaning incompetents hanging
out shingles offering to treat problems with stabbing, and leaving a
trail of maimed and dead people behind them. You get charlatans also
hanging out shingles, doing the same without being well-meaning at
all. You get people claiming that they were stabbing people for good
- particularly harrowing, parents claiming they were stabbing their
own children to treat their medical problems - who are lying, and
were just trying to maim or kill the person they were stabbing, and
using "for their own good" as a cover story.
So what our society has done is, in effect, say, "Alright! You know
what? We're going to be giving out special permission for therapeutic
stabbing. We will give this permission to individuals who prove that
they've had a certain baseline of training in therapeutic stabbing
and who swear a mighty oath never to engage in stabbery in ways that
violate this list of rules about how therapeutic stabbery is to be
conducted and how therapeutic stabbers are to comport themselves. And
we're going to keep a list of everyone we grant this permission to,
and watch them like hawks. The moment any of you break those rules -
you so much as blink funny - we're going to yank your permission to
stab people."
That special permission is professional licensure, and that special
set of rules includes (but extends beyond) professional ethics.
So what a professional license is, is a special permission from the
state to engage, for public benefit, in some behavior that normally
would be too dangerous to society for a society to allow its members
to do - permission, even, to do it for money - granted in exchange
for the licensee being governed by a special set of rules that
mitigate that danger to society, rules that if you violate, you will
lose your special permission, and maybe even go to jail.
I can't stress this enough: a holder of a professional license is
someone to whom laws apply that don't apply to the general public.
For example, under my license to practice as a Licensed Mental Health
Counselor in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, I am a mandated
reporter of child abuse. That means that at all times - not just when
I'm working, but every second, so long as I hold that license, 24/7,
365 days a year, 366 on leap years - I have a legal responsibility to
report any child abuse I encounter to the state authorities.
Now, that's statute (regulation), not ethics, but it illustrates the
idea that professional licensees are held to different, more
demanding legal standards than the general public, and not just in
the commission of their jobs.
A holder of a professional license is someone who gets special legal
privileges and exemptions in exchange for having special legal
obligations and liabilities, all so that society, as a whole, can
benefit by having such people around to serve it.
You're probably aware of the idea that in the US we have two legal
systems: the criminal courts and the civil courts. Actually, we kind
of have three: professional licensees can be subjected to something
very much like a trial, before not a judge, but their license board.
A professional license board can't send someone to jail, and they
can't award damages or fees. But a professional license board can
suspend or strip a license from a license holder.
This is a pretty bloodless way of saying they can execute your career
dead. And therein lies the power of licensure.
You can be a surgeon, carrying a quarter of a million dollars in
student loans from med school, and having dedicated your entire adult
life and 100% of your identity to being a surgeon, and if you screw
up badly enough, your licensure board can decide, "Hmm, you know
what? You don't get to cut anybody open anymore, ever again."
They don't have to send you to jail. They don't have to assess you a
fine. They can just revoke your special legal status - and in doing
so, prevent you from ever practicing your profession again. They can
kill your career.
Your license board holds your whole career in the palm of their hand,
and can crush it like a bug.
What this means is that if you're a licensed professional, your
license board holds your whole career hostage for your good behavior.
And that sure puts getting fired in perspective.
Which is important, because the number one threat to the good conduct
of professionals is their bosses.
2.
Professionals of all sorts generally want to do good work and be
thought of as good at their jobs, so if you tell them of what quality
performance consists, they'll tend to do that. It's hardly a
foolproof guard against malpractice, but it's the positive incentive
that motivates most professionals.
The people who hire professionals, though, have no such inhibitions.
They often have very different goals. The goal of the hospital
administrator may seem congruent with the goal of the surgeon, but
the hospital administrator's concern is the success of the hospital
and the surgeon is the success of the surgery: the former is
accounted in dollars, the later is accounted in lives. You can see
the problem: an administrator who is doing what he thinks of as a
good job at being a hospital administrator might make decisions and
give orders to maximize the success of the hospital counted in
dollars, at the expense of the success of any given surgery, or all
surgeries, which are counted in... not dollars.
Further, because the hospital administrator's not got his hand on the
scalpel, he has more opportunity to kid himself. He can tell himself
stories like, "Surgeons are wasteful drama queens, they don't really
need all this equipment" and "Sanitation staff are lazy, and they
totally could turn over the operating room twice as fast if we just
threatened them more" and "We don't actually need one nurse for every
two ICU patients." Stories that justify cutting expenses in ways
which jeopardize patient safety and treatment success.
Bad as those are, at least we can attribute some good faith to the
administrator thus swayed, in that we can imagine that they're acting
in accord with the goals of their own professional role. But what
happens when the hospital administrator is actively crooked? What
about when they want to commit insurance fraud or steal controlled
substances to sell on the black market, otherwise do something
horrible and wrong, and needs the surgeon to go along with it?
I don't know how relevant the threat model is of hospital
administrators trying to pressure physicians to do something terrible
is, but replace "hospital administrator" and "surgeon" with "business
owner" and "accountant", respectively, and suddenly things pop right
into high relief.
The people who hire professionals don't share in the professional's
intrinsic motivation to not do wrong because of a desire to do good
work. They might even hire the professional to do something wrong,
because they want to exploit the professional's special social
privileges as a professional.
The employer might not care about what happens to the professional as
a consequence of commiting the wrong they're trying to induce the
professional to commit.
The chief pressure the employer has available to them to bring to
bear against the professional to induce the professional do something
the professional knows better than to do is the threat of firing the
professional.
People are scared of being fired. Most of us don't work for fun, we
work for money (and for healthcare!) Which is to say we work to
survive. The threat of being thrown out of our jobs is the threat of
not having the means of survival. And it can be hard to get a new job
under the best of circumstances; getting a job when you were fired
from the last one is even harder, especially for any sort of
professional who will be expected to have queryable references and a
squeaky-clean past.
The threat of being fired is a very credible threat. It quells most
people into doing what the boss orders them to.
But the threat of losing a single job pales in comparison to the
threat of losing every job you might ever hold in your field. The
threat of being fired from one job pales in comparison to the threat
of your entire career being fired into the sun.
That's the thing about licensure. Being licensed by the state
guarantees that there's something vastly more terrible that could be
done to you than could be done by any employer. (At least, worse than
anything that could be done by any employer not willing to commit a
violent crime against you or your family.)
Professional licensure is a gun pointed at your head to guarantee
your compliance with the rules of your profession, no matter what
someone who hires you wants you to do.
But that's not all.
3.
Some of you, especially software developers, are looking at this in
utter horror. I can hear you thinking, "Oh my god, this sounds awful
."
Oh, you have no idea. As bad as this sounds, in real life it's often
worse.
I mean, so far all I've presented to you is the idea of licensure in
the abstract, where one might assume - in a sort of massless ropes
and frictionless pulleys sort of way - the system works more or less
correctly and fairly. I haven't even broached the topic of Boards of
Licensure being stupid, malicious, demented, or prejudiced.
(I once was participating in general forum of therapists, and
somebody related a story of a ghastly thing done by their license
board, and I replied, based on the details, "Oh, you must be in
California: that sounds like the BBS. I'm three thousand miles away
and even I know how bad they are.")
(My license board used to have a FAQ on their website with the
question, "What if I have further questions about the process of
applying for a license?" to which the answer was, approximately, "You
can ask your professional organization." Which is to say, "Fuck off,
we don't answer questions from licensees." I say used to: now they
have no FAQ at all.)
To be licensed is in many professions often to have at least a little
tiny bit of terror, in the back of your head, all the time.
4.
As I was saying, professional licensure is more than a gun to your
head - or rather a gun to the head of your career - to assure your
compliance with the standard of conduct of your profession.
Imagine if you could go hire a hitman, saying, "Okay, these are my
personal standards for how I conduct my profession. If I ever violate
them, drop me." Then you got yourself hired in a professional
capacity and told your boss, "Ha ha! You can't suborn me to do
something naughty, because I've taken myself hostage! Know that
nothing you say to me can sway me from the path of virtue, because I
have arranged a dire fate to befall me should I do so."
Your boss is going to reply, "Oh, well, I can see you take your
commitment to professionalism very seriou- OH LOOK, A LAYOFF! I'm so
sorry it has to end like this. Have a nice life, and I wish you all
the best on your future endeavors. Toodle-loo!"
When professional standards are personal opinions practitioners
choose for themselves (or not, as the case may be) in accordance with
nothing more than their own personal convictions, then something that
differentiates practitioners on the labor market is their... let us
call it... moral suppleness.
If a practitioner is balky and uncooperative with a boss' order to do
something they feel they shouldn't, there's no reason for the boss
not to go find some other more biddable, less morally upright
practitioner.
In that situation, having ethical qualms is a career-hindering move.
In the market for labor, the practitioners who don't give their
bosses any resistance are going to be more hireable than those who
do. Practitioners who are... cooperative... will have their names
passed around as particularly good practitioners to hire, for bosses
who ~don't want no trouble~.
That situation goes away when every practitioner in a field shares
the same standard of conduct.
When that's true, if you're a boss and you want to get up to no good,
on the balance there's no point in letting one licensed professional
go in hopes the next one you'll hire will be more tractable: they all
share the same standards of conduct, so odds are you'll run up
against the exact same objections with the next one, and the one
after that. Sure, you might get lucky and find someone particularly
unconcerned with standards; and, sure, individual practitioners vary
in how scrupulous they are. But when a standard of conduct for a
profession is received, universal, and has the force of law, you
can't assume that you can find a professional who will deviate from
professional norms to suit your nefarious purposes.
How can we get all the practitioners of a field to share the same
ethical code? Well, there's two ways.
One is to convince all of them to do that voluntarily. That is to
say, one can organize them, the way labor organizers organize a
workforce to create a union.
This immediately runs into the same problem unions have: if an
employer of a unionized shop is allowed to hire non-union workers,
then the employer will do that then, so as to have workers who have
less power to resist the employer's orders.
The answer to this is, of course, to make membership in the union
non-optional. If you want to work in this business, you have to be a
member of the union. It's no longer voluntary.
And this is what licensure does, without the extra steps: if you want
to work in this profession, you have to be a member of the profession
- that is to say, a licensed member of the profession, or
pre-licensed per the profession's rule.
And, as such, you must submit to the authority of the code of ethics
of that profession, and will be subject to the power of its license
board.
Thus the other way to make sure all of the members of a profession
share an ethical code is licensure. In a sense, professional
licensure "organizes" all the members of a profession to be willing
to act in concert if a boss tries to get one of them to do something
wrong, by putting them in a situation where even if all alone on a
job, they have to do the same thing as all the other professionals
before them and after them would - and the boss knows it. The boss
knows that they'll all do the same thing.
5.
Or at least that's how it's supposed to work.
It doesn't always. Like everything, it's imperfect. Individual
practitioners don't always conform their conduct to their
profession's code, and sometimes bosses still manage to get license
holders to do things their code says they shouldn't - after all,
there's still the question of getting caught, if nothing else.
But the fact that something is imperfect does not make it worthless,
and the fact that individuals might not entirely uphold an ethical
code does not mean an ethical code isn't worth having.
Indeed, I hope that you can see the value I find in this system: it
has protected me. By allowing my career to be taken hostage this way,
it's put starch in my spine and made it so that I could resist when
authorities pressured me to do something I knew was wrong.
A few months after I started my first job after grad school, I got a
letter from MassHealth notifying me that they wanted to do a case
review for one of my patients who was on MassHealth (i.e.
Massachusetts Medicaid). This is done by scheduled phone call, and
they make it explicitly clear that when calling in, the therapist
should have the patient's record in front of them and any other
records they need to answer the claims reviewer's questions.
So there I am on the phone with the MassHealth dude, and he says to
me, "So I see you've diagnosed this patient with PTSD." "Yeah," says
I. He says, "What was the trauma?"
This is one of those time slows down and you can hear the blood rush
in your ears type moments. I am on the phone with the guy who will
decide whether or not I am going to get paid for treating this
patient - one of my very first at this clinic - and I have been told
explicitly I am expected to answer any question I am asked. And I can
hear my ethics professor in my memory telling us that no insurance
company ever needs to know the details of any patient's trauma. The
first of all a psychotherapist's ethical duties is confidentiality.
This question solicits exactly the kind of achingly, humiliatingly
intimate disclosures that our professional confidentiality is meant
to protect, to make psychotherapy possible at all.
After a pause, I take a deep (perhaps embarrassingly shaky) breath,
and reply evenly, "I don't think you need to know that."
He backs down. I am approved to continue the case.
I tell you this story because it's such a tidy example, but as much
as I wish I could tell you it was a singular one, I can't. This kind
of bullshit happened all the damn time. In some workplaces more than
others.
Ethics, it turns out, is not a sometimes, once-in-the-while thing.
They come up a lot. More when you are an employee or contractor or
dealing with other external authorities, such as a medical
professional dealing with insurance companies.
If I didn't have a profession with an ethical code behind me and a
license board to enforce it, every time something came up, it would
be me, alone, deciding whether to make a personal stand against a
person who pays my rent.
6.
There are several sorts of codes that regulate professional conduct.
Codes of ethics are only one such. There are conventional laws, which
is to say statutes. There are also regulations, which are laws
created not by a legislature but by a regulatory body (which is part
of the executive, not legislative, branch of government) to which
authority for coming up with regulations has been deligated. There
are also other sorts of standards, such as standards of practice.
Authority can be delegated between these. For instance, while codes
of ethics are not laws per se, it is common for a jurisdiction's
legislature to pass a law authorizing a profession's licensure board
to create regulations, and then for the licensure board to make a
regulation which says something to the effect of a certain
professional organization's code of ethics being the standard of
ethics for which members of that profession in that jurisdiction will
be held to, which basically makes that code of ethics have the force
of law.
Codes of ethics typically concern themselves with more abstract
conceptions of issues around how the profession comports itself. For
instance, my professional organization's code of ethics has rules
against accepting barter from clients except in certain
circumstances. Codes of ethics generally are framed in the negative:
what you're required not to do. Rarely, they have positive "must do"
injunctions.
A code of ethics doesn't generally specify how the professional will
perform the specific tasks and duties of their profession. That's
more of a thing for a standard of practice or a regulation. For
instance, building codes specify minimum and maximum measurements for
things like sturdiness of structures and distances to fire exits.
Standards and regulations tend to be more concrete. They specify how
the actual practice of the profession is to be done.
7.
There's another way that all this legal structure around ethics and
other codes of professional conduct benefit the professionals in a
profession.
When your ethics or other guiding principles are just personal
opinions, not professional ethics or other professional standards,
you have no reason to expect if, heavens forfend, you did throw down
over your convictions in the workplace - or worse, in some way which
made the larger internet, or the evening news - that your peers would
agree with you, or think you were a dangerous, self-aggrandizing
crank. Maybe other practitioners in your field would think you were
making a mountain out of a molehill, and consequently wouldn't hire
you if you did, or wouldn't give you a positive recommendation.
This problem isn't wholly resolved by having a professional code of
ethics or other professional standards of conduct, to be sure. But it
does establish at least a baseline of agreement. Even if other
practitioners disagree with the code of ethics, itself, in some
particular, if you wind up at the center of controversy for upholding
that part of the code of ethics, even they won't think you're
unreasonable for doing so. In a profession that has professional
ethics, your colleagues might think you're wrong about how you
interpreted the code (your colleagues will definitely think you're
wrong about how you interpret the code - I guarantee that if your
profession has a code of ethics someone in it, somewhere, will
disagree with you, no matter who you are, about some part of it, at
all times, and I trust that if you are a programmer I am threatening
you with a good time) and they will disagree with how serious an
infraction it is/would be, but they will agree that the code exists
(because it does) and that upholding it is what you are all supposed
to do (because it is), and that consequently no matter how much
practitioners might disagree on the critical details, the act of
defying authority to uphold the code will never, itself, be
scandalous or discrediting.
Relatedly, by having a profession's collective ethics codified - or
trying to codify them - precipitates a vast, ongoing rollicking
permanent discourse about ethics. It's both a pain in the ass and an
absolutely wonderful thing. Many eyes makes bugs shallow. By making
ethics the concern of all the practitioners in a profession, it makes
practitioners concerned with ethics. Everybody gets involved. Ethical
questions need not be wrestled with in isolation, lying in sleepless
in bed in the middle of the night; bringing ethical questions to
peers isn't considered being a troublemaker or a weird preoccupation
with catastrophes, but a normal, natural part of being a
professional. The profession takes collective ownership of the code
of ethics and of the implementation of that code in regular
day-to-day working life.
I promise you, if you do this, you will be infuriated by it. The code
of ethics your profession develops will have things you object to in
it. It will be missing things you think should really be there. It
will develop artifacts that cry out for refactoring and
rationalization. Your colleagues will have terrible ideas and
misunderstand things awfully. It will drive you up a wall.
But it turns out that being infuriated is better than being
anguished, trying to figure out what your moral responsibilities are,
all on your own, with nobody to pair with, with nobody to review your
thinking, with only peers who think you're a troublemaker for even
wanting to stop and ask, "Is this right? Should we be okay with this?
"
8.
I hope from this you can see why, though I am in favor of software
developers having a code of ethics, a lot of present efforts in that
direction strike me as dangerously misguided.
Developing and promulgating ethical standards and expecting
individual practitioners to opt into them as personal convictions is
expecting people to be martyrs for virtue. It is setting individuals
up to go head to head with the authorities who provide food and
medicine to them and, worse, to their children. It is asking
individuals to self-immolate on principle.
Software developers - and other IT professionals - are increasingly
aware of how they and their special skills can be used for ill by the
organizations that employ them. I think it's great that this is
something that's becoming a concern and provoking interest in doing
something about it.
Our society has this tool set for dealing with exactly that sort of
problem. I suggest you look into using it. Even if you don't decide
to use it, and decide instead to develop your own solution, I
strongly suggest you want your own solution to be informed by the
considerable work already invested the prior art, especially the
failure modes that have already been discovered and remedied, so you
don't have to reinvent the wheel.
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Comment catcher: How Professional Ethics Work
Date: 2023-07-01 07:01 am (UTC)
siderea: (Default)
From: [personal profile] siderea
Comment catcher comment for catching comments.
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Re: Comment catcher: How Professional Ethics Work
Date: 2023-07-01 10:20 am (UTC)
wobblegong: Stylized blue fish with spots and stripes. (Default)
From: [personal profile] wobblegong
Thank you, this is a very easy-to-follow look at licensure/
professional ethics in general. One of many things I had not thought
all the way through (probably because I'm not a licensed
professional!) but fascinating and useful to see spelled out.
`[...] and I trust that if you are a programmer I am threatening you
with a good time'
The levity, when there's room for it, is delightful too. :)
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Re: Comment catcher: How Professional Ethics Work
Date: 2023-07-01 01:22 pm (UTC)
From: [personal profile] tagrantelli
Nice work. This is the argument I've been making to my colleagues in
software development for years. And I suspect that the thing that
pulls my particular cultural milieu in another direction is not the
fear of bureaucracy but the fear of credentialism: this is a
jurisdiction with a highly regimented engineers' guild that could
very well come to govern our profession one day, and a lot of
software developers are self-taught. *I* am self-taught. While I
could stomach taking a break from work to qualify as an engineer, I
have worked with a lot of developers who, for a variety of reasons,
cannot. I can imagine a system where ethics and academic credentials
are enforced separately, but it seems unlikely here due to the
existing framework for engineers of other fields.
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Re: Comment catcher: How Professional Ethics Work
Date: 2023-07-02 06:21 am (UTC)
siderea: (Default)
From: [personal profile] siderea
Oh, I have so much to say about this.
Free advice from a Massachusetts LMHC: holy hell, do everything in
your power to keep professionals from other fields, even what seem to
be other branches of the same field, from having sway over your
license board. Right now in MA, the board that oversees LMHCs also
oversees IIRC three other license types (or are we up to four?) So
despite LMHCs being something like 80% of their licensees, the LMHC
members of the board are a tiny proportion. LMHCs are not governed by
LMHCs. It is Not Good. We have a bill before our leg to spin off a
new, LMHC-specific board; here's hoping.
And you've already hit on a great example of why. If software
developers want to pursue licensure without allowing credentialism,
well they could plausibly do that - IFF they held control over their
profession.
I am self-taught too. I'm sympathetic to the issue. At the same time,
I am also sympathetic to the idea that if we're talking about
professionalizing the concept of software engineering, maybe there is
something to be said for that actually requiring the kind of
education actual engineers are required to have.
I think it might be beneficial to professionalize software
engineering as something different than the more general software
development. I would propose that an engineer is a professional who
is held responsible for the success of what she builds - in exactly
the way that software developers today are not. I mean, if you hire
an engineer to build a building for you and the building falls down,
you can sue the engineer for not doing their job. If you hire a
software developer to write you a computer program, and it fails to
run, or does something horrible to your data or your network, you
can't sue them for not doing their job. Maybe we should have software
engineers for when you want - or are legally required (wouldn't that
be nice?) - to have some guarantee of quality, that the programmer
takes responsibility for.
One of the things about psychotherapists and other branches of
medicine that might be a useful model for software developers is that
we have different professions with different licenses with different
levels of education. Psychiatrists are MDs, and have been through med
school, residency, etc. Psychologists, junior to MDs, are PhDs or
PsyDs. One level down from that, the masters level clinicians, like
it says on the tin, have masters degrees: LMHCs/LPCs/LMFTs/LICSWs/
etc. There are some even lower levels, that require shorter masters,
or only bachelor's degrees. In substance abuse counseling in my
jurisdiction, there's a lowest level of license that doesn't even
require a bachelor's degree. What you can do clinically (called
"scope of practice") depends on your license.
Couple other things to know:
Educational requirements, per se, in a bunch of fields are relatively
recent innovations, and I have philosophical objections to them.
Previously, instead of having to present a diploma, one had to past
an independently administrated test (independent of any educational
institution). My favorite example of this was that law school used to
be optional, and even unusual, for becoming a lawyer in many places
in the US (famous example: Lincoln never went to law school); the
legal requirement for being a lawyer was passing the bar exam. Last I
heard, NY state still allows that. Maybe this is a more useful model.
My grad school specialized in providing the education to become a
credentialed behavioral health professional to people who were
working full time, for cheap. It was their whole brand. Close to 100%
of my classmates had jobs. Getting credentialed need not mean taking
a break from work, if there are institutions that want to meet the
need. I won't say that can solve the problem for everyone, and I will
be the first to say it was grueling as hell and I don't know how my
classmates with kids did it. But dropping everything to do a
bachelors+ is not a foregone conclusion even if it were decided it
were necessary.
And here's an option that has probably never crossed most people's
minds. My license (LMHC) requires a masters degree. It does not
require a bachelor's degree. So my grad school set up a masters
degree program for people who don't have bachelor's degree. Not a
joint bachelor's-master's program, a master's without bachelor's. I
went through it. The only degree I have is a master's degree. I do
not have a bachelor's. As I like to put it, I skipped 15th grade
entirely, and my grad program made me do 16th grade as a remedial
classes, some of which I tested out of. This is all perfectly legal
and above board. My license board is fine with it; they don't (or
didn't) even let you submit bachelors credentials when applying for
the license.
Also, when my license was founded, it initially only required a
master's degree of something like 30 or 36 credits. Which is
considered a year of study. It was increased, stepwise over time, to
the present 60 credit standard which seems to be what the profession
is converging on across the US. If software development wants to
start with a modest educational requirement, of, like, a one year
graduate degree, with no requirement for a bachelor's degree, that's
on the table. That's possible.
Also, it's not uncommon when a new field professionalizes, that
precisely because the education isn't standardized, the licensure
path has a boot-up system for grandfathering in people who were not
educated to the standard.
I think if software developers want to pursue licensure while still
wanting to protect the ability of the self-taught to qualify, that's
a beautiful thing and itself an expression of an ethical sentiment
that absolutely should be captured and codified as an important
principle of the profession.
Edited Date: 2023-07-02 06:23 am (UTC)
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Re: Comment catcher: How Professional Ethics Work
Date: 2023-07-02 05:05 pm (UTC)
ungemmed: (Default)
From: [personal profile] ungemmed
Formal apprenticeship with a given set of milestones, often offered
simultaneously with a short period of classroom training, is a
recognized form of licensure qualification in many of the trades.
Given the experiential nature of much modern software work (e.g. you
need to catch incidents to learn incident response), this strikes me
as an appropriate methodology for qualifying software workers.
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Re: Comment catcher: How Professional Ethics Work
Date: 2023-07-04 04:56 am (UTC)
brooksmoses: (Default)
From: [personal profile] brooksmoses
I would also suggest, based on my familiarity with mechanical
engineering licensing, that there is some value in how that field
addresses licensing. Most people who work in mechanical engineering
are not licensed Professional Engineers, and in fact you cannot
become a licensed mechanical engineer without considerable work
experience. An engineering license permits one to work as a
consultant, and to do formal sign-off on design documents, but it is
entirely plausible to have many not-yet-licensed engineers doing the
bulk of the design work and analysis and preparing the design
documents that a licensed engineer will then review and sign.
This leads to two factors that would be relevant to software
engineering. First, not having a license (especially not having one
yet, as opposed to having had one revoked) doesn't prevent one from
working in the field. And, second, it means that companies that need
to have licensed engineers are incentivised to help their employees
become licensed.
One thing I'm not sure of is where exactly licensing is required, for
mechanical engineering. I know that it's required for doing
consulting work. My guess is that other than that it would be
required for documents that are required before doing things that
require permits -- such as how, in civil engineering, you can't get a
building permit without signoffs, and you can't build a building of
more than a certain size without a permit. (But I can design, and
build, a small shed in my backyard without signoff or permit.) I
don't actually know where the boundaries are for mechanical
engineering, and whether something like a table saw would require
anything to be signed off by a licensed engineer if it's designed by
the company that manufactures it.
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Re: Comment catcher: How Professional Ethics Work
Date: 2023-07-01 07:30 pm (UTC)
From: [personal profile] gamedev
I have a few things to say on this topic. The first is that I don't
think the concept of professional ethics is necessarily tied to
licensure. The two counterexamples I can think of are journalism and
computer security research. Both cases have very strong professional
ethics guidelines (e.g. protect your sources, don't fabricate
stories, responsible disclosure of security vulnerabilities, etc.)
but as far as I'm aware, there are no professional boards or licenses
or legal consequences for violating those guidelines besides the laws
that apply to the general public. However, there are informal
professional consequences for violations, like being unhireable by
people who know what you've done. A journalist who has been caught
making up stories will likely lose their job and fall down several
pegs of respectability and prestige if they can find work again.
Computer security research is another case where there is not an
explicit legal carveout, so many researchers do activities which
could be legally prosecuted under the CFAA, but there are an
established set of norms for what responsible disclosure looks like,
including giving the company adequate time to fix the issue before
announcing the discovery, but still disclosing the issue publicly
even if the company doesn't want you to. This is a somewhat stable
system: researchers gain credibility, respect, and trust through
responsible public disclosures, which leads to more job
opportunities, while companies usually have a vested interest in
keeping security researchers in the practice of giving advance notice
before publicly announcing discovered vulnerabilities. I don't mean
to imply that these systems are better than official licensing (you
don't have to look hard to find lapses in journalistic ethics, for
example), just that they are a real alternative form of professional
ethics that isn't tied to laws or professional licensing.
Another thing I'd like to say is that I don't think it would be
possible to establish any kind of lowest-common-denominator form of
professional ethics for software. I think you would be hard pressed
to find even the most anodyne ethical guideline that software
engineers could agree on. Even stuff like "don't store passwords in
plaintext" or "don't gather data about your users without their
consent" or "don't build platforms used to facilitate genocide" are
not only controversial, there are entire multi-billion-dollar
businesses built around violating those principles. Most of the
largest tech companies are entirely dependent on the sorts of
ethically murky quagmire that a professional code of ethics ought to
prevent, and there are many software companies doing things worse
than "ethically murky", like writing software being used in military
drones that kill innocent children. You couldn't even get software
engineers to agree with "don't write software that kills people,"
because there is a thriving military contract industry. There may be
narrow subdisciplines that are amenable to having professional codes
of ethics, like information security, but I think it only amounts to
a small portion of the software industry as a whole, which is largely
devoid of any ethical inclinations at this point.
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Re: Comment catcher: How Professional Ethics Work
Date: 2023-07-02 05:24 am (UTC)
siderea: (Default)
From: [personal profile] siderea
I don't mean to imply that these systems are better than official
licensing (you don't have to look hard to find lapses in journalistic
ethics, for example), just that they are a real alternative form of
professional ethics that isn't tied to laws or professional
licensing.
I think your case for security research is a much stronger one than
journalism, which actually - considering Fox News among others -
seems more like a case illustrating why not having licensure doesn't
work.
Another thing I'd like to say is that I don't think it would be
possible to establish any kind of lowest-common-denominator form of
professional ethics for software. I think you would be hard pressed
to find even the most anodyne ethical guideline that software
engineers could agree on.
You say "don't think it would be possible", I say "super interesting
very hard challenge": tomato, tomahto.
Even stuff like "don't store passwords in plaintext" or "don't gather
data about your users without their consent" or "don't build
platforms used to facilitate genocide" are not only controversial
One of the things I find most interesting about the whole idea of
software development developing ethics, and possibly other standards
of practice, is that the discourse throws up those sorts of things as
examples, and they're very interesting examples.
"Don't store passwords in plaintext" is the sort of thing that would
go in the equivalent of a building code (as in construction) or a
standard of care (as in medicine). It's not the sort of thing that
goes in a code of ethics. But it does feel like it points at some
sort of underlying ethical principle, doesn't it? I am not quite sure
what it is or how to haul it into the light. Maybe it's something as
"treat authentication tokens as confidential" plus "ensure the
confidentiality of confidential data through the responsible use of
adequate encryption".
Both "don't gather data about your users without their consent" or
"don't build platforms used to facilitate genocide" address concerns
about the use to which software developers are put. Some professions
do regulate that sort of thing and some don't. For instance...
like writing software being used in military drones that kill
innocent children
... there's no standard I know of for engineers not to make weapons.
Contrariwise, physicians are forbidden from participating in torture;
many physicians believe (and there is controversy about this) that
their profession's ethics forbid their participating in euthanasia or
medical assistance in dying.
They're controversial, and, at least the last two, maybe should be
controversial. I'm not actually sure that that is something that a
code of ethics for software developers should say, or, as you note,
could say.
But perhaps strangely, I am less interested in (at least to start)
having a ethical code which forbids software developers from doing
bad things well than forbidding software developers from doing fine
things poorly.
I think a more proper aim of ethics in software development is
stamping out "move fast and break things" and "eh, who needs a
testing" and "what's a buffer overrun or two between friends"?
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Re: Comment catcher: How Professional Ethics Work
Date: 2023-07-02 08:19 pm (UTC)
brainwane: Photo of my head, with hair longish for me (pro)
From: [personal profile] brainwane
I am less interested in (at least to start) having a ethical code
which forbids software developers from doing bad things well than
forbidding software developers from doing fine things poorly.
I think a more proper aim of ethics in software development is
stamping out "move fast and break things" and "eh, who needs a
testing" and "what's a buffer overrun or two between friends"?
More Therac-25 than panopticons, right.
One locus of conversation regarding professional ethics in software
development has centered on software licensing, but usually (as far
as I've seen) the initiatives involve promulgating a license that
prohibits the user from using the software for certain purposes. The
Do No Evil and Hippocratic licenses, for instance. (You might be
interested in a talk I gave (linking to the written version) in 2016,
comparing codes of conduct in open source software to copyleft
licenses and reflecting on how we feel differently about having our
freedom constrained in these different ways.) I think the open data
license conversation has more concrete work on "do this safely".
I've been thinking about the standards of judgment open source
maintainers need, and how a current maintainer can assess a
contributor's judgment, and educate them on what's expected of them,
before sharing maintainer privileges with them. Many individual
projects or ecologies of projects duplicate this effort, writing
their own documentation from scratch and working out their standards
from first principles, and it would be so great if we could reduce
the redundancy of that labor.
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Re: Comment catcher: How Professional Ethics Work
Date: 2023-07-02 07:58 pm (UTC)
brainwane: Photo of my head, with hair longish for me (pro)
From: [personal profile] brainwane
I was just thinking about the Never Again pledge
refuse to participate in the creation of databases of identifying
information for the United States government to target
individuals based on race, religion, or national origin.
(And the pledge included several other actions the signatory pledged
to undertake.)
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Re: Comment catcher: How Professional Ethics Work
Date: 2023-07-02 10:24 pm (UTC)
siderea: (Default)
From: [personal profile] siderea
Yeah, that was the first thing to make me cringe and think, "Oh God,
somebody needs to explain to these kids how professional ethics
actually *work* because this is a career-suicide pact."
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Re: Comment catcher: How Professional Ethics Work
Date: 2023-07-03 09:22 am (UTC)
nancylebov: (green leaves)
From: [personal profile] nancylebov
There's a tension between storing identifying information about
people to target them and collecting the same sort of information
about people to establish whether they're being targeted.
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Re: Comment catcher: How Professional Ethics Work
Date: 2023-07-02 01:48 am (UTC)
cvirtue: CV in front of museum (Default)
From: [personal profile] cvirtue
"stabbery"
snort snort hee snortle ... thank you.
And all the rest of course.
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Re: Comment catcher: How Professional Ethics Work
Date: 2023-07-02 05:04 am (UTC)
alexxkay: (Default)
From: [personal profile] alexxkay
Editorial:
The are opinions -> They
strike me a dangerously misguided -> as
It is asking individual to -> individuals
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Re: Comment catcher: How Professional Ethics Work
Date: 2023-07-02 05:27 am (UTC)
siderea: (Default)
From: [personal profile] siderea
Thanks! Fixed.
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Re: Comment catcher: How Professional Ethics Work
Date: 2023-07-02 02:56 pm (UTC)
packbat: An anthro furry with tan fur and brown curly hair, turning
into dreadlocks down zir back. Ze is wearing sunglasses and a bright
red shirt. (Default)
From: [personal profile] packbat
I imagine someone else talked about this, but this whole thing also
makes me think about engineering licensure in mechanical, civil,
aerospace, and other such engineering disciplines. A big part of that
system is the idea that, for matters which impact public safety,
there has to be a professional signing off on work to say, "This is
safe, and if it isn't, I'm on the hook legally and professionally for
it".
Effectively this would mean that, like, in the Cambridge Analytica
scandal, there would be specific engineers at Facebook who had to
sign off on the systems that CA used, and those people would be held
professionally responsible for the consequences.
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Re: Comment catcher: How Professional Ethics Work
Date: 2023-07-04 05:22 am (UTC)
brooksmoses: (Default)
From: [personal profile] brooksmoses
Yup. And one can do plenty of work in those disciplines without being
licensed; the limitation is generally in whether one can sign off on
such things.
One of the first interesting questions there for software is defining
what is a "matter that impacts public safety", I would think. There
are lots of ways to do that both well and horribly badly.
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Re: Comment catcher: How Professional Ethics Work
Date: 2023-07-04 05:58 pm (UTC)
packbat: An anthro furry with tan fur and brown curly hair, turning
into dreadlocks down zir back. Ze is wearing sunglasses and a bright
red shirt. (Default)
From: [personal profile] packbat
For sure, yeah. The ones that seem reasonable to require licensure
for, just going off the cuff, are:
* Payment processing
* Government utilities (e.g. voter info databases)
* Private patient information
...but I'm sure there's all kinds of subtleties I'm not thinking of
in even those cases.
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Re: Comment catcher: How Professional Ethics Work
Date: 2023-07-04 06:54 pm (UTC)
gatheringrivers: (Default)
From: [personal profile] gatheringrivers
Thank you for this explanation - I wasn't as aware of the differences
as I thought I was. :)
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Re: Comment catcher: How Professional Ethics Work
Date: 2023-07-10 08:56 pm (UTC)
sigmaleph: (Default)
From: [personal profile] sigmaleph
It seems a difficult problem to have every practitioner in a field
have a single set of professional ethics for software, a field where
it would not be particularly hard for a company in the US to hire,
well, me. Meaning: someone in a developing country that doesn't have
a licensing board for software engineering, and whose government
won't be in any great hurry to implement one when being able to
export morally flexible software engineering becomes economically
advantageous.
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Re: Comment catcher: How Professional Ethics Work
Date: 2023-07-14 09:39 pm (UTC)
From: [personal profile] philologus
Well, yes, and the way this works, as Siderea explained, is that in
these licensed fields you can only do some kinds of work if you have
the right license in the right jurisdictions. So as soon as these
rules were imposed, developers from non-participating countries who
wanted to wok on these projects would be plumb out of luck. This is
an old and solved problem although the solution creates different
problems like "allowing local workers to discriminate against foreign
workers by creating idiosyncratic licensing requirements."
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