This post is about the potential pitfalls of outsourcing one’s professional decision-making to technical codes or antiquated codes of ethics, some of which may be sufficiently ambiguous as to provide little more than a Rorschach test to justify one’s preconceived intuitions. 

The following is a contribution from Andrés Felipe Valderrama Pineda. If you are interested in contributing, please contact us at engineeringshadowcodes @ gmail [dot] com.   In this blog I will present, and illustrate with the example of project NINHA, the initiative of Design With People that we run as part of the program Sustainable … More Design With People: The case of Ninha

This entry builds on previous posts about the responsibilities of corporations and organizations for the ethical behavior of their employees. There are (at least) two important questions that arise from this treatment of the organization as a distinct actor. First, in the world where corporations possess personhood, and certain constitutional rights, then they should also possess … More Organizing Organizations

As mentioned last week, this is the second of two follow-up posts that arose from the question about the ethical standards germane to artificial intelligence companies. Last week’s applied to the ethics of algorithms, in all of their black box splendor. This week’s post asks questions about which standards are applicable when a company operates in … More On the Border

Last week’s post discussed the newly announced arrangement between some of the tech giants called the Partnership on AI. Embedded in that were (at least) two additional, timely issues that each merit their own posts. The first, the subject of this week’s post, is the issue of the ethics of algorithms and their potentially pernicious effects. … More Feel the Algorithm

Last week, a partnership was announced between Amazon, Google, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft called the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society. The Partnership’s website states that one of its goals is: To support research and recommend best practices in areas including ethics, fairness, and inclusivity; transparency and interoperability; privacy; collaboration between people and … More On the Conduct of Business and Artificial Intelligence

What happens when laws fall short of a full articulation of the public’s consensus desires for certain outcomes? Assume for a moment that such a consensus exists. We can later relax that, but for the sake of simplicity assume agreement. Does it logically follow that anything not expressly forbidden is therefore permissible? If the law … More Framing the Legal Frameworks

In his 1971 book, The Revolt of the Engineers, Ed Layton discusses the crass calculus employed by some engineers in the founder societies to develop codes of ethics. Specifically, he describes the machinations of engineering luminaries’ public writings exhorting their respective professional societies to adopt codes of ethics in order to improve the public standing of the engineering profession and … More The Ethics of Using Codes of Ethics to Improve Professional Standing

From contributors Michael Lachney and David A. Banks: What do engineers need to know about peace to think and act ethically? This is a difficult question given that so much engineering pedagogy implies or explicitly points to users as the agents of morality. In other words, rockets, drones, and smartphones are as peaceful as their … More What Engineers Need to Know About Peace

Hello to anyone and everyone who visited us at the Association for Practice and Professional Ethics 2016 annual conference! It was a pleasure to have so many insightful conversations and brainstorm possibilities for this project at the conference. We look forward to continuing those discussions in the coming weeks and months ahead. In the meanwhile, … More Association for Practical and Professional Ethics 2016