Information Technology, Moral Dilemmas, and Decision-Making

The ethical significance of information technology due to its increasing intertwining with social life has led associations and organizations such as ACM and I-EEE to develop ethical principles and codes for the IT profession and to update them from time to time. Although these principles and codes are helpful as general ethical guidance, in some complex situations they lose their effectiveness due to the conflict that may occur between the principles and consequently the codes. In this paper, we will attempt to suggest a normative model to help ethical decision-making in such situations. This model can help to respond to problems of allowing evil and appealing to evil in IT profession. In addition to explaining and responding to some important ethical dilemmas in the field of applied ethics, we will apply it in at least six ethically important themes in IT profession, including self-driving cars, privacy and security, cyber-attacks, ransomware, and the Internet of Things. In each we will show how the model can help the moral agent in making moral decisions. However, we will not claim that this model acts as a decision-making logic, since the process of reaching a moral decision is not algorithmic and many cognitive and non-cognitive factors play a role in it.