Assessment - Applying Ethical Theory

Task - Your lecturer will place several links in Interact to a number of relevant articles and/or case studies. These will be available to you just after your second assignment has been submitted.

1. Choose one of the media articles or case studies listed by the lecturer in your Interact 2 subject site.

2. Use the title of the article/case study provided in interact 2 as the title of your essay, so that the lecturer knows which article you are analysing.

3. Undertake further research about your chosen case, to assist you in analysing and discussing it in your essay.

You are required to complete the following:

Write an essay: Analyse the article/case study from the perspective of four classical ethical theories including utilitarianism, deontology, virtue and contract. Present well reasoned arguments for your assessments and recommendations.

Write an overall conclusion that justifies your recommendations made in your essay.

Rationale -

In addition to identifying a contentious situation in ICT and dissecting the argument(s) about it, you must also now demonstrate the ability to evaluate the elements of the argument by introducing classical ethical principles where appropriate.

Since Assessment item 1 and 2, your knowledge will have grown, and you will now realise that almost all ICT ethical dilemmas can be classified under one of the main ICT ethical issues that are discussed in this subject; for instance, surveillance is a sub-issue of privacy, harmful software is a sub-issue of ICT professionalism, and piracy is a sub-issue of intellectual property.

In ICT, the main ethical issues are taken to be:

• ICT professionalism
• Privacy
• Security
• Cyber-crime
• Intellectual property
• Regulation on the internet
• Social inclusion
• Community and identity
• Pervasive and convergent computing.

The assessment item is designed to help you to build skills towards achieving the learning objectives, by requiring you to:

• identify an ICT-related ethical issue from a media article or case study;
• apply classical ethical theory to the analysis of an ethically questionable situation to determine the rightness or wrongness of actions/decisions made therein;
• derive logical and justifiable conclusions to resolve the ethical issue(s);and,
• apply proper academic referencing.