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ETHC303Chapter 6- Accountability and Responsibility

Instructor: Dr. Hassan Ismail Abdalla

Room: E236

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Different Senses of Accountability

The terms accountability, responsibility, and liability are sometimes used interchangeably and at other times in quite different ways

A person is accountable to give a report of what happened, to go to jail, to pay compensation or sometimes in the sense that they should bear guilt and remorse for the situation

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Responsibility – Definition

At least four different uses of responsibility can be distinguished:

1. Role-responsibility:– Here responsibility is interchangeable with duty

and refers to what individuals are expected to do in virtue of one of their social roles

– We have duties in virtue of being an employee, a parent, a citizen, a friend, etc.

– These roles entail responsibilities that may not come into play until a special situation arises (e.g., your parent becomes ill)

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Responsibility – Definition – cont.

2. Causal responsibility:– When we say that an individual is responsible for

an event, we mean that the individual did something that caused the event e.g. an automobile accident.

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Responsibility – Definition – cont.

3. Blameworthiness:– This is related to casualty, and generally connected

to acting in a wrongful manner or being at fault.– That is, the attribution of responsibility is made on

the basis of a judgment that a person did something wrong and his wrongdoing led to the event.

– Individuals are often considered blameworthy when they fail to fulfill a role-responsibility.

– E.g. programmer who releases software with many bugs is blameworthy

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Responsibility – Definition – cont.

4. Liability:– Individuals can be considered responsible in the

sense of being liable (legally).– To be the person who, according to law, must pay

damages or compensate when certain events occur. E. g. if someone is working at your house, slips and hurts himself.

– Consider a computer case where all four types of responsibility come into play.

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Strict liability

Strict liability is liability “without fault." Strict liability is controversial because it

opposes the common moral intuition (perceptions, exceptions) that individuals shouldn't be held responsible for things that they can't prevent or control.

Nevertheless it is used in the law to encourage individuals to take precautions and make things safe.

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Strict liability – cont.

Where strict liability applies, the liable person (or company) is responsible to pay damages or compensation even though he or she did nothing wrong.

Strict liability is an interesting concept when it comes to computing.

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BUYING AND SELLING SOFTWARE

Who is (or should be) responsible for what, when it comes to designing, producing, selling, and using computer software?

Designers and manufacturers should bear some responsibility for what they sell and what they tell customers about products

Users, in turn, should bear some responsibility for reading instructions and knowing some general aspects of how to use software

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Contractual Relationship

The buying-selling relationship is at its core a contractual relationship

While a contract seems a good way to clarify all the terms of a buying and selling arrangement, disputes do arise even after the details have been spelled out

This happens less frequently today because buyers are more computer confident than before.

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Contractual Relationship – cont.

The Categorical (definite) Imperative (very important):– The categorical imperative asks us never to treat

a person as a means but always as an end in himself

– This means that salespersons should never lie, but it also mean that salespersons need only give customers information they request

– What about customers who don't know right questions to ask

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Computing and Accountability

Accountability is systematically undermined in our computerized society

Accountability, Blame, and Responsibility: Two conditions required to determine whether someone is

responsible for harm:

1- a casual condition; 2- a mental condition The mental condition can be weakened to include even

unintentional harm if harm is brought about through negligence (fault condition)

The causal condition can be weakened to include situations where the individual's actions were only one causal factor among a number of others

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Four Barriers to Accountability

1. The Problem of Many Hands: computer systems are often developed by teams the locus of decision making is often far from the

most direct causal antecedent computer systems often incorporate pre-existing

code, the authors of which may be long forgotten computer systems often operate within complex

relationships to the hardware they run on we should not confuse the obscuring of

accountability due to collective action (we cannot accept agent-less mishaps)

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Four Barriers to Accountability – cont.

2. Bugs: viewing bugs as unavoidable hazards in the software

industry should not be allowable to such an extent that this mindset begins to excuse sloppiness and carelessness as inevitable

if bugs are that inevitable, should such bug-ridden software be considered ready for important uses?

3. "It's the Computer's Fault": The Computer As Scapegoat:we do not blame the gun for the murder, we blame the personwho shot the gun

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Four Barriers to Accountability – cont.

4. Ownership without Liability: the trend in the software industry is to demand

maximal property protection while denying accountability

licensing agreements and disclaimers attempt to remove responsibility from the owners of the software and instead place the responsibility on those licensing the software to ensure that it does not directly or indirectly cause harm

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Maintaining Accountability in a Computerized Society

Recommendations: Keep Accountability Distinct From Liability To

Compensate:– being accountable to society does not allow one

to be 'let off the hook'– if several individuals are collectively responsible

for any sort of harm, they should all be considered completely accountable

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Maintaining Accountability in a Computerized Society – cont.

Clarify And Vigorously Promote A Substantiate Standards Of Care: – ensure that software professionals follow software

engineering principles and that they take these guidelines seriously

– evaluate the above to provide a better assessment for accountability

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Maintaining Accountability in a Computerized Society – cont.

Impose Strict Liability for Defective Consumer-Oriented Software:– shift the burden of accountability to the producers

of defective software– force software producers to take extraordinary

measures to make sure their product is safe

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Liability for Defective Electronic Information

the general public seems largely unaware of the risks of defective software

there have been far more injuries from defective software than litigations about defective software

when an electronic information product behaves like a machine, the law will treat it with the same rules adopted for dealing with defective machines

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Liability for Defective Electronic Information

What about when the software behaves more like a book than a machine?– Publishers, authors and booksellers are not

generally held liable for erroneous information contained in books

– Unless the author claims to be an expert on the subject, the law may not impose a higher duty on the author than it would impose on the reader

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Last Thoughts

There are several reasons why electronic information providers may be more at risk for liability:– naive customers may think that because the

information product appears to be in computerized form that it is more trustworthy

– electronic information products often perform a task rather than simply instructing the user in how to perform a task