Extended Principlism Approach to Software Engineering Ethics

The reliance on software systems to support our daily activities, and to facilitate decision making processes in the workplace is becoming a fact of life spanning a wide range of application domains including healthcare, security, banking and finance, education, transportation, and social networking. Many of these software systems are safety-critical and real-time systems that affect the physical safety and well-being of humans. Developing ethical and trustworthy software systems is a complex and challenging process. To avoid many of the ethical concerns and pitfalls, it is of utmost importance that the developers and maintainers of such systems understand and adhere to some ethical principles that these systems must conform to in order to increase the various stakeholders’ trust in such systems and avoid potential future legal consequences. In this paper, we first explain how the four ethical principles of autonomy and respect, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice that were introduced by Beauchamp and Childress can apply when developing and maintaining ethical software systems. We then define the people, process and product viewpoints with requirements for ethical software engineering. The strict consideration of these requirements is shown to map to the four ethical principles and hence contribute to the conformance to these principles. Finally, we present and discuss cases using the principlism (principlesbased) approach and the three viewpoints.