CS 349 Contemporary Issues in
Computer Science
Alan Cline
What Would Kant Say?
Make sure that you have read all of Chapter 2 of Ethics for the Information Age.
Now consider the following problem (taken from Ethical, Legal and Professional Issues in Computing, p.11)
Imagine that you, a programmer, take a
holiday to an underdeveloped country.
You have been deeply affected by the level of poverty you saw
there. You return home to your job in a
large international corporation. It
occurs to you that you could write a program that skims small amounts of money
from the advertising account and funnel it into a separate account that you
could use to help the people you’ve just visited. In fact, your plan is to buy computers and
fund training for the people in the village where you stayed. But now you’re wondering, “Is this plan
ethical?”
What would Kant say?
Write a short essay (no more than one double spaced page).