Readings
The Ethical Evaluation
For this course, you need to demonstrate that you can think and write critically about ethical issues, applying tools drawn from various ethical traditions as applied to concrete business situations that are likely to occur as a result of the use of computer technology.
The ethical evaluation involves four steps, each of which must meet at least the “acceptable” level of evaluation.
Ethical Evaluation Step |
Unacceptable |
Acceptable |
Outstanding |
1 – Identify whether there are any ethical issues and distinguish from legal or non-ethical issues. |
Fail to identify all major factual and conceptual issues. |
Identify most, but not all major issues. |
Identify all major issues, demonstrating maturity in ability to consider needs and interests of others. |
2 – Identify the ethical decision-makers, stakeholders, and feasible alternatives and consequences. |
Fail to identify the major alternatives and consequences. |
Identify most feasible alternatives and consequences, but overlook one or more important issues. |
Identify all of the feasible alternatives and consequences, demonstrating high ability to foresee consequences. |
3 – Construct ethical arguments by applying ethical principles. |
Fail to correctly apply the ethical principles. |
Apply correctly, but overlook important factual or logical errors in one or more arguments. |
Correctly apply ethical principles. |
4 – Evaluate arguments and reach conclusion |
Fail to weigh various ethical arguments or decision not justified by arguments. |
Provide some evaluation of reasons and arguments, but fail to identify and respond to reasonable ethical counter-arguments. |
Provide defensible evaluations, noting factual assumptions and logical errors and responding to reasonable counter-arguments, demonstrating ability to choose solution that will generalize to like cases. |