Justice Wright

CPR E 394

Ethics Essay

December 6, 2017

Ethical Engineering

Jane Addams once famously said, “Action indeed is the sole medium of

expression for ethics,” and in no career path does this quote ring more heavily than engineering.

Engineers are responsible for the constant design, building, and implementation of nearly every

piece of the world around us, and as such the effects of their actions are infinitely spanning.

Actions engineers take are reflected and impactful upon the people who grow to use their

projects and as such they must take great care to ensure they are continually ethics conscious

in all they do. Ethics however are not always as black and white as their impact, a recent case

study into the a privacy dispute between the United States government and Amazon. This case

brings much insight into the purpose of a code of ethics, how ethics can not always be clear,

and how the different virtues of ethics can appear in everyday life.

Before evaluating an action as ethical or unethical, it’s important to know what your

frame of reference is, and where your core values or loyalties ought to lie. One of the best

solutions for this is to establish a code of ethics. While a code of ethics can vary highly

depending on the intended audience (as an engineer I would highly recommend IEEE’s code of

ethics) the purpose of an established ethical code is generally the same. Codes of ethics

provide an agreed upon list of moral obligations and ideologies that represent what a body of

people believe in and agree to stand for. In doing so they serve two purposes. The first is to

get everyone on the same page as to what is and is not ethical behavior, which as we will soon

examine is not always easy. The second is to have a set of values you can turn to in guidance
for ethical decision making, or even analysis of events deemed to have been potentially

unethical. By establishing and adhering to a code of ethics professionals can more easily

ensure that their actions are as ethical as they intend them to be. Even though codes are a

great aid, ethical decision making is not always clear-cut.

One such ethical quandary takes place in the aforementioned Amazon echo case study.

The shorthand version of events is that Amazon has a large market share of in home use

devices that are constantly taking audio samplings from their environment. A crime occurred in

a residential home that had one of Amazon’s devices in use at the time of the the alleged crime.

Authorities asked Amazon to surrender the data of the particular device as a tool to develop

their investigation. One’s gut instinct might wonder what the ethical implication is here. A crime

was committed and aiding police in solving it seems about as ethical as can be. However, I

think you can make a very convincing argument that this is the unethical action to make, and it’s

all about context. Amazon’s ethical duty is first and foremost to protect its users, and as an

extension their data. If Amazon surrenders the data immediately, they are setting a precedent

of information release (without the consent of the data’s creator/owner) and are in a sense

giving a mutual property away entirely to a third party. In short, they are giving away something

they don’t fully own, and are setting a dangerous precedent into forced surrender of third party

data that could potentially become a means to very invasive access to their customers lives.

It’s an ethically dense situation with a lot of angles to consider. Many people at my small

group discussion felt uneasy answering this. Some felt the obligation should always be to the

law, (even in cases without direct subpoenas, and just at the behest of informal requests), a

position which personally baffles me. We both clearly shared the moral guidance that crime is

wrong and it is ethical to work against crime in all forms. Where we seemed to differ was in

opinion of who Amazon has ethical obligations to and how those should guide their actions. I
feel that the virtues of ethics are good starting points to finding a reasonable answer to this

situation. But which virtues are applicable? While all are to some extent I would say that by

examining the responsibility, fidelity, and integrity of the situation the answers become much

more clear. Responsibility is probably the most widely debatable axis of this predicament. As

citizens of the world Amazon obviously has a moral obligation to the world at large, however as

suppliers of a widely popular good and a holder of nearly countless amounts of individual private

user data, they have an even stronger obligation to these users who trust them to protect their

information. It is because of this strong obligation to the many that Amazon cannot ethically

surrender private data of one of its users at will to the government, because it cannot do so

without jeopardizing the privacy implications of its millions of other users. It’s not an easy

realization to come to, but it is most certainly true. This is also a great showing for fidelity as

well. While Amazon is faithful to the world it lives in, its true faithfulness always resides with its

user base, and it must to its best ethical ability always choose to protect the rights of those it

consists of and represents by proxy. This is not incompatible with the idea of being faithful to

the country, for they stated multiple times they would be willing to comply with warrant requiring

information releases, but could not surrender the information otherwise. They laid out the

circumstances for which they believed they could act without compromising their own ethical

obligations and did not back down. By being staunch defenders of their position Amazon

showed above all else tremendous amounts of integrity. They did so by adhering to their morals

at all costs, even when it may appear a controversial decision, and continually exercising the

utmost quality of judgment. While these are just half of the six virtues of ethics one could easily

examine this case from any of the other virtues and reach a similar conclusion. There’s much to

be said about charity, and how amazon could not volunteer this information without violating its
own code of ethics, as well as the tremendous amount of self-discipline shown in taking time to

collect an ethical perspective before making a hasty decision in such a pivotal situation.

All decisions have ethical impacts. Some are greater than others, and some are more

clear than others, but it is always important to act ethically and work to further establish an

ethically acting world. By establishing and adhering to a code of ethics, considering your ethical

obligations and virtues in all that you do, and by not being too quick to take a stance it is

possible to greatly increase the likelihood that one is remaining ethical in all that they do. It’s

not an easy undertaking by any means, but as engineers it is our obligation to do so, and in the

process help create actions that express our ethics outwardly into the world.