Imperative Ethical Behaviours in Making Systems Development and Deployment Compliant with Health & Safety and Wellbeing

Abstract

Literature on systems development has been progressively identifying the importance of social aspects in systems development, to the extent that this process has been considered a socio-technical system. More often than not there is a failure of participants in the recognition, and fulfilment, of ethical duties concerning the concepts of health and safety and wellbeing. The purpose of normative ethics is to scrutinise moral standards for the rightness and wrongness of actions, the ultimate goal being the identification of the true human good. A rational appeal can be made to normative defensible ethical rules in order to arrive at a judicious, morally justifiable judgement. In this paper our first step is to report on the findings of a literature review, which presents the current health and safety issues concerning usage of computers in organisations and the workplace. Secondly, we identify and list some basic generic Deontological and Teleological moral principles and theories that can serve as normative guidelines for addressing the issues pinpointed in the initial step. Thirdly, we prescribe a set of moral rights and duties that must be exercised and fulfilled by protagonists in systems development and software engineering in order for them to exhibit moral behaviour. Each of these suggested actions are substantiated via an appeal to one, or a number of the normative guidelines, identified in the second step. By identifying, and recommending a set of defensible moral obligations that must be fulfilled in the development and deployment of systems, protagonists such as: project managers, software engineering teams, systems analysts, clients, etc. can fulfil their ethical duties, thus increasing the likelihood a deployed system that is compliant with principles of health and safety and wellbeing of its users. Ultimately systems development and deployment must be underpinned with ethical consideration.