A Pragmatic Framework for Ethical Decision Making: The Limits of Professional Codes

The need for professionals to make informed ethical choices in design and management of information systems is more important than ever. However, the relative newness of the information profession and the dynamism of information technology mean that traditional foundational approaches to ethics, while useful, are inadequate for today's designers and managers. This paper proposes a pragmatic ethical framework that suggests a possible relationship between the maturity and dynamism of a professional field to different approaches to ethical decision making. It concludes that relatively new fields such as software engineering can benefit from process-based approaches, and that such fields are well positioned to inform other dynamic professions that face similar challenges in making ethical decisions.