This week's reading from TCT focused in on the various aspects of ethics that are involved in constructing technical documents, namely white papers. As the author noted, these ethical issues could be broken down into 3 particular categories: personal ethics, social ethics, and conservational ethics.
Person ethics, from the TCT perspective, encompasses the wide range of values and beliefs held by various individuals, groups and religious organizations. These ethical issues likely cover the widest range of possibilities, as no two people are likely to hold the same perspective on all personal matters. This presents a situation in which a lot of grey area is likely to exist, in which one individual may find something offensive or inappropriate, while another may find no error. In the reading, this seems to be expressed in Einstein's letter. Here, what appears to be a reasonable and logical decision at the time, turns into something that could be, arguably, for the worse.
The next category emphasized, social ethics, covers mainly legal, constitutional issues. I think this category of ethics draws key distinctions to our white paper work, as we will likely be using a lot of information derived from sources other than our own imaginations. In doing this, we'll obviously need to be carefull when dealing with certain copyright and trademark laws, and making sure to properly cite all of the sources that we plan to use. I think this is something that most, if not all, of us are quite familiar with, as we've been reminded constantly in the past, but it is still an issue of great importance.
The last category discussed, namely conservational ethics, examined issues relating to the maintanance and preservation of our environment. This will certainly be the most relevent ethical topic for our group, as our focus will be directly on reducing energy costs and increasing energy efficiency. With this focus, we will need to ensure that the geothermal heat pumps we research and provide as possible solutions are, in fact, serving their purpose and reducing emissions, etc. If it turns out that this doesn't work out properly for one instance of several analyzed cases, all of our credibility will rightfully be lost.
As this chapted reminds us, ethical issues are much more frequent and wide-spread than most people think. Even now, in front of this audience, I should be constantly aware of what I say, and how my writing style and statements are reflected in personal, social, and, maybe less so, conservational ethics.
Ethical Dilemmas
I also felt that the information gathered for the white paper could be a source of social ethical dilemmas because some people forget to properly cite things when using the internet for research. Over the years we have all used the internet to find information on many different topics and for many different reasons. When gathering all this information many people tend to cite things improperly and or just plain steal the information which is considered a social ethical problem and can be punishable by law. My group is also covering the topic of energy consumption on our white paper so conservational ethics will play a big role on our paper.