AN ANALYSIS OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTING MACHINERY (ACM) CODE OF ETHICS

As the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Code of Ethics hasan important guiding role in embedding ethics into computingpractice, both in the United States and around the globe, itscontent is important. This paper considers a way of analyzing theCode into ethical categories, inspired by a soft systems 'richpicture' Information Systems (IS) framework. A list of sevenstakeholder categories, together with the major components ofapplied ethical theory, are used to map the elements of the ACMCode. While such an analysis is imprecise due to humaninterpretation, so also is the art of applied ethics. Yet, byframing the ACM Code according to stakeholder roles and basicethical analysis tools, the ACM Code of Ethics becomes more usefulin various ways. Overlaps and gaps can be identified, variousinterpretations of word meanings can be more easily identified anddebated, and, perhaps, most importantly in the global ethicalarena, a better comparison of the ACM with other codes of ethics isfacilitated.