ACM President's Letter: ethics

Ethics At its meeting in Atlanta last August, the ACM Council adopted as Bylaw 20 of the Association the Code of Professional Conduct as published in the April 1973 issue of Communications. By so doing, Council met an obligation imposed on i,t by the constitutional amendment passed in 1970 that: Article 6, Section 8: The Council shall adopt, maintain, enforce and conspicuously publish and display to all members and the public a code of professional ethics which shall be binding on all Members, associate members and student members of the Association. At the same time Council took the position that the procedures for enforcing the Code, also published in the April 1973 Communications, needed further study and that, in any case, the constitutional provision that a member may be "admonished, suspended or expelled for demonstrating lack of integrity" by a three-fourths vote of Council after a hearing before it leaves ACM in compliance with the enforcement requirements in Article 6, Section 8. When I wrote the introduction to the publication of the code and enforcement procedures last April, I anticipated that Council would wish to submit the Code to a referendum of the membership before adopting it. Long experience should have taught me never to anticipate the intent of the ACM Council. In adopting the Code as an ACM bylaw, Council took the position that the opinion of the membership was clear in 1970 and that feedback from the publication of the Code last April indicated general approval of the Code if not of the proposed enforcement procedures. The Council vote to adopt the Code was 19 for, 5 against. As President I customarily only vote on Council to break ties. If I had been recorded on this issue, I would have voted in favor, but much less enthusiastically than most of my 19 colleagues. In this letter I would like to convey the reasons why I think this action is at best a quite modest triumph for professionalism. To most members of ACM and to most others in computing, the canons of the Code of Professional Conduct will seem not only reasonable but obvious. There are undoubtedly, however, some in our field who, through inexperience or lack of education , are unsure of what constitutes ethical conduct. Insofar as the ACM Code provides guidance to such people , we have done something useful. Also on the positive side is …