October 16th, 2007
Software morality
Charles Cooper recently interviewed Grady Booch, one of the developers of the Unified Modeling Language (UML), on the subject of software morality. Mr. Booch, in short, defended the application of moral principles to software development as a means by which to curtail the more negative uses of software (among other things).
To a certain extent, I can understand his concerns. It’s one thing to write software that, say, manages your finances (even though small businesses and hitmen might find it equally useful). It’s another thing to build software that guides cruise missiles (though I can see how some could defend that), or worse, skims money from other people’s accounts and sends it to an account in the Cayman islands. Software is powerful stuff, and like a kitchen knife, can be used for good or ill. Obviously, sensible people shouldn’t sit back and take a laissez-faire attitude to how their creations are used.
You always have to be careful, however, when you start to introduce something as slippery as morality into something as utilitarian as software. Take the Oracle database. Some see it as merely an enterprise-class database within which to store your data. Other might view it as “evil” on the basis of it being proprietary software.
The morality flag can be raised by pretty much any group to defend their point of view, and each would be equally justified in doing so given their subjective definition of morality. Morality can be linked to personal biases against private property. It can be linked to what people said 1400-2000 years ago in a book many consider to be sacred. It can be linked to the rantings of a 50’s pulp fiction writer who had this bizarre antipathy towards psychiatry and a tendency to blame the world’s problems on space aliens.
Ethics matter in the world of business. The rule of law depends on them, as government can only do so much to regulate things and keep buyers and sellers honest. Economics implies a kind of social compact, and you can’t just impose the necessary restrictions from the center, as totalitarianism isn’t usually conducive to vibrant economies.
Even so, it’s still worth being careful when the subject turns to “morality.” It would be nice, in recognition of the productivity-enhancing goals of software, to have a simple black and white equation that would make determinations of morality in software as easy as pressing a button and getting a result. That, however, is pretty much impossible.
Maybe that’s the point. People who truly understand the slippery nature of morality would do well to limit its application to the realm of personal choice. Better to consign uncertainties to areas that only affect ones own actions (however much one might speak out in defense of one’s own conception of morality) than to think one has a special link into the mind of “god” (or just “what is”) and try to impose that definition on everyone.
Anyway, I’m leaving rainy Los Angeles this morning to spend a day in (likely) rainy San Francisco.
John Carroll has delivered his opinion on ZDNet since the last millennium. Since May 2008, he is no longer a Microsoft employee. He is currently working at a unified messaging-related startup. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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