Ethics and the practice of software design

Matteo Turilli ( OUCL )

Over the past few years, the ethical implications of software design have become increasingly problematic, especially when considering distributed systems for information management and automation. Privacy, anonymity, trust and informed consent are only a few examples of the ethical principles that have to be taken into account when designing and implementing these kind of software systems. This talk will focus on the problem of translating ethical requirements into software specifications and is divided into two sections. First, the results of two exploratory case studies will be presented. This field work was conducted with the core development team of "Virtual Organisations for Trials and Epidemiological Studies" (VOTES) and with a medical research team. The aim was to investigate how developers and users conceptualise ethics and cope with ethical requirements in their professional practice. Moving from the fieldwork results, in the second part of the talk, a formalism called "Control Closure" will be introduced. Further explanation will be made of how the Control Closure may be used to describe the degree of distribution of a system at specification time and how this is useful to translate ethical requirements into state based specifications.