Archive for the 'Ethics' Category

Why we’ve all gone a bit “Daily Mail”

Thursday, August 10th, 2006

So the other day I got this email from a friend of mine…

Do you remember February 1993 when a young 3 yr old was taken from Liverpool, United Kingdom, by two 10-year-old boys.Jamie Bulger walked away from his mother for only a second and Jon Venables took his hand and led him out of the mall with his friend Robert Thompson.They took Jamie on a walk for over 2 and a half miles, Along the way stopping every now and again to torture the poor little boy who was
crying constantly for his mummy.

What these two boys did was so horrendous that Jamie’s mother was forbidden to identify his body.

They then left his beaten small body on the tracks so a train could run him over to hide the mess they had created. These two boys, even being boys, understood what they did was wrong, hence trying to make it look like an accident.

This week Lady Justice Butler-Sloss has awarded the two boys anonymity for the rest of their lives when they leave custody with new identities. They will also leave early this year only serving just over half of
their sentence. They are being relocated to Australia to live out the rest oftheir lives. (didn’t think we were a convict settlement anymore)
They disgustingly and violently took Jamie’s life away in return they each get a new life.Please .. If you feel as strongly as we do, that this is a grave miscarriage of justice .. Copy entire email and paste into new email .then add your name at the end, and send it to everyone you can!

If you are the 500th person to sign, please forward this e-mail to:>cust.ser.cs@gtnet.gov.uk and attention it to Lady Justice Butler-Sloss.

Then start the list over again and send to your friends and family.
The Love-Bug virus took less that 72 hours to reach the world. I hope this one does as well.We need to protect our family and friends from creatures like Robert and Jon. One day they maybe living next door to you and your small children or your grandchildren, without your knowledge.

What is your first feeling when reading this? Mine was, “oh god this was such an awful crime” and the details of the actual email were a lot more graphic than I’ve bought myself to replicate here. It was sickening what happened to poor little Jamie Bulger.

However, my second reaction was, “why the hell is my friend sending me this?” Aside from the absurdity that loads of aussies had signed it, (obviously scared to death that two English “monsters” were about to be let loose into their land) this happened in 2001!

Funnily enough it is indeed a hoax Hoax Slayer

However, all this got me thinking..

In a tone that is reminescent of that used by the Daily Mail, the writers of the email thought that 8 years in prison was a “grave miscarriage of justice”. As do others BBC News Link. Michael Howard tried to get the minimum time they spent in custody increased and was later criticised by the European Court of Human Rights.
I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking this is just another case of media-driven justice in the making.

Firstly 8 years might not seem that long to you, but imagine if you were 10 years old? Think about all the things that happened to you between the age of 10 and the day you drank you first legal pint. Maybe you should read the BBC audience guidelines (6 -12) to jog your memory: BBC Audience Data particularly note that “1 in 3 [children] now live in relative poverty compared to only 1 in 10 in the early 1970s”

Secondly, a young offender’s institute is far from a walk in the park. It’s a pretty lawless environment in itself, BBC News Living with rats, rapists, druggies and murderers must be great fun. No doubt the tabloids would have us believe that they watched tele all day in comfort drinking tea and eating chocolate hob nobs, oblivious to their crime - I doubt it.
In 2000 the BBC World Service compared the cases of Bulger and a Norwegian case in the city of Trondheim BBC World Service People

“On 15th October 1994 Silje Raedergard was playing with friends on a local football field. She had played with the two boys many times, but this time the game turned rough. Whilst playing snow castles, the two boys became aggressive. They stripped Raedergard, stoned her and when she fell unconscious they panicked and ran, leaving her to die in the snow..”

“The news of Raedergard’s death shocked the small town. With a population of 135,000, the city of Trondheim had only experienced two murders in the six years prior to her death. However instead of expressing anger and revenge, the local community felt grief and a level of responsibility.”

The two perpetrators of this hideous crime were children, but no doubt a portion of the British public would have happily seen them hanged at the time they were covicted, thrown rotten vedge and watched them die a slow painful death before announcing that “justice had finally been done”. We would send emails asking for them to be named and shamed so that a mob can go and pay them a visit just like in “the good old days”.

In contrast, the Norwegian community took collective responsibility for what had happened and also viewed the perpetrators as victims, ensuring that they got back to “normal” lives as quickly as possible and going through thorough psychiatric help.

In Britain we constantly believe that the justice system is failing us but we rarely stop to think that maybe we are failing our children.

In Norway they have moved on from medieval times, if only Britain could do that too.
More comment here: BBC News

NOTE: THESE ARE THE PERSONAL VIEWS OF STEPHANIE CHAMBERLAIN AND ARE NO WAY ENDORSED BY BIT10 ltd

Posted in Ethics, Philosophy, Politics | No Comments »

XP2006 Day 4: Moral Stance of UCD

Friday, June 23rd, 2006

Is there really a moral stance for UCD?

I was talking to a guy called Robert Biddle at the conference who made this excellent point:

UCD practitioners qualify what they do from a moral stance saying that the user should be the centre of the development process because the user’s goals should drive the development process. However, there are two reasons why this isn’t true.

  1. UCD practitioners aren’t always acting in the interests of the user. For instance, take the case of a parking ticket machine. The user’s goal is to park and go shopping. Their goal does not include paying for parking, this is in fact the customers goal (the company who own the car park/machine). Therefore, in making the user pay for a ticket the UCD practitioner is making the user act in the interest of the customer and not the user.
  2. Secondly, who says the user has a “moral right” anyway? If one is designing a missile launcher it could be argued by the pacifist that the moral thing to do would be to make the missile launcher as unusable as possible so that people wouldn’t be killed!

In response to this I would also make two further points.

  1. Although the user’s goal is to park and shop and NOT to pay for a ticket they also have another goal: not to pay more money than they need to. When looking at any system we place boundaries on where the system ends and the rest of the world begins. If one takes the system as a complete whole by including concepts of paying versus the concept of being penalised for not paying, the user’s goal becomes “to park, shop and pay for the least amount of money possible”. In which case the UCD practitioner is working in favour of the user in relation to this goal.

However, Robert’s example was not of a ticket machine but of an ATM. The user’s goal (he suggests) is to take money out (maybe more than he has) and not have the bank charge him for it. However, my point would be that this is including the outside world as part of the system rather than working with the boundaries that a UCD practitioner would normally work within i.e. within the system’s boundaries. By saying that the user’s goal is to take money and not be charged is presuming that not charging the individual is good for them. This is looking at the user goals outside of the system boundaries and within the world outside of it. However, if the boundaries of the system are stretched so far that we begin making moral judgements then I could then argue that there are instances where the bank is actually being moral by charging the ATM user. This is because the charge is encouraging the user to be better at handling his money by not going overdrawn and being in debt! In essence we could argue for days but this would be outside of the UCD practitioners boundaries of practice.

However, if moral judgements are outside of the UCD practitioner’s realm of practice there are other, more fundamental issues at stake. For instance, in response to point 2, Helen Sharp made the point that anyone working in IT or systems design should ask themselves about the values of the people they work for and the values of the user when using the systems they are designing. This would mean that within the UCD process there is a value judgement before one starts work as to whether the work being carried out is morally reprehensible or not.

This is a good point but again opens up the question as to how far the boundaries stretch. If the UCD practitioner now has to examine how the system he/she is designing affects others from a moral perspective, rather than simply from a user perspective they are dangerously close to:

  1. being accused of straying from the User-Centred Design process altogether in favour of something else entirely (”Human-Centred Design” so that the good of humans not just users are central to system design). In which case they aren’t UCD practitioners at all and have to cope with the questions around which and how many humans are served.
  2. In response to Biddle’s claim that they are not “user-centred” but “customer-centred”, they cannot use my previous argument of “setting system boundaries”. In this argument, it is the system boundaries that govern the user’s goals alone. If the boundaries are stretched to include the goals of other agents outside of the system, then the UCD practitioner is not only in danger of straying from the task in hand into the field of moral philosophy but also into value judgements about which agent’s goals are the most important or morally sound. Again, the inclusion of other agents outside of the system boundaries mean that the UCD practitioner fails to remain user-centric.

There is potentially only one way out of this dilemma for the UCD practitioner. The practice following acceptance of the assignment by the UCD practitioner, must be separated from the moral judgement that takes place before the assignment is accepted. If we take medicine as an example, a surgeon may turn down an operation which will result in active termination of a life (such as an abortion) because he is in effect “siding” with the unborn patient over that of the mother patient. In this instance, the “customer” could be seen as the hospital trust who have set the moral boundaries for the surgeon’s work if he accepts the assignment. However, he isn’t allowed to take the operation and then decide to act in the interests of the un-born child rather than the mother.

In the same way, when a UCD practitoner takes on an assignment, they are already accecpting the customer’s point of view and accepting that the user’s goal is convergent with that of the customer’s (at least to some degree). When a UCD practitioner is faced with having to design a missile launcher he/she must first ask whether they can morally work for the customer and in accepting to work for that customer they are sautomatically setting the moral boundaries in which they will work. In doing this they are also accepting the system boundaries, in the case of the missile launcher, accepting that the soldier working the launcher won’t suddently suffer a crisis of conscience and want the launcher not to work and in the case of the cash machine, that the user goals when taking money out of the cashpoint are to recieve cash in line with the bank’s expectations.

Posted in Agile, Ethics, Religion, Techniques, Technology, UCD, Web/Tech, XP2006 | No Comments »