The abdication of IT ethical responsibility: The "Myth of Amoral Computing and Information Technology" permeates the public as well as the business mind, implicitly accepts the technological imperative, and undermines the ethical responsibility of business.

The lack of awareness of the ethical implications of the information age is what I call the "myth of amoral computing and information technology." The myth says that computers are not good or bad, information systems are not good or bad - they simply have a logic and rationale of their own. To speak of ethics with respect to them is to make a category mistake. Hence, when the computer is down, that is no one's fault. When programs malfunction or software has bugs, that is no one's fault. In general, anything that has to do with computers and information technology has a life of its own and is not susceptible to moral evaluation or blame or censure.

This myth is understandable in part because so few people in or out of business truly understand computing and information technology. They are tools that we non-techies like to have and use. But we do not take ethical responsibility for them, and because of our ignorance, we do not expect anyone else to take ethical responsibility for them. The result is a failure both to accept and to assign responsibility.

In businesses in the more developed countries, management for the most part still tends to think of information systems and information technology as something that is not central to the organization. Most managers do not understand them, and tend to ignore them. IS and IT offices are not typically center stage at corporate headquarters, and the typical manager is not a computer techie. The disconnect between corporate leaders and their technical divisions, which often are still off in a back set of rooms and considered part of the support structure and not part of the core business, is the clearest indication that firms have not moved consciously into the information age. Yet if we are truly in a developing information age, then IS and IT need to be at the center of things, and management has to both understand them and take responsibility for them.

The phenomenon of the Y2K problem to which I referred is symptomatic of the myth of amoral computing and information technology. We all know about the Y2K problem. And we know that law firms throughout the U.S., probably throughout the world, are gearing up to handle suits and defend companies against suits for damages as a result of companies failing to solve their Y2K problems in time. Yet amidst all the publicity, there is scarcely any mention of moral blame or discussion of the moral dimensions of the problem. It's as if computer programmers are not responsible for failing to fix programs earlier; managers are not responsible for making sure their products are Y2K compliant; or firms are not responsible for addressing their Y2K problems before they reached crisis proportions. The failure of any moral discussion is almost unbelievable, considering the general concern with business ethics in so many other areas.

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