A study on the effect of a web-based teaching module and gender on accounting students’ ethical judgements

Accounting educators face the increasingly important task of teaching ethics. Yet, there is little empirical evidence on the effectiveness of different ethics instructional methods on accounting students’ ethical judgements. This study examines whether the ethical decision making of accounting students differs (1) between those instructed through a web-based teaching module and those adopting a more traditional textbook-focused approach, and (2) between gender. A total of 156 students from a second-year financial accounting course participated in the study, with 90 students utilising the web-based module which was designed based on Rest’s (1979) model on ethics development. The other 66 students were instructed through a more traditional teaching approach based on regular class discussions using the ethical problems presented in the textbook. Subsequently, when presented with a whistle-blowing situation, the results of the study suggest that the attitudes and judgements of students instructed through the web-based module were more ethical than those utilising the traditional textbook module. Further, gender was found to impact ethical judgements but only among students who were exposed to the web-based module. The implications of the findings on accounting ethics education are discussed

Artificial morality: Making of the artificial moral agents

Abstract: Artificial Morality is a new, emerging interdisciplinary field that centres around the idea of creating artificial moral agents, or AMAs, by implementing moral competence in artificial systems. AMAs are ought to be autonomous agents capable of socially correct judgements and ethically functional behaviour. This request for moral machines comes from the changes in everyday practice, where artificial systems are being frequently used in a variety of situations from home help and elderly care purposes to banking and court algorithms. It is therefore important to create reliable and responsible machines based on the same ethical principles that society demands from people. New challenges in creating such agents appear. There are philosophical questions about a machine’s potential to be an agent, or mora l agent, in the first place. Then comes the problem of social acceptance of such machines, regardless of their theoretic agency status. As a result of efforts to resolve this problem, there are insinuations of needed additional psychological (emotional and cogn itive) competence in cold moral machines. What makes this endeavour of developing AMAs even harder is the complexity of the technical, engineering aspect of their creation. Implementation approaches such as top- down, bottom-up and hybrid approach aim to find the best way of developing fully moral agents, but they encounter their own problems throughout this effort

Visions, Values, and Videos: Revisiting Envisionings in Service of UbiComp Design for the Home

UbiComp has been envisioned to bring about a future dominated by calm computing technologies making our everyday lives ever more convenient. Yet the same vision has also attracted criticism for encouraging a solitary and passive lifestyle. The aim of this paper is to explore and elaborate these tensions further by examining the human values surrounding future domestic UbiComp solutions. Drawing on envisioning and contravisioning, we probe members of the public (N=28) through the presentation and focus group discussion of two contrasting animated video scenarios, where one is inspired by "calm" and the other by "engaging" visions of future UbiComp technology. By analysing the reasoning of our participants, we identify and elaborate a number of relevant values involved in balancing the two perspectives. In conclusion, we articulate practically applicable takeaways in the form of a set of key design questions and challenges.Comment: DIS'20, July 6-10, 2020, Eindhoven, Netherland

Four Lenses for Designing Morally Engaging Games

Historically the focus of moral decision-making in games has been narrow, mostly confined to challenges of moral judgement (deciding right and wrong). In this paper, we look to moral psychology to get a broader view of the skills involved in ethical behaviour and how they may be employed in games. Following the Four Component Model of Rest and colleagues, we identify four “lenses” – perspectives for considering moral gameplay in terms of focus, sensitivity, judgement and action – and describe the design problems raised by each. To conclude, we analyse two recent games, The Walking Dead and Papers, Please, and show how the lenses give us insight into important design differences between them

Focus, Sensitivity, Judgement, Action: Four Lenses for Designing Morally Engaging Games

Historically the focus of moral decision-making in games has been narrow, mostly confined to challenges of moral judgement (deciding right and wrong). In this paper, we look to moral psychology to get a broader view of the skills involved in ethical behaviour and how these skills can be employed in games. Following the Four Component Model of Rest and colleagues, we identify four “lenses” – perspectives for considering moral gameplay in terms of focus, sensitivity, judgement and action – and describe the design problems raised by each. To conclude, we analyse two recent games, The Walking Dead and Papers, Please, and show how the lenses give us insight into important design differences between these games

Evaluation based on critical systems heuristics

Introduction: Critical systems heuristics (CSH) draws on the substantive work and philosophy of C. West Churchman, a systems engineer who, along with Russell Ackoff during the 1950s and 1960s, defined operations research in the United States. Churchman later pioneered developments in the 1970s of what is now known as 'soft' and 'critical' systemic thinking and practice in the domain of social or human activity systems. Churchman died in 2004. His legacy lies in signalling the importance of being alert to value-laden boundary judgements when making evaluations. Boundaries are what we socially construct in designing and evaluating any human activity system of interest (e.g., any situation of concern from a kinship group, an organisation, or a larger entity such as a national health system). The primary boundary of any human activity systems is defined by 'purpose'. Churchman's work is characterised by a continual ethical commitment to the overarching purpose of improved human well-being. In order to fulfil such purposeful activity, there is always a need to broaden inquiry from the particular system of focus so as to appreciate what Churchman calls the total relevant system. The effectiveness and efficiency of a system of interest depends on the actual boundary judgements associated with that system of interest. Churchman first identified 9 conditions or categories (including the category 'purpose�) associated with any purposeful system of interest in his book The Design of Inquiring Systems [1, 2]. He later extended these to 12 categories in a book provocatively entitled The Systems Approach and Its Enemies, significantly taking into account 3 extra factors (�enemies�) that lie outside the actual system of interest but which can be affected by, and therein have an effect on, the performance of the system [1, 2]. In the early 1980s a doctorate student of Churchman from Switzerland, Werner Ulrich, translated Churchman's 12 categories into an operational set of 12 questions which he called critical systems heuristics [3]. Ulrich returned to Switzerland and worked with CSH as a public health and social welfare policy analyst and program evaluator [4]. Section 2 introduces the basic toolbox of CSH, along with suggestions on when to use it and the benefits of its use. Section 3 will guide you through a suggested operational use of CSH questions in a process of evaluation. Section 4 provides a summary of an extensive case study in which CSH was used for evaluating the role of public participation in natural resource-use planning. Section 5 provides some advice for the practitioner in developing skills on using CSH for evaluation

Reflections on Mira : interactive evaluation in information retrieval

Evaluation in information retrieval (IR) has focussed largely on noninteractive evaluation of text retrieval systems. This is increasingly at odds with how people use modern IR systems: in highly interactive settings to access linked, multimedia information. Furthermore, this approach ignores potential improvements through better interface design. In 1996 the Commission of the European Union Information Technologies Programme, funded a three year working group, Mira, to discuss and advance research in the area of evaluation frameworks for interactive and multimedia IR applications. Led by Keith van Rijsbergen, Steve Draper and myself from Glasgow University, this working group brought together many of the leading researchers in the evaluation domain from both the IR and human computer interaction (HCI) communities. This paper presents my personal view of the main lines of discussion that took place throughout Mira: importing and adapting evaluation techniques from HCI, evaluating at different levels as appropriate, evaluating against different types of relevance and the new challenges that drive the need for rethinking the old evaluation approaches. The paper concludes that we need to consider more varied forms of evaluation to complement engine evaluation

Bells that still can ring: systems thinking in practice

Complexity science has generated significant insight regarding the interrelatedness of factors and actors constituting our real world and emergent effects from such interrelationships. But the translation of such rich insight towards developing appropriate tools for improving real world situations of change and uncertainty provides a further significant challenge. Systems thinking in practice is a heuristic framework based upon ideas of boundary critique for guiding the use and development of tools from different traditions in managing complex realities. By reference to five systems approaches, each embodying more than 30 years of experiential use, three interrelated features of the framework are drawn out – contexts of systemic change, practitioners as change agents, and tools as systems constructs that can themselves change through adaptation. The ‘bells that still can ring’ refer to tools associated with the Systems tradition which have demonstrable capacity to change and adapt by continual iteration with changing context of use and different practitioners using them. It is in the practice of using such tools whilst being aware of significant ‘cracks’ associated with traps in managing complex realities that enables systems thinking in practice to evolve. Complexity tools as examples of systems thinking can inadvertently invite traps of reductionism within contexts, dogmatism amongst practitioners, and fetishism of our tools as conceptual constructs associated with ultimately undeliverable promises towards achieving holism and pluralism. The heuristic provides a guiding framework on monitoring the development of tools from different traditions for improving complex realities and avoiding such traps

The Fact/Value Dichotomy: Revisiting Putnam and Habermas

Abstract Under the influence of Hilary Putnam’s collapse of the fact/value dichotomy, a resurging approach that challenges the movements of American pragmatism and discourse ethics, I tease out in the first section of my paper the demand for the warranted assertibility hypothesis in Putnam’s sense that may be possible, relying on moral realism to get rid of ‘rampant Platonism’. Tracing back to ‘communicative action’ or the Habermasian way that puts forward the reciprocal understanding of discourse instigates the idea of life-world as composed of ‘culturally transmitted and linguistically organized stock of interpretative patterns’, this section looks for whether Habermas’ psychoanalysis of prolonged discussion can accord with Putnam’s thick ethical terms or not. The last section of the paper pitfalls Putnam’s stance to accepting Habermas’ ‘discourse ethics’ that centers around the context of entangling ‘rational thoughts’ to ‘communication’, but he introduces the idea of fallibilism in a rational query that also attacks the Habermasian metaphysical idea of the validity of ethical statements that goes towards the truth. My next attempt is to see whether Putnam’s objective dictum towards morality that resonates the collapse of fact/value dichotomy from a universalistic stand can successfully evade Rorty’s naive realism (structured by linguistic representation) and Habermas’ ‘sociologism about values’ (a kind of minimalist ethics depending on solidarity) respectively. This sort of claim insists on a universalizable pattern of culture-relative value. I consider that the idea of a fact/value dichotomy engages with the inextricable entanglement between the normative and descriptive content, besides the epistemic values having exclusively intertwined with the structure of factual discourse that intends towards collapsing the fact/value dichotomy, a subjective universalizability predilection