Implications of recent virus (Trojan Horse) attack

[Sean McLinden]

In article <8909 at smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn at brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>) writes:
:The problem is, ethics and legality have little logical connection
:with each other.  One does not solve an ethical problem by passing
:crime laws.
:[deleted]
:No, ethics and morality need to be self-motivated.

Possibly, but social consciousness is learned. Children aren't born with
a sense for what is right and wrong, they are educated in that area. Most
of the education comes from personal experience: you touch a hot stove
only once. Insofar as what harms other people, we start out with a system
of rules which are replaced by reason when the child has enough experience
to make sense of it. An example is respect for personal property. Have you
ever known a three year old who DIDN'T think that everything was his/hers
to play with? Until they can appreciate the concept of individuality and
stop defining the world in terms only of their own existence, children
cannot understand that some things in their world are other people's
personal property and should be treated, accordingly. This is learned,
it is not divined by the soul.

One problem (sic) with an open academic computing environment is the
fact that real world experience does not contain enough parallels to
allow people to reason about appropriate behavior. At least one can
say that if they do exist they are not obvious to everyone. There is
a perception that whatever a (computer) system allows you to do is
acceptable ("If I'm not allowed to run 32 processes simultaneously
why is MAXPROC defined to be 32?"; "If it isn't 'fair' for me to fire
up 12 LISP jobs in the background why does the shell support '&' ?").

There are also less obvious consequences of behavior that need to be
taught. The solitary programmer often has no knowledge of the administrative
issues surrounding the operation of a facility and the allocation of
resources in that community. How many people who have access to ARPANET
have read the ARPANET policy manual (how many copies of it are there
at YOUR institution)? Many rules of conduct in a programming environment
develop from the experience of people who functioned, for a time, in
a society without such rules. Before British colonialism, much of the
U.S. wilderness was lawless. Social rules and laws evolved from that
pioneer spirit because someone determined that these rules would be
needed in order to support a society. In many cases, generations of
experience were needed before an appropriate formalism existed.

I would agree with the claim that you don't make a person behave
ethically by exposing them to ethics. But you can, at least, provide
an background which will allow them to understand why certain social
conventions exist. Many of these would not be obvious to everyone,
which is the justification for doing it in the first place.

Sean McLinden
Decision Systems Laboratory