Writing 00

What does it mean to be an ethically responsible person and is that something you strive for?

This week’s readings and class discussions have given me the opportunity to reflect upon responsibility: what it means to be ethically responsible, what my duties and obligations are, and how I should be held accountable for the consequences of my actions, both as an engineer and as a human being.

I believe that a lot of the responsibility that I hold stems from the talents that I’ve been given and the blessings that I’ve received. I’ve been fortunate throughout my entire life to have a family that loves and supports me, to have been provided with endless opportunity and a quality education, to have been given talents that have allowed me to produce and succeed in much of what I’ve worked at – the list goes on. As a result of all this good that has been given to me, I know that I have an obligation to try and give back and spread all this good to the world around me. But I find the difficulty lies in determining how I should go about this: how much good am I obligated to do and what exactly should I be doing? how do I change lives as a 20-year old college student coding at my desk?

We talked a lot in class about the idea of coding as a superpower, and I understand why this notion developed and how it could be inspiring to young people. But, I don’t think at this stage in my education that I would really classify it as that. My friends that aren’t computer science majors or family members that aren’t “tech-savvy” would be considerably more apt to view coding as a superpower or as somewhat “magical” simply because they don’t understand it. My friends do often marvel that the projects I work on and the things I’ve created come from lines and lines of code that seem so foreign to them. More often than not, my response is that they could probably be doing exactly what I’m doing too, had they chosen to go into this field and learn it. In the same way that I learned to code, so could they. I think programmers therefore view themselves as people with a lot less “superpower” than those who have never programmed might view them as. Stemming from this, as Jeff Atwood talks about in his “To Serve Man, with Software” blog post, it’s probably the case that most programmers don’t think of themselves as people with power to change the world. I know I certainly don’t think of myself in this way and I think I’d find myself getting overwhelmed if I did, if I really considered myself someone who could have an impact that large. But yet when I return to the idea of responsibility – isn’t that precisely my duty, my obligation because of all the gifts I’ve been given?

Professor Bui presented a notion in class that served as a prospective answer to this question for me, an answer that I honestly found very comforting. He proposed that being your best self, using your talents to the fullest, and being the ultimate version of yourself in all aspects of your life is a way of giving back and making a positive impact on the world. I can thus fulfill my duties by bettering myself and offering the best version of myself to the world. I find this view reassuring because it seems more attainable- the world at large seems out of my control but the person that I am is in my control. This view also presents a challenge to determine what that best self is and how to reach it. It challenges me to assess my daily actions and interactions- Am I actually putting my best effort into nurturing the relationships that I have in my life or am I taking them for granted? Am I doing things with good, purposeful intention or strictly out of habit? It further challenges me to cultivate my talents and requires me to reflect on and assess what my talents truly are- Is coding my primary talent? Or is it a skill I’ve developed? Are there other talents I have that I’m neglecting?

In essence, the question of what an ethically responsible person is has left me with a lot more questions although there is no question that it is indeed something I strive to be. When I first read this prompt prior to any discussion this week, my initial thought was to view it through the lens of the field of ethics; that is, to consider all the ethical frameworks and theories I had read about, contemplate which one I thought to be most correct in most situations and develop my own definition of an “ethically responsible person” with these frameworks as a basis. I’ve realized now that there’s a lot more to it and whether or not I come to a clear-cut definition, just thinking about these topics – being aware – or to use the term used by Samuel Florman in his Engineering Ethics discussion- being “conscientious” – is a step in the right direction.