Growth and Training Impact in IT: A Measure of Ethical Reasoning

As technological advances reshape society and the workplace, the need for ethically-grounded information technology professionals has become paramount. Recognizing the importance of pursuing the ethical life as well as the unique ethical challenges posed by rapidly evolving technologies, scholars have recently debated how best to incorporate ethical instruction in the information technology (IT) curriculum. The controversy lies not so much in whether ethics should be taught, but rather in how to evaluate the effectiveness of particular pedagogical practices vis-à-vis their impact on the ethical development of IT students. One ethicist, Muriel Bebeau, suggests that a system of "intermediate concepts" should be adopted in particular disciplines. This review of the literature traces the developing demand for and concern about ethical training in the IT field and suggests an application of Bebeau's intermediate stages theory in the IT field.