Code is Ethics — Formal Techniques for a Better World

Computers are involved in our every-day life, making increasingly consequential decisions. This raises the question of the ethics of these decisions, for example when autonomous cars are concerned. We argue that the ethics of the decisions taken by a computer are in fact those of the developers, encoded in the program ("code is ethics"). This encoding is mostly implicit — programmers and users are often even not aware of the implicit decisions that are being made before the program is even run. We suggest that formal methods are an excellent way to make the criteria under which these decisions are taken explicit, because formal specifications are more concise, abstract and clearer than code, This way, it becomes clear why systems act the way they do, and where the responsibility for their behaviour lies.