Week 15 - Ethics: Ethical Egoism

 Ethical Egoism

I wanted to talk about the ethical theory of Egoism by brining an example of it in IT and then go a little in-depth to it.

Ethical Egoism states that: "The long-term personal benefit should be the sole criterion for the Right; Bartering is a foundational principle in human relationships - while not ruling out helping others, it is only considered reasonable in case of mutual benefit."

A prime example of this I would want to talk about are independent vulnerability researchers or more accurately the company's attitude towards people like this.

There are multiple examples of someone finding a critical vulnerability in a system which is owned by a company and then the person has ended up getting sued till they are unable to proceed with their passion. To combat this kind of action there were created bug bounty programs.

There are multiple bug bounty programs out there that have many companies, where they can define their scope and then what are considered different criticality of bugs and their monetary reward. For a few examples of bug bounty programs:
You might be confused as to why this is an example for Ethical Egoism? Well companies can start either suing people who are trying to do a good deed to them without expecting payment, then continue to gain a bad reputation for their attitude and deter people from helping them patch their security vulnerabilities.

Instead they created a clever program where the companies can pay mostly a measly price for a personal security researchers to constantly keep an eye on their servers/sites for any vulnerabilities.

The big companies in this case are mostly the sole benefactor of this trade deal, but also the security researches receive some kind of freedom from not being forced to work a full-time job. This is a good example for that reason of ethical egoism.

Both parties are benefiting, while there is a constant barter going on, for what should be considered a critical bug and what the reward should be.

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