Carlos Tamez
20204653
PHIL-2393
Case 23
Member Support by IEEE In the mid 1970’s the NYCPD operated an online computerized police car dispatching system called SPRINT. A dispatcher would receive a distress call and upon entering an address, SPRINT would display the location and notify the nearest patrol car. This would help to reduce the response time for emergency calls, and the SPRINT system could have saved many lives.

In 1977 the PROMIS system was proposed by NYC prosecutors, to be used and mounted on the same host computer as SPRINT. PROMIS was to aid prosecutors and arresting officers with a system that would serve as a database of information for defendants. Containing valuable information such as names, addresses of witnesses, …show more content…
Soon after the project director hired Virginia Edgerton, an experienced system analyst. Edgerton was assigned to be the project’s senior information scientist to work directly under the project director. Shortly after joining the project. Edgerton saw a potential flaw in the system that if adding an additional task to the host computer could potentially compromise the response time SPRINT was known for. After Edgerton expressed her concern to the project director, she was shot down and instead was told to leave the matter alone. Edgerton then proceeded to seek advice from her professional society, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). After an electrical engineering professor at Columbia University supported her concern, she sent a memorandum to the project director, which was rejected a second time.
Immediately following this, Edgerton sent copies of the same memorandum to the Circle Project Committee. Soon after Edgerton was discharged from her duties as senior information analyst by the project director. The reason being that she had disobeyed his orders by going to the Circle Project committee with her claim. Although the project director stated that the issue was under ongoing discussions by the NYPD computer team, there was no evidence to back his …show more content…
After she was discharged Edgerton went on to form a small company selling data-processing devices.
This case has a situation and the problem, the situation being adding PROMIS system to the same server that ran SPRINT, which potentially can me the SPRINT system’s response time increase, and the problem was that, After Virginia Edgerton told the project director about this potential problem he did not care and told her to drop the matter.
The two courses of action based on the Utilitarianism and Ethical Egoism theories, could be this two courses of action, which were 1. Edgerton keeping the potential overload problem to him self. 2. Edgerton following the project director’s orders and do nothing. The ethical theory that can be applied is, Utilitarianism which is choosing the action that maximizes total positive value, minus total negative value for everyone who was involved on the project. This ethical theory seems to support this case, since it is also a better decision for her to take in order to get the maximum benefits for her without caring or taking into consideration other people