 This presentation sets up your studies in Lessons 2 and 3 of Geography 581. We'll ground our studies in moral philosophy, at least to the extent of a minimum conception of morality. We'll go on to consider the distinction between the ordinary morality that applies to everyone and the special moral obligations that distinguish members of a profession from everyone else. You'll learn that the essence of morality is reasoning, and you'll learn to apply moral reasoning skills to make sound decisions about practical ethical challenges that confront geospatial professionals. And, hopefully, you'll begin to articulate a moral ideal for your own professional aspirations. We begin by reading the first chapter of Father and Son team James and Stuart Rachel's primer on moral philosophy. In response to the question, what is morality, they offer a minimum conception. They write, morality is, at the very least, the effort to guide one's conduct by reason. That is, to do what there are the best reasons for doing, while giving equal weight to the interests of each individual who will be affected by what one does. They discuss several case studies to illustrate what moral reasoning looks like. As I mentioned in my introductory remarks, my first formal exposure to ethics was a graduate course in environmental ethics I took at the University of Wisconsin. I was deeply impressed by the rigor of philosophical reasoning and humbled, too, by the amount of reading, analysis, and writing we were expected to do. One of the philosophers we studied was Aldo Leopold. In his renowned 1949 essay, The Land Ethic, Leopold argued that a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise. Environmental ethics is an example of applied or practical ethics, which are concerned with the application of moral theory to real-world ethical challenges. Dennis Thompson, founding director of the Ethics Center at Harvard, observed that philosophical principles cannot be applied in any straightforward way to particular problems and policies. Practical ethics, he points out, is the discipline that bridges the gap between moral philosophy and the ethical challenges that confront people and institutions in day-to-day life. Other examples of applied or professional ethics are bioethics, business ethics, engineering ethics, and perhaps spatial data science ethics. At the advice of Michael Davis, the author of this article, we tread lightly into moral theory in this course. Michael advises that it's fine for non-philosophers like me to teach professional ethics, but not to try to teach moral philosophy, because we'll only screw it up. When my collaborators Dawn Wright, Francis Harvey, and I first asked the National Science Foundation for support to develop educational resources for GIS ethics, I was unaware of the distinction between moral philosophy and applied ethics. NSF reviewers corrected that when they rejected our first grant request, but encouraged us to reapply after getting involved with the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics. I met Michael Davis at one of the Association's annual conferences. He and a couple of his colleagues agreed to join our project, which the NSF subsequently approved. Our second reading in Lesson 2 is the introductory chapter of Davis's book, Profession, Code, and Ethics. After pointing out that, just as nobody likes a wise guy, nobody likes a definition, Davis takes the entire chapter to explain his definition of profession. A key feature of his argument is that the moral obligations codified in professional ethics codes above and beyond ordinary morality are the defining characteristics of professions themselves. Beyond that, Davis also poses the notion of a moral ideal to which practitioners in a given profession aspire. Aldo Leopold's land ethic, for example, might be a moral ideal for environmental scientists and planners. Medical professionals aspire to eradicate disease. Lawyers' moral ideal is justice. No snickering now. Davis' argument challenges us to think if GIS, or Spatial Data Science, is a profession, what is its moral ideal? What's yours? Think about it. Davis argued that the moral obligations incumbent on professionals go beyond what the law, the market, and ordinary morality would otherwise require. It's important to keep in mind that law and policy are often intertwined with ethical issues. Our first reading in Lesson 3 is Dan Sweeney's chapter in the Sage Handbook on GIS and Society. Dan is a geographer, former NSF program director, and most recently vice president for research and innovation at Virginia Tech. His chapter provides an overview of legal and ethical issues arising from the use of geospatial technologies. Dan identifies three categories of major legal issues. First, privacy and data accessibility. Second, intellectual property, copyright, and data licensing issues. And third, international law. Regarding ethics, he observes that we have yet to define what actions are acceptable and under what circumstances our use of geospatial technologies is ethical and moral. While reading his chapter, you should consider the ways in which the manuscript could be revised today, more than a decade after its publication. As you'll read in Lesson 2, Michael Davis is also interested in the moral authority of professional codes. There have been several organized efforts to define standards of ethical behavior for geospatial professionals. The Urban and Regional Information Systems Association, the American Society for Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing, and other related professional and scientific organizations have published codes of ethics. A ERISA committee led by Will Craig developed a GIS Code of Ethics beginning in 1993. In 2004, the newly founded GIS Certification Institute included the code along with a complimentary set of rules of conduct in its procedure for certifying GIS professionals. In 2010, a task force of the NSF-funded Geotech Center and the U.S. Department of Labor published the first edition of a geospatial technology competency model, which includes competencies in integrity, professionalism, and business ethics. And in 2021, the Association for Geographic Information and the Ethical Geoproject of the American Geographical Association published a locus charter that proposes 10 principles for the responsible use of location data. You'll get acquainted with these projects in Lesson 3, if you aren't already. Some scholars have been interested more in questioning than defining the ethics of GIS. Early on, Jeremy Crampton critiqued ethics codes as internalist judgments of good behavior, arguing that contextualized, externalist ethical analysis is also necessary. His critique and others like it later coalesced as the intellectual stance known as critical GIS. Nadine Sherman's article Trouble in the Heartland recounts the widening gulf of misunderstanding and mistrust that separated critical scholars from proponents and practitioners of GIS and related technologies in the 1990s. I'll ask you to read her story in Lesson 3. And if you wish to dig into contemporary critical GIS or digital mapping, as some now prefer to call it, you do well to read Matt Wilson's 2017 book New Lines. Matt points out that critical geographers are drawn toward GIScience as a way to analyze issues related to social and environmental justice. Geographic information systems are more than what GIS users and developers tell us they are, he writes. To call into question those stories effectively establishes an inside and an outside of critique. The spectrum of perspectives or stances on the ethics of geospatial technologies from questioning to defining is represented in the three entries on ethics published in the GIS and T body of knowledge. Crampton's entry presents his critical outside perspective on ethics. Nancy Obermeyer, a leading voice in the professionalization of GIS for over 30 years, represents the inside perspective. My entry is meant to bridge the other two. A common thread across the spectrum is, or should be, I believe, the centrality of reasoning to ethical problem solving. That brings us back to the GIS professional ethics project. Michael Davis writes, cases are opportunities to exercise judgment. The student who has to decide how to resolve an ethics case is better equipped to decide a case of that kind than one who has never thought about the subject. If she has also had to present her decision, hear it criticized, and respond to that criticism, she will be even better prepared to think through an actual problem of that kind, and so more likely to make the right choice in practice. As a consulting philosopher to the GIS professional ethics project, Davis encouraged us to develop case studies to support teaching professional ethics by the case method. Effective ethics cases may be based on actual events or plausible stories. You'll hear an example of an actual event in your case study analysis assignment in Lesson 3. The story goes like this. Imagine yourself an independent GIS services contractor who's been offered a lucrative contract by a municipal government to map Muslim neighborhoods in a major city. City police intend the project to identify enclaves of Muslims who are susceptible to radicalization and to target outreach activities designed to mitigate the risk of domestic terrorist attacks. On the other hand, community leaders and others oppose the plan as geographic profiling. Should you accept the contract, decline it, or respond in some other way? Unless you're willing to go with your gut, the right decision may not be obvious to you. Several provisions of the GIS Code of Ethics and GISCI rules of conduct pertain, but no one provides decisive guidance. In such a non-trivial ethical case, moral reasoning is more likely than intuition to lead to a good decision. Moral reasoning is the process of determining the difference between right and wrong in a rational way. Moral reasoning is needed to resolve ethical problems that do not present alternatives that are obviously right or wrong. It is a learned skill that can be honed by practice. Davis's Seven Step Guide is a useful framework for helping us acquire and hone these skills. You'll apply Davis's framework to analyze a case study of your choice in Lesson 3. You'll find a variety of cases to choose from at GISethics.org. I'll finish now by summing up Lessons 2 and 3. Lesson 2 is a one-week module in which I ask you to read a couple of chapters, then present a live or recorded presentation that addresses one of a series of questions I posed. You can opt for a question of your own if you wish, but please check with me first. Lesson 3 spans two weeks. In the first, I ask you to read a longer list of references, then pick an ethics case study from the collection at GISethics.org. You'll announce your choice in a discussion forum post, along with your brief comments about the relevance of the assigned readings. In the next week, you will analyze your chosen case study using Davis's Seven Step Decision Making Framework. Then, you'll present your analysis in a live or recorded presentation. Please check our Canvas calendar for meeting dates and assignment due dates. If you have questions or comments about any of this, please post them in the discussion forum.