A responsibility ethics for audit expert systems

To effectively pursue ethical action, the business community must recognize that the fundamental form of human association is not the "social contract " into which persons enter as atomic individuals, making partial commitment s to each other for the purpose of gaining limited common ends or of satisf ying certain laws. The fundamental form of human association is rather the face to face community in which ongoing commitments are the rule and in whi ch aspects of every individual's experience are conditioned by the continui ng membership. The following discussion initiates a preliminary phase in th e consideration of what constitutes ethical issues associated with the busi ness applications of expert systems. The focus is on knowledge based expert system applications in public accounting, specifically in the audit domain . Prior research on the development and use of expert systems in auditing h as focused on a limited set of ethical issues. Niebuhr's theory of the "the responsible self" is used here to broaden the scope of what constitutes an ethical issue and provides a framework for identifying responsible action. Within this framework, an action is responsible if it takes into considera tion ongoing relationships among the stakeholder groups affected. Actions p rior to the development of the system along with the potential consequences for the system must be considered. The discursive requirements that provid e the context and conditions necessary for implementing the proposed theore tical framework are presented and an illustration of how the responsibility ethic can be implemented in the audit expert system domain is developed.