INFLUENCE OF DIFFERENT THEORIES OF ETHICS ON ORGANIZATIONAL CODES OF CONDUCT OR ETHICS: A COMPARATIVE SEMANTIC ANALYSIS

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of various theories of ethics on codes of conduct or codes of ethics of computing and data organizations. To quantify and evaluate the differences in influence, four Python libraries, namely difflib, gensim, nltk, and spaCy, and, in addition, a web-based proprietary semantic similarity tool, Compare Text, were used. The codes of seven computing and data organizations for Information Technology (IT) professionals and scholars were compared to the descriptions of five different schools of ethical thought through four different tools. The findings were tabularized, summarized in radar charts, and their implications were discussed: It was found that there are some differences of influence on the codes by different theories. However, the percentages of similarities calculated by each tool were observed to differ, on some occasions, considerably. Finally, contributions and limitations of the current work and recommendations for further studies were presented.