Final answer:
Ethical decision-making that emphasizes professional autonomy is rooted in ethical frameworks that prioritize individual moral agency, such as the principles of autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. Professional codes of ethics, like those provided by IEEE-CS, instruct on making autonomous decisions that consider broad moral theories and political debates. These frameworks align with the belief that ethics is a social construct and that we have an innate moral sense.
Step-by-step explanation:
The ethical decision-making model that begins with ensuring the professional is autonomous, or free from outside influences, typically connects to frameworks that emphasize the importance of individual moral agency and conscience. The concept of autonomy is one of the four main ethical principles identified in ethical issues involving physician and patient, or researcher and participant relationships, the other three being beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. Ethical frameworks may rest on different justifications, including appeals to nature, society, culture, tradition, or individual moral reasoning. The Existentialists, for instance, highlighted radical freedom and human responsibility in decision-making, rejecting pre-set essences or rules that precede individual existence.
In the realm of professional ethics, bodies like the IEEE-CS provide a Software Engineering Code of Ethics and Professional Practice, which requires software engineers to make autonomous ethical decisions aligned with quality, safety, privacy, and environmental standards. This code of ethics, while providing concrete guidelines, is inherently tied to broader moral theories and political debate, reflecting the existentialist and pragmatist views that reality, including ethical norms, is a human construct. Importantly, studies suggest that we possess an innate moral faculty that shapes our intuitive judgments of right and wrong, which is shaped by millions of years of social evolution.