Ethical, Legal, Cultural and Environmental Issues

AQA 4.9.1 — Ethical, legal, moral, cultural and environmental issues

Retrieval: every lesson so far in this sequence covered a technical way something can go wrong or need protecting. This final lesson widens the lens: computing raises questions that technical controls alone can never fully answer — about fairness, the law, personal judgement, communities, and the planet.

Key vocabulary

• Legal issue — something the law explicitly requires or prohibits (e.g. UK data protection legislation, the Computer Misuse Act).
• Ethical issue — a question of professional or organisational conduct, often guided by codes of practice, that goes beyond the legal minimum.
• Moral issue — an individual's own personal judgement of right and wrong, which can differ from person to person even under identical laws and codes of conduct.
• Cultural impact — how technology changes communities, behaviour, or access to opportunity, sometimes unevenly.
• Environmental impact — the physical, planetary cost of computing (energy use, e-waste, resource extraction).

Understand — four different lenses on the same situation

The same real situation can be legal but still widely considered unethical, and something can be ethical by a company's own code of conduct while individual employees still hold different personal moral views about it. These aren't four labels for the same idea — they're genuinely different lenses: the law sets an enforced minimum; ethics is professional/organisational judgement, often going further than the law requires; morality is personal and can vary between individuals even under the exact same law and code of conduct.

Visualise — one issue, four lenses

A company builds an AI hiring tool that is later found to be biased against a protected group of applicants:

Apply to scenario — classify the issue

For each scenario, classify which lens (or lenses — more than one can genuinely apply) is most directly raised, and justify your answer:

1. A company is fined for failing to adequately protect customers' personal data after a breach.
2. A social media app is deliberately designed with addictive features that its own engineers privately feel uncomfortable about, despite it being fully legal.
3. A large data centre uses enough electricity and water to affect a local community's own supply.
4. Reliable high-speed internet access remains far rarer in some rural communities than in cities, widening the gap in who can access online education and services.

(1: legal — a specific data-protection law has been breached. 2: ethical/moral — nothing illegal has occurred, but it raises a genuine question of professional conduct and personal conscience. 3: environmental — a direct physical resource cost affecting the wider world. 4: cultural — an unequal impact on communities' access and opportunity, not a legal breach.)

Analyse — stakeholder perspectives

Following a data breach at a company, analyse how the company itself, the affected customers, and a data-protection regulator would each view the same event differently — what does each stakeholder care about most, and where might their priorities conflict?

Evaluate

New AI tools can now generate highly convincing fake images, audio and video ("deepfakes") of real people. Evaluate whether existing computing-related legislation is likely to adequately address the risks this creates, or whether it reveals a genuine gap between what technology can now do and what the law was originally written to cover.

Common mistake

Assuming "legal" and "ethical" mean the same thing. Something can be entirely legal while still being widely regarded as unethical (a company can be transparent about aggressive, addictive design choices, in full compliance with the law) — and conversely, an individual might consider something perfectly ethical by their own personal standard even where the law is genuinely unclear or unsettled.

Justify

A tech company discovers its own product has an unintended negative environmental impact that current law does not yet regulate at all. Justify what you believe the company's responsibility is here, distinguishing clearly between what the law currently requires and what ethical or moral responsibility might reasonably ask for beyond that legal minimum.

Looking ahead: this is the final lesson of Year 12. Year 13 builds directly on these foundations — deeper technical topics assume the hardware, networking and responsible-computing understanding established across Sequences 1–9, while the NEA project will ask you to apply exactly this kind of ethical and legal reasoning to a real system you design and build yourself.