Examples of Ethical Codes
Plenty of professions have their codes of ethics (The discussion of whether programming is a "profession" will take place in the next chapter). Indeed, the Online Ethics Center (http://www.onlineethics.org) has plenty of examples, case studies, and discussions. Rather than trawl through those, I'll focus on a couple from the computing field.
The Association of Computing Machinery's code of ethics and professional conduct— http://www.acm.org/about/code-of-ethics is a short document, comprising 24 ethical imperatives members are expected to follow: one of which is that membership of the Association is contingent on abiding by the other imperatives.
The code is both technology and practice agnostic, as it should be written at the level of abstraction of an entire industry's career lifetimes. Briefly, the four sections say:
- Respect other people and their property, do no harm, work to make humanity better
- Be up to date with what...
