Recently I had read over an article regarding the ethics of a programmer. This article went on to say that every programmer should have specific ethics, or moral values, when preforming their duty. These morals were things such as only programming to benefit society, not to harm others (meaning avoiding any negative consequences). The other part of this page went on about the professional side of things such as honoring a contract, not to discriminate, accepting review and criticism, maintain professional competence, striving to achieve the highest quality, etc.

Now this got me thinking a bit, should all programmers have some type of ethical or moral code? I find some of these ethical codes I read to be a bit vague or easy to break. If you have a job for some company or the government and you have to make programs to intercept terrorist communication or to hack their systems, well you've already broken the code to not harm others, but you can also see it as "benefiting society". When it comes to BYOND, you see a few people (such as those who own rips) that don't seem to have much moral ethics, or professional ones. But then there are some users who you can see have these ethics and ideas.

My opinion is that a programmer's moral or ethical ideas should be evaluated and created for the purpose of their own values. I'm not saying have ulterior motives and lie, but what I'm saying is I feel that someone "doing things for the sake of benefiting society!" seems a bit off. Someone who is designing games or simulation is most likely doing it because they wanted to and it's their passion. However I do feel that aside from a programmers personal values, they should have that professional side such as honoring confidentiality, respecting privacy of others, not discriminating, honoring those laws, striving to achieve high quality in their work, honoring contracts, responsibility, etc.

But what I want to ask you BYOND, is should programmers have a sense of ethics or moral codes?