Ethics provide guidelines for personal and professional conduct. Such guidelines include standard moral and legal behaviors (do not harm the health or safety of the public, be honest, obey the law) and also provide expectations for professional conduct (do not take on work you are not qualified to do, ensure adequate documentation and testing, etc.)

These guidelines supplement other legal and moral guidelines that professionals use to guide their professional conduct.

Examples of professional codes of conduct for programmers and software engineers:

Wikipedia has a nice writeup on computer ethics.

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