Medgaarden 1

Cole Medgaarden
Dr. Benjamin Blakely
CPR E 234
04/19/2021

What is your personal code of ethics that will guide you on your journey as a cybersecurity
professional? That is, develop a set of principles or criteria that you might use to help you
handle ethical dilemmas.
“Create all the happiness you are able to create; remove all the misery you are able to
remove. Every day will invite you to add something to the pleasure of others, or to diminish
something of their pains” -Jeremy Bentham (Ethics Quotes). This quote really resonated with me
because it is what I plan to live by. Being able to create happiness while also being able to help
others along the way is how I want to live my life. My personal code of ethics is made up of
several different goals on how to live life better and make stronger relationships. Ethics are very
important in everyday life because they help to give countries and specifically people a purpose.
I plan to talk about some of the ethics that I live by as well as how they will help me excel in a
business situation and everyday life.
To “always show respect to everyone and be kind” is an ethic that I have been told and
resembled for many years. Abiding by this statement will help to excel in qualities of life
especially in any work setting. By being friendly and showing respect to everyone is a very
important skill for one to be able to continuously advance in a work setting. Within the lecture 25
slide set and discussion from class, we talked about how there is a difference between showing
respect towards someone or if someone is trying to suck-up to a supervisor. “Recognizing that
someone has hard-won experience, skills, or knowledge and treating them with accordant
deference is respect” (Lecture 25 slide set), this quote from the slides is a great example of how
to show respect towards a co-worker or supervisor. “Saying things to someone, whether true or
not, or doing things for them just to curry favor and try to get on their good side for your own
benefit is sucking up” (Lecture 25 slide set), this example from the slides is how one should not
try and make relationships within the work setting. I believe that there are times to not be
completely honest with a person to not hurt their feelings, but one shouldn’t lie to them because
this could build a false friendship or relationship. It is important to always show a positive
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attitude in a work environment to help things run smoothly at the office.

Another ethic that I plan to help me succeed in the workforce is “Show a positive attitude
to everyone and everything even if it has been a bad or rough day”. Being able to show
happiness and friendliness to other co-workers and people in general is a huge quality to have if
one has been having a bad day. Completing work with a bad attitude usually never works out
good for anyone. If you are crabby towards other people at work, it could put them in a bad
mood and branch out from that and turn lots of people’s days into bad days. This ethic is
important to me because I know how important it is to show kindness to everyone even if the
other person is having a bad day. Having a bad mood in a work setting could lead to work not
being done correctly or possibly taking longer to finish a project or assignment. This is never a
good thing, later on in this paper I will be talking about methods I plan to use to help brighten
my mood or others moods.
“Learn from mistakes and try to understand where the mistake was made and how to
correct it”. Following this ethic is important because it will help for one to be able to grow in
which field is being operated in. I have been following this ethic since I was in middle school, it
has helped me in learning and my work ethic as a whole. By learning how to correct which steps
were taken incorrectly; it helps to excel knowledge in that study. In a place of work this ethic is
very important in the steps to becoming a better employee. Trying to understand where a
problem originates can also be a stressful situation, so developing good stress and conflict
management is very important to help relieve some of that stress. Continuing to develop this
ethic will be essential for me to be able to continue to grow in whichever circumstances are
presented to me. I plan to continue to live by this ethic and hope that it will help me to succeed in
any line of work that I will get into. To have a strong set of “soft skills” is also an important
quality to have within a workspace to help one abide by their code of ethics.
“Engineering is about right and wrong, working the problem, optimization, technical
knowledge” (Lecture 25 slide set). In my opinion the number one soft skill to help in achieving
my code of ethics is communication skills. Without having some sort of good or decent
communication skills it would be much harder to talk with coworkers if you or them are having a
bad day. Good communication skills could also help when trying to show respect towards
someone by showing them you appreciate their help or showing them you are happy to help
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them. According to the “Emotional Intelligence” reading from the syllabus it talks about how
giving helpful feedback is useful in a work setting. “Negative feedback has great potential to hurt
the feelings of others. Realizing this, you reframe criticism as constructive feedback, so the
recipient sees it as helpful instead of harmful”(Bariso, Justin). This is why having good
communication skills is very useful in a work environment, because it could lead to giving
fellow employees helpful suggestions and ideas. Teamwork is also a very important soft skill for
me personally, it can be where strong relationships are built. By working with a team and
showing respect to each other and helping figure different problems along the way can help to
build relationships with coworkers and possibly later lead to strong connections within the
company. Teamwork could lead to helping a coworker through a hard time if they are having a
bad day, or vise versa if you are the one having a bad day and they are there to help you with it.
There are many more soft skills that could lead to the success of my code of ethics, but critical
thinking is the other one that I think is the most important to me for me to succeed with my code.
Critical thinking is an important skill to have to help with learning from mistakes made within
the line of work. Not only does critical thinking help when trying to correct mistakes, but it also
helps when trying to decide from the right decision and the wrong. Without using critical
thinking to help me with my ethics I would not be as happy with my finished work if I wasn’t
able to see both sides of my work, the right and the wrong sides. This course has helped me to
further understand how my personal ethics would be able to help me now as well as in the future
in a work environment.
I would like to believe that if I was asked the same question at the beginning of the
course and then had to reanswer it now, my ethics would be similar in discussion. Throughout
the semester of taking this class, it has helped me to get a more in depth look at ethics as a whole
and the different characteristics that make them up. Prior to taking this course I was not as
knowledgeable of ethics and the different parts that make them up. Virtue Ethics, Deontological
Ethics, and Utilitarian Ethics were some of the first terms that were introduced during the course
and I did not know that there were different types of ethics until this class. From taking this
course I was able to learn more about what characteristics made up these different types of
ethics. Specifically how Deontological is primarily “rule based” ethics and that Kantianism and
Contractarianism branches off from the idea of Deontological ethics (Lecture 03 slide set). The
class has also helped expand on topics other than ethics as well by discussing how cybersecurity
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has affected the world and its laws. By looking at these examples that we discussed in the course,
It has really helped expand on thoughts about certain areas of the cybersecurity field. Looking at
the real world examples definitely helped me to think about handling situations differently and
how different situations could have different outcomes, maybe good or some possibly worse than
others.
There have been many times throughout my life where I have gone back to what I have
learned and been taught about how to act and used that knowledge to help assist me with
situations I have been presented with. My personal belief is that my view of what I think my
ethics are has changed since when I was a kid and I believe it will continue to change going into
the future too. Being presented with different situations throughout life will help to shape and
possibly change the ethics that I currently have. For example, Snowden had beliefs before
working for the NSA and his ethics were changed during his time of employment. Although I am
not completely sure when or if my ethics will change in the future, I am open to the idea of
learning from examples that I am faced with. My ethics may not be changed strictly from an
event that happens in my life, but could change from a number of different reasons possibly
relationships or from an outcome from a previous encounter made. That’s what’s nice about
ethics, is that they do not have to be a set and stone set of rules that must be followed they can be
interchangeable and improvable based on the person that is creating them for his or herself. This
class has definitely helped me to think more in depth of how I should base my ethics and ways to
improve or change them for the better.
In conclusion, the ethics for my list that I have stated in this paper are the ones that I
believe are the most important for me to be able to succeed. I plan to continue to follow these
ethics into the future and hope that they will help me to succeed in any line of work I get into. “A
man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and
needs. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and
hope of reward after death” -Albert Einstein (Ethics Quotes). This quote from Einstein helps
ressemble my paragraph above about how my personal view of ethics could change from what it
is based on the different things I am faced with, whether that be from an emotional connection or
from an educational experience or maybe even an encounter with someone. I hope to use
knowledge and the thought process used within this course to also help me along the way and be
successful throughout life.
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Works Cited:

Bariso, Justin. “13 Signs of High Emotional Intelligence.” Inc.com, Inc., 28 Feb. 2018,

web.archive.org/web/20200115234126/www.inc.com/justin-bariso/13-things-emotionally-i

ntelligent-people-do.html.

“Ethics Quotes (1420 Quotes).” Goodreads, Goodreads,

www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/ethics.

Lecture 03 slide set

Lecture 25 slide set