Cybersecurity Ethics
This course examines ethical issues relevant to ethics for cybersecurity professionals, including privacy, professional code of conduct, practical conflicts between engineering ethics and business practices, individual and corporate social responsibility, ethical hacking, information warfare, and cyberwarfare. Students will gain a broad understanding of central issues in cyberethics and the ways that fundamental ethical theories relate to these core issues.
Course Material
Reflective Writing Assignment
As this course has come to an end, a lot of the ethical tools have opened my eyes to see things in new life. The three topics I’ll discuss will be the Deontological tool, the Confucian tool, and the contractarian tool. I felt that all of these, coupled with the stories that they came with, and some personal experiences helped with how my thoughts on the subject have changed.
To begin, the Deontological tool was about understanding that the ends don’t justify the means. It was understood that one could do good deeds for the completely wrong reasons. While I had already had an understanding of this. In the past, I’ve looked at some of my actions and understood that I did them with the sole purpose of getting praise, not because I knew that it was the right thing to do. It wasn’t until I went in-depth with this tool, that I understood what it meant. A good example would be the fact that I was an engineering major for my first year and a half here at ODU. The catch was, I wasn’t doing it for my benefit or because I wanted to myself, but because my parents wanted it. Looking back, I was motivated to do it for bad reasons. This is why I resonate with this part of the class.
Next, the Confucian tool. I felt that this was more interesting than eye-opening, especially because I enjoyed the story that came along with it. I at first struggled to grasp the tool, but in the end, it was one that I probably enjoyed the most learning and reading about. The tool itself was a new concept to me as I had never thought about how you live your life and grow as a person is based on a role you are given in society and that role you’re given is one you have to work to uphold and nurture. What caught my attention with this part was the story, The Year of the Rat. The story mainly opened my eyes to how you have to treat different relationships differently. In the story, the drill instructor had changed over time and his teaching methods had changed over time as he started to learn that not everyone responds to the same type of directives. This was something that I liked a lot about the instructor because, by the end of the story, you could see his change. It gave me a new perspective on how I, as a person, should go forward with nurturing my relations with friends and family.
Finally, the last one I resonated with was the contractarian ethical tool. Again, this one was an eye-opener because I hadn’t thought about this topic in this light. One of the biggest concepts I got from the tool was “There is no “natural law” or inherent basis for morality in human dignity. Instead, “morality” is just a word for the rules that we all implicitly agree to live together and have good lives.” It made me think about the many things that we as a society deem wrong or unethical, but they are perfectly legal. It made me think about how society can accept things, even if they may be bad, they are accepted because the good outweighs the overall bad. This opened my eyes to a new outlook on not life as a whole, but things that we as people find to be ok or deem to be immoral.