By calling it "personal politics," you are saying something against it. Nobody should invent some subjective opinion and then bring it in to the workplace, but it seems fine to expect doctors to refuse kickbacks from drug reps, or for soldiers to decline to carry out war crimes, or for civil engineers to refuse to sign off on a cheap blueprint that will save a lot of money but probably collapse. The debate is about what "professional ethics" means for software development.
> By calling it "personal politics," you are saying something against it.
I am being objective. If the political opinion was not formulated by senior leadership and passed down through management then it is not likely, at least at the time of expression, the politics of the organization. That said, it is personal politics.
Ethics is not defined by the industry. Ethics is quite literally perceptions of right or wrong in accordance with organizationally defined rules. Right and wrong where rules are either not available or not defined is instead the more generalized term morality. In the example of Google employees' boycott of the drone contract the political action was a moral judgement that graduated to an ethic once senior leadership made a decision.
Applied ethics, are what most people mean when talking about Ethics. They are industry specific and defined by the industry. Normative ethics are near equivalent to morality. Meta-ethics are what Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson like to argue about.
Rules are defined by industry. Applied ethics, or commonly used in the adjective form ethical, applies to the directness of a decision point to the governing rule and perceptions or right/wrong. Ethics are evaluated the same even when the rules change. Likewise ethics are violated for similar reasons regardless of industry.
This is very simple for most professions that are defined by licensing or certifications which require conformance to a code of ethics. Ethics in law are not dissimilar from ethics in medicine. In software there is no commonly accepted code of ethics. Instead there are "terms and conditions" and "employment agreements", which typically do not isolate ethical standards to the software profession.