[gizmo686]

>You learn all your basic ethics during early childhood.

The ethical questions a software engineer (or almost any professional) faces are not "basic". More specifically, the "basic" ethics we learn as children relate to direct interpersonal relations and small group dynamics (including excessive deference to authority, which "good" ethics must unlearn).

These lessons to not prepare us to deal with questions that involve millions of people whom we know very little about.

[wpietri]

Truth. Most people I have worked with know how not to be dicks. And if you put them in a situation where the human impact of something is obvious, they'll have the right reactions.

The challenge is to have the right reactions when you are sitting in a comfortable office and the moral dilemmas inherent in your work are entirely hidden by metrics, and all your bosses ask you to do is to drive the graph up and to the right.

[IIIIIIIIIIII]

> The challenge is to have the right reactions when you are sitting in a comfortable office and the moral dilemmas inherent in your work are entirely hidden by metrics, and all your bosses ask you to do is to drive the graph up and to the right.

And that is where I refer back to my comment: Pretty much nobody will become the whistleblower or the guy who prevents their company (or their country) from landing that billion dollar arms sale or from raising drug prices to levels unaffordable to many sick people even if they are perfectly well aware of how bad it is. There is one Snowden outlier for a million other people. "If I don't do it somebody else will" is just one of numerous rationalizations (and it even is actually correct).

Statistically speaking the impact of ethics education vs. incentives is like 1 : 1 billion or worse.

[sideshowb]

This. My Cambridge CS degree (graduated 2002) included a short ethics course with some interesting problems of this nature.