[cotelletta]

As opposed to shifting responsibility from the people who command the work to those doing it? Is that not an equal denial of agency?

OP has it right. They want the engineers to talk ethics because engineers are the new druid class... instead of the wannabe preachers in media and the humanities who step further and further away from being able to have an intelligent, logical thought.

The public long ago absolved itself of responsibility for modernity, and that includes the public intellectual class, who now just fingerwag the ones doing actual work.