[Nasrudith]

I think the awkward thing about ethics courses and training is that they are effectively initial state only in the pipeline. They are to be "overridden" by incentives and selection when possible. It seems to be a "trade" of slower start up time due to inculturation to undo it to unethical standards in exchange for ass covering. Even if they had say yearly ethics course requirements the actual incentives dominate in practice.

You don't solve persistent corruption by ethics courses you do it by removing conflicts of interests, changing incentives, and enforcement. They may not be easy to do, free of costs or even within capability to change.

Ethics could still be useful of course but the institutions need to care about it and the incentives need to be changeable accordingly for it to be more than just a figleaf.

[pbourke]

Some occupations - usually professions such as medicine and engineering - seem to have a relatively strong ethical tradition. Perhaps it comes from the self-regulatory aspect of being a member of a profession. These ethics courses in software education are an attempt to move towards that goal. I think ultimately you can’t bootstrap ethics into a population unless that population feels like they owe something to one another. The computing field is just too broad for that.

[cuddlybacon]

In my case, the ethics course we had to take was the same one engineers take.