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Comment by TAForObvReasons | Hacker News Reader

Professional exams oftentimes cover subjects like ethics, which would undoubtedly help the industry

I doubt that unethical people act unethically because it just never occurred to them to be ethical, and that they would've known better if there was a class.

I'm less worried about explicitly unethical people than I am about somebody just out of college in their first job whose boss asks them to build something ethically dubious. Professional ethics instruction would A) help determine if something was unethical ("My boss told me to add a feature to our social network app to vacuum up every call and text message made on a device that has our app installed. Should I do that?") and B) provide a framework for people to push back on and censure unethical requests.

The point of teaching ethics is to help people better recognize unethical situations, not to convince the strictly unethical to become what they're not.

Including ethics at the individual contributor level of licensing is utterly detrimental to software individual contributors. It gives cover to business management who almost always can override technical individual contributors and technical managers even on decisions with ethical import. Ethics at the individual contributor level is NOT our civilization's problem, it is at the leadership levels, even more so the closer that leadership gets to levels where they have enough wealth and power to peddle influence upon judiciaries and legislators.

Teaching ethics won't help, but providing financial and social support for dissidents would. So would requiring members to adhere to an ethics pledge that can get their membership revoked if they fail to comply.

The numerous repeated calls for ethics pledges taken by individuals I see on this site betrays a misunderstanding of how power works. Individuals can't fight the system alone, it takes a collective.

The membership revocation is key - the fact that you could lose your professional license for ethics violations is enough to keep everything above board. Also, the NSPE would provide support for an individual engineer in the dissident/whistleblower case.

As an Electrical Engineer, we went over this in school, as ethics is one of the cornerstones of the Professional Engineer license. (Though, personally I am not professionally licensed.)

See here for what it covers: https://www.nspe.org/resources/ethics/code-ethics

Is there evidence that people actually act more ethically after taking a class on ethics?

Not that I know of but there’s evidence professional ethicists behave no more ethically than other philosophers.

Ethicists’ and Nonethicists’ Responsiveness to Student E‐mails: Relationships Among Expressed Normative Attitude, Self‐Described Behavior, and Empirically Observed Behavior

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/meta.12033

Do you really expect individual dissenting developers, who in many cases are more replaceable than ever, to be able to effectively resist the decisions of design leads and business managers?

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