How do you envision 'morality' working in the corporate context for an engineer, then?
Do you fault them for not asking their boss each time they are assigned some work how it will be used, with what presets and so on, and refusing to do it if it doesn't meet their standards?
I don't think I've made any mention of the work I do nor will I; I'm just trying to understand why you think the buck of 'morality' even generally exists in a corporate context, let alone why it stops at some likely mid-level engineer, who likely was just given a vague usage model of a mechanism to build without the 'need to know' information that would raise the moral dilemmas.
"Moral integrity" doesn't really have anything to apply to to the day-to-day work of an engineer. A moral compass can't work without a magnetic field of context.
Considering most engineers' main concern is just to meet a spec and get it shipped, I don't really see how the burden of ethical justification falls to them, when they don't even necessarily know how it'll be used. Can't really see how they could act as moral gatekeepers in a corporate structure.
That's what I'm hoping we can change. When I think of Engineering, I think of trades that tend to have a firm grasp on ethics and take the consequences of what they build very seriously. I know that organizations like the ACM and IEEE espouse those same virtues, and I think they are not only worthy virtues but also important. Something worth being uncomfortable - or even discarded by less ethical companies - in order to defend.
Ethics not being a desirable quality to some (many? That seems too bold to assert) businesses is ironically part of the reason why ethics is so important to hold onto as an engineer. Some businesses would be elated to find software engineers that have discarded their sense of ethics entirely, to the profit of themselves and the harm of our society.
This is stupid. There is no such thing as working without morals, and you aren't going to have 'sanity' by asking engineers to adopt someone else's (also arbitrary) morals rather than their own.
Again, maybe you do. You are not everyone. Stop assuming things to make your argument stronger. You know exactly nothing about 99.9999% of the engineers at these companies and their lives and their needs. You also do not know what they care about and if their morality lines up with yours (which you have decided to be the global "right" morality, for some reason)
I hate to be a debby downer but this is nothing but virtue signaling.
How can we enforce this? Strong individual ethics without ability to do anything about it will simply make engineers feel helpless. And that’s just going to hurt happiness at the workplace.
I strongly believe that engineers should have mandatory ethics classes. Then when they accept a BigTech salary, at least they would know that they trade their ethics for their salary.
I find it alarming how many engineers just don't ever think about the impact technology has on the world.
> Think it's someone else's responsibility to make decisions about ethics (as an engineering prof, I see this all the time...students who say engineers' jobs are technology not ethics/morals)
The problem is that they're correct in a practical sense.
The company they work for might get fined, but all the engineers see is the performance review. This system encourages engineers to think of compliance and morality as someone else's problem because: it is.
Many will justify this as "if I don't do it, someone else will" and again: absolutely correct.
Pass a law where engineers themselves may face fines or jail time for implementing immoral code, and they will suddenly discover a keen interest in the ethics of what they do.
Engineers, like most human beings, are free to waste their talent. It wouldn't be nice to demand some kind of moral responsibility from engineers just because they can do more. How they live would be up to them, and free market solution would be far better terms under which they would be convinced to do more.
Honestly, a big part of it is the lack of ethics training that engineers receive. Far too many engineers have a, "The problem is fun/interesting, that's all the further I'm going to think about it. The implications of what I'm working on are not my department." We need to start thinking more about what we're building, how it's going to affect the world, and how it can be misused.
No, absolving engineers from responsibility is the wrong move. People are responsible for what they make: hiding behind "oh it's the system's fault not mine!" is morally bankrupt. It's literally being a coward.
Engineers contributing to the ability of assholes to continue making others miserable is a pretty clear chain of causation. Everything I've read about people's moral convictions says they consider causal relationships to be morally relevant.
It’s almost as if the lack of morality costs us less than the lack of revenue.
Maybe it’s time to rethink the value system in the first place?
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