I think the field of software, writ large, is already too morally bankrupt for any system of ethics to take hold.

People have a hard time seeing the evil in their products, and their possible unintended uses. Or they do, and don't think it's bad enough to forgo getting paid for it.

Even if you don't agree with the reasons, it's not hard to imagine what developers at Fin Fisher or Hacking Team told themselves to sleep well at night. Easy example: they might think they're doing a moral positive by focusing on the use cases of western governments in taking down organized crime.

So forget about the Hacking Teams of the world. Look closer to home. We're wrestling control over computing systems further and further out of the end user's grasp, monitoring them more pervasively, and processing that data like never before. We're building digital toys to fill people's leisure time up with digital junk food in hopes of monetizing them. And if the dollars don't come quick enough, we turn to "gamification" (read: psychological manipulation).

Sure, there is a difference of scale. But it's not a difference in kind. We may think it should be legal to insult the Emirate rulers. But that doesn't matter. The point is, they thought they were justified. Just like we think we're justified. All the way down to highlighting false choices so we can tell ourselves the victims did it to themselves.