FWIW my opinion on this isn't actually as black and white as my earlier comment might make it seem. I'm well aware that not everybody is in a position to quit their jobs over something as vain as ethics. That's classic Bertolt Brecht right there, "Food comes first and then morality".
I'm mostly just frustrated that vast swathes of developers, most of them like me living a comfortable life in a comfortable place with plenty of options, are happy to condone and support the evils their employer commits. Plenty of people look at me like I'm an alien when I say I refuse to work for a weapons manufacturer. So I get worked up when people hide behind their bosses and pretend that developers, perhaps the most influential people of the next few decades, are nothing but amoral code machines. No we're not, we're people and we have a choice.
It's not very black and white at all. I personally wouldn't work for Google of Facebook for moral reasons, but I understand that some people say "well, we're targeting ads, not cluster bombs" and they have a point. I'm asking that people consider whether their work fits their own personal ethics. I'm asking that people look around for better jobs when they discover that, deep inside, when they really think about it, no, their current job does not fit with their own ethics. I'm convinced that large numbers of developers would go and look for alternatives if we make it common to just do this thought exercise. I think many people simply don't consider it. After all, there's a fun team and exciting tech!
I don't think that's too much to ask. But when we propagate the idea that developers are mindless robots that turn money into code, we're letting psychopaths take more advantage of us than necessary. Let's try to move the needle, just a bit.
Sidenote: yeah TUE with the Dijkstra apostles was fun, loved the handwriting :-) When were you there? 2002-2008 here. I recognize how the Dijkstra ideals could be extrapolated to ethics by a particularly zealous crowd, but I agree with you that it doesn't hold up to the real world for a long while :-)