The ideal situation for a manager is to be promoted through/across the company every few years. Long enough to deliver some large project (that was certainly already in the pipeline) but short enough not to be responsible for the long term impact of that project.
You don't fix that by giving the management lectures on morality, you fix it by reducing their ability to hide the issues that happens in their organisation so that when lines are crossed the manager can't be confident they can sweep it under the rug.
You also don't fix this by overlooking the fact that all publicly traded organizations are performing for the street, not the customer. How much can we sell them is the mantra now, more so, than ever. Instead of being the best we've decided that lobbying and paying the board/shareholders is the best for everyone. Those people just happen to be the 0.1% as well.
It is definitely relevant. The programs will pump students full of notions of "corporate social responsibility", right before they send them off to consulting gigs for the summer where short-termism is how you get the offer. It's a self reinforcing system. It would maybe be different if MBA programs weren't a cash cow for universities (especially universities that cater to international students), and instead were essentially apprenticeships at the companies themselves. I agree with the general sentiment of your comment, but I'm not ready to forgive the MBA programs' part in this.
Ethics courses teach frameworks that can make it easier to rationalize commonsense unethical decisions as being ethical, so I'm not convinced they're actually the right answer
And software engineers do plenty of unethical things when the consequences are removed and the payoff is good. How many of us operate under the immunity of “lol they’ll blame russia”
Although it's rar to see it as a requirement in software (most software developers aren't engineers anyway), it is more common to see it required when public safety is on the line.
When breaching ethics will cost you not only your job, but your employability altogether, that's a strong incentive to act ethically.
And, in my country's law at least, some ethics are codified into legal requirements for directors: http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1993/0105/latest/D...
s131 to s138a
Of course, in both the ethics are basically "Work in the best interests of the company". Which may not ethically align with the greater good of society. But that's where criminal law comes into it, hopefully.
As for professional engineers, sadly, there's no requirement in my country that an engineer be a member of IPENZ, as notoriously demonstrated by the case of Alan Reay, who was responsible for a substandard building that killed 115 people in the Christchurch 2011 earthquake. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CTV_Building#Royal_Commission_...
He simply resigned from IPENZ to avoid their ability to censure him, and sadly, our corporate manslaughter laws were found to be woefully lacking around this (and a coal mine explosion): https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/345102/corporate-manslau...
Question remains too, how would you define ethics for a programmer? Some programmers consider it unethical to work in adtech or porn, yet plenty of others don't. What about facial recognition techology?
It's like the old joke - no ethical programmer would write a function called bombBaghdad(), instead they'd write it as bomb() and pass the city as a parameter.
the reasons for the paucity of corporate ethical behavior is complex and varied, but certainly one cause is we've collectively capitulated to the supremacy of the profit motive, and there's just not enough perceived (direct) benefit in doing so.
Surely someone must have had a vague sense that relying on $9 per hour software development might not be a wise choice, but in a "managerialistic" environment, the concrete cost savings are taken into account, and the vague sense is not.
Economic and managerial schools only seem to teach one ideological viewpoint, which in term results in there being very little recourse on what would be the right way to tackle a situation, philosophically and ideologically speaking.