Being expected to behave ethically is part of being an Engineer regardless of what your boss expects. Now we increasingly see real world negative consequences of the work of software engineers I don't see why they should be any different.
There's some (not a lot, but some) power in a profession just claiming to have ethics, even if there is no enforcement and change in the hearts of practitioners.
Plus, at some point, we all just have to own what we do with our lives. It's great to advocate for systemic change but doing your own small part is at least as important.
Do you want to license software developers?
But if you're working on video games, or pizza delivery, or really probably like 90% of software then no.
Failures of a company responsible for this kind of thing that lead to injuries or deaths can result in imprisonment of (at least) the CEO and possibly others. I'm not sure licensing is necessary here, that's what documented process is supposed to manage (change tracking, development process, etc.)
Software is fundamentally different because until you run it it has no consequences, and even if you run it, it can be contained. I can write a worm and not release it on world. In that regard, it is more like engineering _plans_. I can draw up plans for a building that is designed to collapse with X number of persons inside -- in fact I can imagine either of the two assignments given as an exercise in University.
No reason to make more laws: it should be immaterial whether I chop down the Christmas tree at the local town square or program a robot to do it.
The programming of said robot isn't the bad act here, it's the act the robot actually performs.
The danger of being castigated for having written something that wasn't used is that we then get into the area of thought-crimes.
That is so wrong it isn't even funny. If the car was invented as powered by a Mr. Fusion the buggy whip makers going out of business would be a negative real world consequence.
Aristotle and a while host of philosophers certainly thought so.
Extending this, why don't we expect everyone in society to behave ethically? But then we get into arguments about what is ethical, because people disagree on that, and people naturally will disagree on what is ethical in software development, which isn't always a problem. The is a diversity of opinion, though since are clearly extreme.
One of the issues with a "Hippocratic oath" for software developers is that software spans the while spectrum of human activity and thought.
Constraining software is nearly equivalent to constraining human thought in more ways than one.
A lot of the demands for software ethics get into even fuzzier and more complicated territory, like whether the companies which control our mass communications should use that control to decide which political views people should be able to share and what they should target, whether this is good or bad for democracy, etc. Also, many of them seem to be things that would've been incredibly niche viewpoints even a decade ago. I've seen people in another thread thinking that Google promised not to use e-mail contents to sell ads originally and then snuck that in, but in reality basing ads on the contents of e-mails was part of their business model all along and it's just that no-one cared when they launched because it was so much less obnoxious than the ads on other providers. Somewhere along the way, we got this meme about big tech selling our personal information, and everyone seems to project it backwards in time onto how people felt before the meme.
Want to see an example - Ask Aristotle are women same or lower than men?
Pls excuse the caps, but too many people seem to ignore this very important part of his argument here.