Is behaving ethically not a part of being a designer or a PM or a director/boss?
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.
Want to see an example - Ask Aristotle are women same or lower than men?
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.
Pls excuse the caps, but too many people seem to ignore this very important part of his argument here.