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In medicine you may be treating someone who may later go on to commit war crimes, it doesn't mean you're causing harm by proxy. The oath just says "help this pe

• nostrademons 10y ago
  The irony is that public condemnation usually goes the opposite way for software developers. For a doctor, their client is the patient, and they are bound by oath to help that patient. If the patient goes on to do horrible crimes, that's on the patient, not on the doctor. For a software engineer, the client is either their customer or the employer, and the equivalent oath would be to always act in their customer/employer's best interest. Most developers already do this - they typically don't continue to get paid if they don't. But the moral dilemmas that surround software are often of the form "You write software that massively violates peoples' privacy, gets people to click on ads, wastes peoples' time, etc." If an NSA developer did an IAmA and said "Yes, I write code to spy on people because I have a responsibility to the people that pay my salary", they'd be vilified, and more than a few people would likely say "No, you have a responsibility to the American people to stop doing what you're doing." If a doctor were to say "I refuse to treat this NSA engineer because he is harming humanity", he would be similarly vilified.