>... the question of should you sell that knowledge to the government is up to you. True. But that doesn't really free you from moral judgement. > It varies b

>... the question of should you sell that knowledge to the government is up to you. True. But that doesn't really free you from moral judgement. > It varies by case, but if you try to delineate where it's OK and where it's not, it will be endlessly subjective -- in the face of that, I lean in the "do what you want" direction. This really depends on your value system. Of course, you can do what you want (perhaps as long as it's legal), but again, moral judgement is a separate issue. It's totally okay to be immoral, and ethics itself doesn't really have any limitations on what you would do. From a utilitarian perspective, yes, perhaps everything is endlessly subjective, but I think for most people their ethics system lies somewhere in between deontological and utilitarian, that is, there are certain moral guidelines that are more applicable even in subjective situations. Again, I'm not saying you shouldn't do anything immoral. There are many other factors for one to consider: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, etc. Most of this have nothing to do with ethics at all, but none of it gives anyone a free pass for moral judgement. > the medical system in the US (for one) is really fucked That may be true, but we're not really talking about the system here. We're talking about the individual physicians. > "ethics" I just think of agreed-upon shared moral values Ethics is a system, sort of the "theory of morals". Ethics training is more about the logical study of these theories, and how one would apply a certain ethics system to evaluate a certain situation, rather than the "agreed-upon shared moral values". Endless engineering fields before us have faced these problem before, and the principles apply just fine in Computer Science.