The relevant difference between medicine and software development is that doctors provide a service and software developers create a product. A doctor's respon

The relevant difference between medicine and software development is that doctors provide a service and software developers create a product. A doctor's responsibility is solely to the patient. When the treatment ends, the doctor has done their job. They may be responsible for long-term damage from the treatment, but that's still about something the doctor did themselves. It's like being responsible for your software randomly running amok and deleting random files on a user's computer. When a software developer has developed some software, that product continues to exist and can be used by anyone who can run it, to do anything the software is capable of. Turning this around, given that the doctor's "product" is a healthier patient, it would be like making doctors responsible for the evils committed by patients that they have saved. It's easy to come up with obvious unethical scenarios, but a lot of harm can come from less predictable unethical uses. If you make your software easy to use, the result is that people outside of any ethically-aware, license-controlled bubble can use it. Where does the responsibility end? The developers of Excel and Access have almost certainly indirectly contributed to evil software.