Yeah, the problem with this idea is that it assumes there's one fixed set of right ethical values everyone should agree on. Take for example the actual, origina

Yeah, the problem with this idea is that it assumes there's one fixed set of right ethical values everyone should agree on. Take for example the actual, original Hippocratic Oath - it required, amongst other things, doctors not to provide abortions to women. There's still a large number of Americans who hold this ethical belief, but I'd venture a guess that almost all the people pushing for ethics in software development hold the exact diametrically opposite view. 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.