Many of those people probably would've preferred the horse kill that guy instead of just bump him a little. Half of them probably feel that he deserved it, and they were happy to see him get hit.
It's easy to feel like the court of programmer opinion is much more evolved and sophisticated, but as far as I can tell, we're cut from the same cloth.
I was hoping there were a way to navigate ethical issues from a personal standpoint. It would be helpful to have a template: "I'm going to do S, and I know it's right because X." "I'm going to do T, even though it might be wrong, because Y." "I'm going to do V, even though it's wrong, because Z."
These decisions become ever-higher-stakes as responsibilities accrue. Is your loyalty to your employees and investors, whom you can pay more if you charge more, or your customers, who are looking to keep more of their "surplus" and may very well already have that money allocated to other needs? You can cast such dilemmas about most choices.
Anyway, religion is the framework that has been formulated to satisfy your very natural yearning for a moral standard or compass.
But even in religion, there is no hard deterministic path. Much like law, there are some baselines, but beyond that, the decision falls back into the individual's lap. That is why regular self-examination through prayer and introspection are core components of religion.
Good luck to you.
What would you be hoping to accomplish? To never step on anyone's toes or piss anyone off? A lot of these questions just don't have easy answers, no one has all the information.
Even when there's law available to draw from, you still have to have a court case or settlement negotiation or something because every situation is really different and nobody has all the facts.
There's no template because these are humans we're dealing with. They're smart, and not all of them care. If all you ever had to deal with were other ethical people, then you wouldn't need the law at all, you could just agree on things and nobody would try to abuse it.
What makes the US a good place for business is its very willingness to forgive certain types of transgressions, which would get you crucified in Europe. We instinctively understand that this stuff is hard and until legal lines are drawn and sometimes even in that case, we're not going to hang your ass out to dry.
I think the reason for this is that a lot of innovations can come out of this process. If we held ethical transgressor's feet to the fire without fail then we'd never find really interesting products and services that never would have existed otherwise.
If you operate outside of safe, established, legal and ethical grounds, then you're throwing your fate to the court of public opinion, and that feels right to me.