The ethical questions a software engineer (or almost any professional) faces are not "basic". More specifically, the "basic" ethics we learn as children relate to direct interpersonal relations and small group dynamics (including excessive deference to authority, which "good" ethics must unlearn).
These lessons to not prepare us to deal with questions that involve millions of people whom we know very little about.
The challenge is to have the right reactions when you are sitting in a comfortable office and the moral dilemmas inherent in your work are entirely hidden by metrics, and all your bosses ask you to do is to drive the graph up and to the right.
And that is where I refer back to my comment: Pretty much nobody will become the whistleblower or the guy who prevents their company (or their country) from landing that billion dollar arms sale or from raising drug prices to levels unaffordable to many sick people even if they are perfectly well aware of how bad it is. There is one Snowden outlier for a million other people. "If I don't do it somebody else will" is just one of numerous rationalizations (and it even is actually correct).
Statistically speaking the impact of ethics education vs. incentives is like 1 : 1 billion or worse.
This has an impact on your quote because the urgency with which one pursues these rational incentives is going to depend on that person's estimate of their need (i.e. how much they perceive themselves to be lacking, in a very broad sense which includes needs of kin, emotional needs, etc.).
Words to live by if you've never encountered a problem you can't solve with A*...
I've never taken an ethics course myself, but we discussed ethical problems extensively when I was in high school and I've read numerous books on the subject. It's taken me until middle age to be able to easily recognize and debunk unethical rhetorical strategies and philosophical positions, and I'm sure than in 10 and 20 years I'll bemoan my present lack of sophistication.
If you want to create change in the world, you need rational thinking, not wishful thinking.
Most of the troubles we have with Healthcare in the US is due to very poor incentive structures. I'll never understand why people were surprised when investors realized they could buy niche lifesaving drugs and raise their prices by 6,000% since insurance providers would pay for them regardless.
Obviously they would do that. The system was never designed to reduce the incentive to not do that (ie. making it illegal). The problem isn't "unethical" people. Trusting people to act ethically without any disincentives (ie. Jail/fines/social stigma/etc) is like trusting your toddler to run safely around a busy intersection.
The question is, why do you invent stuff I didn't say? Is this show you get your highs? People like you are one of the major annoyances of online discussion.
The question is, why do you invent stuff I didn't say? Is this show you get your highs? People like you are one of the major annoyances of online discussion.
I didn't say anything about my childhood. Stop making stuff up, troll.
The only thing I ever retweeted on my otherwise completely empty and unused Twitter account so that I could copy and paste it when needed:
"For evil to triumph, all that is required is for good men to respond rationally to incentives."
You learn all your basic ethics during early childhood, not in university courses. Most of the rest is the quote above. University classes talk to and train parts of the brain whose involvement in the ethics of your decisions is minimal.