And software engineers do plenty of unethical things when the consequences are removed and the payoff is good. How many of us operate under the immunity of “lol they’ll blame russia”
Although it's rar to see it as a requirement in software (most software developers aren't engineers anyway), it is more common to see it required when public safety is on the line.
When breaching ethics will cost you not only your job, but your employability altogether, that's a strong incentive to act ethically.
And, in my country's law at least, some ethics are codified into legal requirements for directors: http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1993/0105/latest/D...
s131 to s138a
Of course, in both the ethics are basically "Work in the best interests of the company". Which may not ethically align with the greater good of society. But that's where criminal law comes into it, hopefully.
As for professional engineers, sadly, there's no requirement in my country that an engineer be a member of IPENZ, as notoriously demonstrated by the case of Alan Reay, who was responsible for a substandard building that killed 115 people in the Christchurch 2011 earthquake. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CTV_Building#Royal_Commission_...
He simply resigned from IPENZ to avoid their ability to censure him, and sadly, our corporate manslaughter laws were found to be woefully lacking around this (and a coal mine explosion): https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/345102/corporate-manslau...
Question remains too, how would you define ethics for a programmer? Some programmers consider it unethical to work in adtech or porn, yet plenty of others don't. What about facial recognition techology?
It's like the old joke - no ethical programmer would write a function called bombBaghdad(), instead they'd write it as bomb() and pass the city as a parameter.
Ethics courses teach frameworks that can make it easier to rationalize commonsense unethical decisions as being ethical, so I'm not convinced they're actually the right answer