Biology researchers are held responsible for what they do. Not usually what they enable. The examples you gave are biology researchers themselves doing something. The relevant analogy would be if we held the inventors of CRISPR responsible for some future super-virus engineered using it.
Biologists enabled chemical warfare. Same harm has been done with mathematics. Physics.
I think we largely let researches do research, and don’t hold researchers accountable for harm enabled with that research.
In other words, self policing of customers seems like a newer and uncommon phenomenon.
Mathematicians at large may have enabled various terrible things again by contributing to our knowledge of math, but those mathematicians are blameless; only the ones who used their knowledge to (insert bad thing here) are the ones who can be blamed.
Doing research that can be later used for good or evil is generally fine. To say that improving our understanding of biology is a bad thing is clearly ridiculous. However, actively contributing to a biological weapons program is a very different matter.
For a hosting service, that's much more like active contribution than simply providing knowledge. The people who wrote the Linux kernel are akin to the biologists who simply increased our understanding of biology, but people who manage a hosting service with actual customers are not like this: they have the power to decide who is using the service for actual evil, and the ability to refuse their business.
Supporting politician X doesn't make person more moral or ethical. Same as believing in god A over god B.
Politics discussions are just tribal wars.
IMHO, politics is much more than partisan politics. In the broad sense, it is reflecting and deciding on how live together. And parties and candidates are only a part (maybe the most divisive) of it.
1. a vocation requiring knowledge of some department of learning or science: the profession of teaching. Compare learned profession.
2. any vocation or business.
3. the body of persons engaged in an occupation or calling: to be respected by the medical profession.
It goes on, but the rest have to do with "profession" in the sense of declarations.
So, you can make your claim all you want that you have the correct definition of "profession", but you seem to be mistaken...
That's irrelevant. The rules are for conducting responsible research, not for pondering the potential misuse or evil use of whatever technology. Physics and bio have a far greater record of evil uses, and it was never questionable. It was accepted that scientists do science, and ask questions later. The before-the-fact crusades are a very recent (like, 10 years) phenomenon limited to the west coast of the US
I'm from Europe, for the record :)
That said, you're right, of course there are no laws regulating the potential misuse or evil use of research results.
However I feel we, as societies, tend to feel that researchers have some kind of moral responsibility in the use of their discoveries. That somehow, the researchers working on nuclear bombs are not entirely unrelated to its use – and, on the other side, that Alexander Fleming deserves some moral credits for the uses of penicillin.
My point is that in software engineering we are usually held responsible neither by law or by this shared understanding.
Not really. Doctors are expected to do the best for their patient without worrying about societal consequences. If Hitler came to a doctor in need of medical help, the doctor would be ethically required to do their best for him, desolate the negative consequences of Hitler to society.
Same with lawyers. Even if their client is a serial murderer and has co fessed their guilt to them, they still have to do their best in representing them.
IANAL but I believe this is untrue. It would not be acceptable for a lawyer to represent to the court something that they have reason to believe is false.
But software engineering seem to have a pass on how the things we build is actually used.
Dark patterns, facial recognition, mass surveillance? Just some code, a nice puzzle. It's like the profession as a whole feels only distantly connected to what they actually do.
I welcome the trend of developers taking more moral responsibility for their work. I want more ethics courses, more difficult questions, more uneasiness about what we do with our code, and what we enable. Not to be sure we build the right thing, but at least to be less wrong–and, sometimes, to know when we clearly build the wrong thing. I want us to be accountable; like other technical professions in the world.
And if in the workplace, the place where the majority of software in the world is usually produced, we can't have these discussions, what use will it be?