> That is outrageous. The company owners have limited liability protections.
The owners have limited financial liability, not limited legal liability.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_liability
> Limited liability is a legal status in which a person's financial liability is limited to a fixed sum, most commonly the value of a person's investment in a corporation, company or partnership.
> That is outrageous.
And this is why software engineering is a joke.
Software engineers are not lawyers and they are bad at interpreting laws.
If the product of your engineering directly enables unethical actions, yes, you should bear some of the responsibility for it.
Right, so if something seems sketchy ("please ignore these specific deductions when calculating our holdings") , get a lawyer - or CEO or CFO or whatever - to say in writing that it's fine.
And if something seems actually illegal ("just run the blood test results out-of-spec and report them anyway") just don't do it. Nothing absolves you of some things.
That is outrageous. The company owners have limited liability protections. The employees should receive at least that unless they are in a position that requires specific legal training like an engineer legislatively appointed to be responsible for some safety function. Where they are appointed and remunerated specifically for their legal responsibility, in other words.
And the court cases after WWII are hardly reliable precedent. They were basically making it up as they went with fairly flimsy justification apart from the fact they had a bunch of troops still in fighting form.