Engineers are responsible for strictly technical failures. When a piece of software does what a representative of company management asks for it hasn't failed.

Software engineers are not lawyers and they are bad at interpreting laws.

I’ve received yearly training as part of my job outlining my civil and criminal liabilities as a software engineer going back 20 years. It’s par for the course in finance.

Engineering is all about working with constraints. Most of these are technical, but some of them are and should be ethical.

If the product of your engineering directly enables unethical actions, yes, you should bear some of the responsibility for it.

> Software engineers are not lawyers and they are bad at interpreting laws.

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.

Sure. But if the engineer doesn't think it is sketchy enough to seek out a lawyer, why would they suddenly be liable for issues where they are obviously ignorant, and never expected to be competent?

This isn't how ethics works, just doing my job doesn't work legally.