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Programmers Talk About the Unethical and Illegal Things They’ve Been Asked To Do

posted by martyb on Tuesday November 22 2016, @08:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the "code"-of-ethics-needs-debugging? dept.

Phoenix666 writes in with news of this story about the morality of programming:

Earlier this week, a post written by programmer and teacher Bill Sourour went viral. It's called "Code I'm Still Ashamed Of."

In it he recounts a horrible story of being a young programmer who landed a job building a website for a pharmaceutical company. The whole post is worth a read, but the upshot is he was duped into helping the company skirt drug advertising laws in order to persuade young women to take a particular drug.

He later found out the drug was known to worsen depression and at least one young woman committed suicide while taking it. He found out his sister was taking the drug and warned her off it.

By sake of comparison, take a look at the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct (Adopted by ACM Council 10/16/92.)

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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23 2016, @12:03AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23 2016, @12:03AM (#431577)

    You are asking people to take a boot to their wallet out of altruism. That's asking a lot.

    Sometimes the only ethical thing to do is "a lot". For instance, no one should work for the TSA; that job involves violating countless people's constitutional rights every single day, so it is unethical. 'Just following orders' is no excuse for doing something unethical, even if you feel you need the money. The only question is whether or not the job is actually unethical. But if you've already accepted that the job is unethical and do it anyway, you should be held accountable (morally, at least).

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  • (Score: 2) by art guerrilla on Monday November 28 2016, @09:14PM

    by art guerrilla (3082) on Monday November 28 2016, @09:14PM (#434227)

    i can sympathize with what you say, but -as in this TSA example- there is a difference between working for the state as a TSA droid, grabbing gonads legally, stealing shit opportunistically, and generally taking the bullshit sekurity theatre way too seriously, and ACTUALLY murdering people for Empire, as membrrs of the military-industrial komplex are doing...
    the harsh reality is, MOST of those in either the TSA or military are there because they effectively have no other choice... there are NO jobs otherwise for them, except to do the dirty work of empire...
    ...or they can be super-moral, refuse a shit job of Empire, and watch their kids starve to death, and yet their super ethical behavior will keep them warm and fuzzy ! !