> If civil engineers acted the way that software engineers routinely do, they'd never work again, and rightly so.

This part is what I take issue with. Software is simply different from buildings.

Software still gets people killed, a lesson that should have been learned decades ago with the Therac-25. Of course "software is different from buildings," but the responsibility to build both ethically and responsibly isn't one of the differences. Granted the impacts of software are often less direct than a building collapse, but they still exist and the people involved in making it need to stop pretending that this is still the digital wild West.

The process of building a building ethically, and the process of building software ethically, are completely unrelated and different.