Ethics and Computer Science

How many times have we heard it said “with great power comes great responsibility.” Have you read about the scandal with Volkswagen where they used software tricks to dupe emissions tests? As my friend Jim Huggins pointed out on Facebook, this scandal was possible because software developers were asked to do something unethical (and probably illegal) and agreed to do it.
One tends to wonder how anyone thought this sort of fraud was appropriate of course. But among the people who had to be in on it were software developers. This underlines, to me at least, that we need to talk about ethical behavior in computer science. There is so much wrong that can be done so easily in software these days that we need people who can resist the temptation to do so.