Comment by kvcc01

I agree with you both. "One can, and one should," and it’s even better if the profession provides a mechanism to remove from practice its own worst offenders. The AMA/ABA examples I gave above do not just offer protection to their members, but they also hold power to send their unethical practitioners to the poorhouse. (If you’re a junior physician with lots of student loans but lose your license due to an ethics violation, I don’t know what you’ll do. Loans don’t go away in a bankruptcy.) So those professions come with a terrible downside for flagrant violators. We don’t have any such downside in software, which may explain some of the moral depravity mentioned.