I'm curious why you think an ethics course would actually change minds. In my experience in undergrad, we had a CS ethics course, and it went in in-one-ear-and-out-the-other for 99% of students, probably myself included. I know it was a thorough course but I promptly forgot all of it, and so did everyone else.

Ethical stance is not something you can teach in one course. If you don't have this disposition by the time you're in college, I think you're likely not learning it.

My original comment was more about the quality of discourse in this thread being...somewhat lacking. I'd hope that an ethics course would at least equip CS grads to have a more substantive debate about these sorts of topics. I agree that many students would dial it in for an ethics course (just like they do for many required courses), but I also think there's likely some value in exposure, and it's difficult to argue that ethics are irrelevant to software engineering given the frequency of discussions like this one.

(And, to be fair, it's a discussion board on the Internet, so maybe my expectations are just out of whack.)