1) Weapons development, specifically development of weapons of mass destruction or other weapons that seem biased towards aggressive rather than defensive use.

2) What if one of your engineering project has a small risk of failure, but a failure could kill someone. However, eliminating this risk would put you over budget, put a lot of pressure on you, and may prevent you from proceeding with your next project (which is going to save the world!)

3) You see scapegoating within your organization. Your boss ruins the career of one of your peers to cover his own ass. Do you call your boss on it?

Are any of those interesting to you? I took a “professional ethics” course as an undergrad, which primarily focused on case studies (and BS ethical analysis). Anyway, the case studies were really interesting. You might be able to find something like that.

You may also be interested in this website: Breaking Ranks: http://breakingranks.net/

Finally, I wrote a pretty long response at my own blog, (including substantial quotes that I’ve been wanting to transcribe for awhile): http://e-vigilance.blogspot.com/2007/09/ethical-bright-line.html

-Adam R, Pgh