Engineering is an important and learned profession. Engineers are expected to exhibit the highest standards of honesty and integrity. Engineering has a direct and vital impact on the quality of life for all people. Accordingly, the services provided by engineers require honesty, impartiality, fairness, and equity, and must be dedicated to the protection of the public health, safety, and welfare. Engineers must perform under a standard of professional behaviour that requires adherence to the highest principles of ethical conduct.
Thus ethics is not peripheral to, or an add-on to, engineering. It is integral to the practice of engineering, part of engineering problem solving. Safety and guarding against avoidable harm are built into engineering; they are the principles that underlie engineering codes and standards.
Engineering ethics can be considered in three frames of reference—individual, professional, and social.
Engineering ethics can be further divided into “microethics” , concerned with individuals and the internal relations of the engineering profession and “macroethics”, concerned with the collective, social responsibility of the engineering profession and societal decisions about technology.
Micro ethics can be at two levels – Individual and Professional. The individual ethics include honesty, integrity, fairness etc; where as professional ethics at micro level include adherence to safety, quality etc.
Includes personal qualities like decent, honest and truthful life, technical qualities and responsibility. Other than these personal qualities, professional specific individual values are,
The moral responsibility of engineers arise from special knowledge possessed by an individual in the profession
The Professional ethics
Usually the professional and personal responsibility is represented in a code of ethics which are covered under professional competencies in that organization.
Codes of ethics vary from one professional society to another, but they typically share common features in prescribing the responsibilities of engineers to the public, their employers and clients, and their fellow engineers. All modern codes state that the most significant responsibility of engineers is to protect the public health, safety and welfare. Codes often also emphasise such characteristics as competence, trustworthiness, honesty and fairness.
What does the code of ethics say?
As most of the codes of ethics say, the values of safety, health and welfare of the public are paramount to an engineer. These values are discussed below.
One of the main duties of an engineer is to ensure the safety of the people who will be affected by the products that he or she designs. The code of ethics of the professional engineering societies make it clear that safety is of paramount importance to the engineer.
The Bhopal disaster, the gas leak incident in India, is considered as the world’s worst industrial disaster ever known to mankind. It is proven that the responsibility for safety, risk assessment and ethical codes was an absent criterion in the UCIL plant. Important lessons learnt from Bhopal incident would be that in professional ethics, responsibility for safety and risk assessment are the most important aspects that should be practiced in every establishment.
What is safety?
Safety means freedom from damage, injury, or risk . Risk is the possibility of suffering harm or loss.
Responsibility of Engineers
Public health is affected by many factors such as pollution, toxic elements, flawed design etc. So the engineers should
If the standards for safety and health are met, it will add to the public welfare. Apart from those public welfare includes
What is a citizen’s charter?
The codes of ethics also mention the personal values that an engineer should have. They are
The professional qualities that the code of ethics mandates are
What is competence?
Is the essential knowledge, skills, and abilities without which an individual is not a qualified practitioner. It is an ability to do something, especially measured against a standard.
The four professional development core competency areas are:
1. Communication Literacy
2. Personal and Professional Management
3. Critical Thinking and Problem-Solving Skills
4. Technical Literacy
The personal competence includes: Self-Awareness, Emotional competence, Accurate self-assessment, Self-confidence and Self Management.
The common ethical issues or dilemmas faced by engineers are,
Corruption, Bribery and Fraud – Corruption is dishonest or fraudulent conduct by those in power
An engineer may be bribed to give permit to a potentially harmful project
Ex – giving permissions for real estate in environmentally sensitive areas and for constructions not following the design standards
As a result of the concurrent development of engineering as a profession and technology-driven corporations, there exists conflicts between the professional values of engineering and business values of corporations.
Macroethics looks at bigger picture issues such as sustainability, poverty, social justice, and bioethics which need to be addressed by the engineering profession (and society) as a whole. Macroethics is also generally not captured by professional codes of conduct. Macro ethics covers certain professional and social ethics as follows:
The role of professional engineering societies has been limited largely to developing codes of ethics. Professional societies, however, could potentially serve as a conduit to bring together the entire continuum of ethical frameworks by linking individual and professional ethics and linking professional and social ethics. In the domain of macroethics, professional societies can provide a link between the social responsibilities of the profession and societal decisions about technology by issuing position statements on public policy issues, such as sustainable development
For example, the engineering community reacted to Agenda 21 by establishing the World Engineering Partnership for Sustainable Development (WEPSD) in 1992. Recently, some engineering societies have included the social objective in the role of engineering in the realization of sustainable development.
The leaders of professional societies can be agents of change in the engineering culture.
Try to find solutions for the following case studies.
Case Study 1 – Conflict of Values
A Quality Assurance Engineer at a large electronics company responsible for the final testing of her company’s servers. Because there is such a short amount of time between the release of each next new product, the Quality and Assurance department cannot perform every possible test on the servers to ensure they are defect free. The engineer decided that she will ship a product that has a likelihood of failure resulting in data loss for the customer, because she knows that if she doesn’t, her company’s competitor will.
Case Study 2 – Privacy and Confidentiality
A commercial network operator collects personal information and sells it to companies for telemarketers without informed consent.
Case Study 3 – Miscommunication
The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster
While reentering Earth’s atmosphere the shuttle unexpectedly disintegrated, resulting in the death of all seven astronauts on board. The cause was later discovered to be damage to thermal shielding tiles from impact with a falling piece of foam insulation of an external tank during launch. It was the seventh known instance of this particular piece breaking free during launch. NASA’s investigation team found melted aluminium on the thermal tiles and inside edges of the left wing of the spacecraft, supporting the notion that the Columbia’s destruction was due to hot gases that penetrated the damaged spot on the wing. Mission control deemed that foam shedding was a not a safety factor prior to launch, believed damage of the shuttle panels were not a significant issue . It was not until January 24, 2003, that mission control had classified the damage as a problematic issue. These missteps in communication between mission control and the debris assessment team inhibited a proper examination of the damages to the spacecraft.
Case Study 4 – Responsibility
The Puri-Haridwar Utkal Express derailed with 14 coaches of the train jumped off the track. Derailment could have been caused by the ongoing repair work on the rail line; station master insists he was not informed about any maintenance.
Case Study 5 – Macro ethics
The making of atom bomb
During II world war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt approved a crash program to develop an atomic bomb. In May 1942 J. Robert Oppenheimer Oppenheimer was invited to take over work on fast neutron calculations, a task that Oppenheimer threw himself into with full vigor. This resulted in the first ever atom bomb explosion. After the war, Oppenheimer lobbied for international control of nuclear power to avert nuclear proliferation and a nuclear arms race.
Case Study 6 – Design failure
1940 collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.
At the time the world’s third-longest suspension bridge, crossed a strait of Puget Sound near Tacoma, Wash. A few months after its opening, high winds caused the bridge to fail in a roar of twisted metal and shattered concrete.
Case Study 7 – Risk Assesment
Following a major earthquake, a 15-metre tsunami disabled the power supply and cooling of three Fukushima Daiichi reactors, causing a nuclear accident on 11 March 2011. All three cores largely melted in the first three days.
Case Study 8 (UPSC 2013) – Conflict of Values
You are working as an Executive Engineer in the construction cell of a Municipal Corporation and are presently in-charge of the construction of a flyover. There are two Junior Engineers under you who have the responsibility of day-to-day inspection of the site and are reporting to you, while you are finally reporting to the Chief Engineer who heads the cell. While the construction is heading towards completion, the Junior Engineers have been regularly reporting that all construction is taking place as per design specifications. However, in one of your surprise inspections, you have noticed some serious deviations and lacunae which, in your opinion, are likely to affect the safety of the flyover. Rectification of these lacunae at this stage would require a substantial amount of demolition and rework which will cause a tangible loss to the contractor and will also delay completion. There is a lot of public pressure on the Corporation to get this construction completed because of heavy traffic congestion in the area. When you brought this matter to the notice of the Chief Engineer, he advised you that in his opinion it is not a very serious lapse and may be ignored. He advised for further expediting the project for completion in time. However, you are convinced that this was a serious matter which might affect public safety and should not be left unaddressed.
What will you do in such a situation? Some of the options are given below. Evaluate the merits and demerits of each of these options and finally suggest what course of action you would like to take, giving reasons.
Case Study 9 (UPSC 2013) – Conflict of Interest
You are heading a leading technical institute of the country. The institute is planning to convene an interview panel shortly under your chairmanship for selection of the post of professors. A few days before the interview, you get a call from the Personal Secretary (PS) of a senior government functionary seeking your intervention in favour of the selection of a close relative of the functionary for this post. The PS also informs you that he is aware of the long pending and urgent proposals of your institute for grant of funds for modernisation, which are awaiting the functionary’s approval. He assures you that he would get these proposals cleared.
Case Study 10 (UPSC 2016) – Whistle Blowing
A fresh engineering graduate gets a job in a prestigious chemical industry. She likes the work. The salary is also good. However, after a few months accidentally discovers that a highly toxic waste is being secretly discharged into a river nearby. This is causing health problems to the villagers downstream who depend on the river for their water needs. She is perturbed and mentions her concern to her colleagues who have been with the company for longer periods. They advise her to keep quite as anyone who mentions the topic is summarily dismissed. She cannot risk losing her job as she is the sole bread-winner for her family and has to support her ailing parents and siblings.
At first, she thinks that if her seniors are keeping quiet, why should she stick out her neck. But her conscience pricks her to do something to save the river and the people who depend upon it. At heart she feels that the advice of silence given by her friends is not correct though she cannot give reasons for it. She thinks you are a wise person and seeks your advice.
Case Study 11 – Macro ethics
Elon Musk recently commented on Twitter that artificial intelligence (AI) is more dangerous than North Korea. It’s not the first time that the entrepreneur has warned about the dangers of AI.