Ryan Ingram

Ethics Essay

The “Code of Ethics” is an important part of engineering that every engineer and
company needs to be aware of. Ethics in engineering protects people and their rights by
providing guidelines for what people should follow.

I personally have faced ethical situations during school as a student in engineering.

There is always opportunity to copy another person’s homework or cheat on a test and these
situations you must make sure you stay within the school’s code of ethics along with your
personal moral. As a computer engineering student there is a big ethical situation with creating
code because there are so many solutions to problems that you can easily find online. In this
specific situation I make my decision based off how I benefit from copying a piece of code. If I
copy it doesn’t affect anybody except for me and in the short term it may even help me.
However, if you think about the long term it doesn’t help me at all because I am not learning or
achieving anything. In other ethical situations I follow this same way to make my decisions. I try
to think about long term benefit and if the situation involves others or could possibly involve
others, I try to think about them and put myself in their shoes.

In class we discussed a few real-world examples of ethics issues involving Amazon, Ford,
and Volkswagen. The three of these examples all involve different decisions and outcomes that
were all major ethical situations. The first was Amazons situation where one of their products
was a “witness” to a murder investigation. Amazon’s Echo is always listening and contained
critical information to a murder case and Amazon had to decide if it was ethically right to give
up this information to the police or to protect the privacy rights of the user. The second
involved Ford cars and the safety involved in the designs. The design originally failed and the
company for the most did nothing and sold it to the public. This decision ended up causing
deaths and a very large loss in money for the company. The third situation was with
Volkswagen when they found a way to hide the amount of carbon emissions that their cars
created. This was a huge ethical decision made by the company to care about the money over
the environment and the law and involved a huge amount of money lost for them.

These situations that were covered in class are obviously very different than the ones
that I have come across as a student. They are much larger scale and affect a large amount of
people whereas my situations usually involve only myself and affect myself in the future.
However, they are also similar in the way that they all involve making decisions that are morally
right. In class my group was always able to come to the same idea that we all agreed was right.
It was fairly easy for us to look at the situations from a third person point of view rather than it
being us in the situation.

The case study that we reflected on the most was the Amazon Echo murder case. The
three virtues that mostly relate to this situation would be responsibility, integrity, and fidelity.
Amazon as a company has a big responsibility to uphold with keeping the information that they
obtain private. This is true for all companies and they must always protect the customers. They
must also hold strong morals and integrity with the information that they have. Finally, the
customers put a lot of faithfulness into the companies like Amazon who can do a lot of things
with the information that they have. The other three of the six virtues are also relevant to this
case just not as much based on the situation Amazon was in.

In conclusion, the code of ethics is a very much needed thing in the world of
engineering. Without it there would be a lot of bad situations cause by people only focused on
themselves. The code of ethics guides engineers and the decisions that are made that affect
everybody.