ENGG 434 ENGINEERING ETHICS

CODE OF ETHICS
CODE OF ETHİCS-ABUSE OF CODES
▪ When codes are not taken seriously within a profession the problem
starts.
▪ Probably the worst abuse of engineering codes is to restrict honest
moral effort on the part of individual engineers in the attempt to
preserve the profession’s public image and protect the status que.
▪ The best way to increase trust is by encouraging and helping engineers
to speak freely and responsibly about public safety and well being. This
includes a tolerance for critisims of the codes themselves, rather than
allowing codes to become sacred documents that have to be acceptd
uncritically.
CODE OF ETHİCS-ABUSE OF CODES
 On rare occasions, abuses have discouraged moral conduct and
caused serious harm to those seeking to serve the public. In 1932,
two engineers were expelled from ASCE for violating a section of
its code forbidding public remarks critical of other engineers.
CODE OF ETHİCS-LİMİNATİONS OF CODES
 Codes are no substitute for individual responsibility in grappling
with concrete dilemmas. For instance, most codes are restricted to
general wording, and hence inevitably contain substantial areas of
vagueness. Thus, they may not be able to straightforwardly adress
all situations.
 Usually codes provide little guidance as to which entry should have
priority in those cases.
 Codes are not always the complete and final word.
CODE OF ETHİCS-ETHİCAL RELATİVİSM
 Codes try to put into words obligations that already exist,whether
or not the code is written.
 Codes are conventions established within professional codes of
ethics.
 Ethical relativism also called ethical conventionalism, which says
that moral values are entirely relative to and reducible to customs-
to the conventions, laws and norms of the group to which one
belongs.
 What is right is simply what conforms to custom, and it is right
soley because it conforms to customs.
CODE OF ETHİCS-JUSTİFİCATİON OF
CODES
❖ A sound professional code will stand up to three tests: 1) It will be clear
and coherent; 2) It will organize basic moral values applicable to the
profession in a systematic and comprehensive way, highlighting what is
most important and 3) It will provide helpful guidance that is
compatible with our most carefully considered moral convictions
(judgements) about concrete situations.
❖ Certainly codes are a proper starting place for an inquiry into
professional ethics: they establish a framework for dialogue about
moral issues.
MORAL FRAMEWORKS
 An ethical theory is a comprehensive perspective on morality that
clarifies, organizes and guides moral reflection. If successful, it
provides a framework for making moral choices and resolving moral
dilemmas-not simple formula, but rather a comprehensive way to
identify, structure and integrate moral reasons.
 Ethical theories also ground the requirements in engineering codes of
ethics by reference to broader moral principles.
UTİLİTARİANİSM
• Utilitarianism says that we ought to maximize the overall good,
taking into equal account all those affected by our actions.
• Utilitarianism is the view that we ought always to produce the
most good for the most people, giving equal consideration to
everyone affected.
• Surely morality involves producing good consequences-especially in
engineering.
• Utilitarianism even seems a straightforward way to interpret the
central principle in most engineering codes: «Engineers shall hold
paramount the safety, health and welfare of the public in the
performance of their engineering duties».
RULE UTİLİTARİANİSM
 An alternative version of utilitarianism says we should take rules,
rather than isolated actions, much more seriously. Justified rules
are morally authoritative, rather than loose guidelines. Right
actions are those required by rules that produce the most good for
the most people.
 Act-utilitarianism seems to permit in justice by promoting social
good at the expense of individuals.
 Give to help others, while keeping sufficient resources for the
security and reasonable luxuries for oneself and one’s family.
RİGHTS ETHİCS AND DUTY ETHİCS
Right ethics regards human rights as fundamental, and duty ethics regards
duties of respect for autonomy as fundamentals. Right ethics and duty
ethics are largely mirror images of each other. Because you have a right to
life, I have a duty not to kill you; and if i have a duty not to decide you then
you have a right not to be decieved.
HUMAN RİGHTS
• Rights enter into engineering in many ways. Holding paramount
the safety, health, and welfare of the public can be interpreted as
having respect for the public’s rights to life (by producing safe
products), rights to privacy, rights not to be injured (by dangerous
products), and rights to recieve benefits through fair and honest
exchanges in a free marketplace.
• Human rights have been used as the basis for critiquing the
violation of rights in other countries such as current dictatorships.
• They are also embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights proclaimed by the General Asembly of the United Nations
in 1948.
TWO VERSİONS OF RİGHT ETHİCS
 Right ethics gets more complex as we ask which right exist. Thus,
human rights might come in two forms: liberty rights and welfare
rights.
 Liberty rights are rights to exercise one’s liberty, and they place
duties on other people not to interfere with one’s freedom. Welfare
rights are rights to benefits needed for a decent human life, when
one can not earn those benefits and when the community has them
available.
TWO VERSİONS OF RİGHT ETHİCS
 A second version of right ethics denies there are welfare human
rights. Libertarians believe that only liberty rights exist; there are
no welfare rights.
 John Locke (1632-1704), who was the first philosopher to carefully
arrticulate a rights ethics, is often interpreted as a libertarian. He
believed that the three most basic human rights are to life, liberty
and property.
DUTY ETHİCS
Duty ethics says that right actions are those required by duties to respect
the liberty or autonomy (self-determination) of individuals.
Autonomy-moral self determination or self-goverance-means having the
capacity to govern one’s life in accordance with moral duties.
Immorality occurs when we “merely use” others, reducing them to mere
means to our ends, treating them as mere objects to gratify our needs.
Violent acts such as murder, rape, and torture are obvious ways of trating
people as mere objects serving our own purposes.
VİRTUE ETHİCS

 Virtue ethics emphasizes character more than rights and rules. Virtues
are desirable habits or tendencies in action, commitment, motive,
attitute, emotioni ways of reasoning, and ways of relating to others.
VİRTUES İN ENGİNEERİNG
 The most comprehensive virtue of engineers is responsible
professionalism. Four categories of virtues: public well-being,
professional competence, cooperative practices and personal
integrity.
 Public-spirited virtues are focused on the good of clients and the
wider public. Engineering codes of professional conduct also call for
beneficence, which is preventing or removing harm to others and
more positively, promoting the public safety, health and welfare.
VİRTUES İN ENGİNEERİNG
 Proficiency virtues are the virtues of mastery of one’s profession, in
particular mastery of the technical skills that characterize good
engineering practice. The most general proficiency virtue is
competence: being well prepared for the jobs one undertakes.
 Teamwork virtues are those that are especially important in
enabling professionals to work successfully with other people. They
include loyalty and respect for legitimate authority.
 Self-governance virtues are those necessary in exercising moral
responsibility. Courage, self-disipline, self-respect and integrity are
such examples.
ARİSTOTLE: COMMUNİTY AND THE GOLDEN
MEAN

Aristotle (384-322 B.C) defined the moral virtues as habits of reaching a

proper balance between extremes in conduct, emotion, desire, and attitute.
To use the phrase inspired by his theory, virtues are tendencies to find the
Golden Mean between the extremes of too much (excess) and too little
(deficiency) with regard to particular aspects of our lives.
The most important virtue is practical wisdom, that is, morally good
judgment, which enables to discern the mean for all the other virtues.
ARİSTOTLE: COMMUNİTY AND THE GOLDEN MEAN
 Virtues enable us to pursue a variety of public goods within a
community-a concept that was especially important for citizens.
 They enable us to attain happiness, by which Aristotle meant self-
fulfillment through an active life in accordance with our reason
(rather than a life of mere contentment or pleasure).
 Aristotle tells us it arises from the development of good habits as
achieved through proper training within families and communities.
ARİSTOTLE: COMMUNİTY AND THE GOLDEN MEAN
 The virtues enable engineers to meet standards of excellence and
thereby achieve internal goods, especially public or community
goods, without allowing external goods such as money and power.
 The virtues thereby add to the personal meaning that engineers
find in their work by linking individua lives to wider communities.
All four categories of the virtues play key roles in engineers’
commitments to the safety, health, and welfare of the public.
 Think how dramatically engineers have improved human life
during the past century by developing the internal combustion
engine, computers, the Internet.
SELF-REALİZATİON AND SELF İNTEREST
 Each of the preceeding ethical theories leaves considerable room
for self-interest, that is, for pursuing what is good for oneself.
 Self-realizarion ethics, however, gives greater prominence to self-
interest and to personal commitments that individuals develop.
 ETHİCAL EGOİSM

Ethical egoism says that each of us ought always and only to promote our
own self-interest. The theory is ethical because it is a theory about
morality, and it is egoistic because it says the sole duty of each of us is to
maximize our well-being.
Self interest is understood as our long term and enlightened well being
(good happiness), rather than a narrowi, short-sighted pursuit of
immediate pleasures that leaves us frustrated or damaged in the long run.
ETHİCAL EGOİSM

 Nevertheless, these and other ethical egoists do not assume that

well-being must involve community abd caring for others. Indeed,
ethical egoists deny the value of altruism, of caring about others
for their sake. Their ethical, standard is that each of us should care
about our self-interest-period. As such, ethical egoism sounds like
an endorsement of selfishness. It implies that engineers should
think first and last about what is beneficial to themselves, an
implication at odds with the injunction to keep paramount the
public health, safety, and welfare.
SELF-REALİZATİON AND PERSONAL COMMİTMENTS
 Self-realization ethics emphasizes that we are social beings whose
identities and meaning are linked to communities in which we
participate.
 Self-realization ethics points to the particular commitments
individuals make in their work as well as in their personal lives.
 Personal commitments are commitments that might not be
incumbent on every member of a profession, including
humanitarian, environmental, religious, political, aesthetic and
family commitments.
 They also include, however, voluntary commitments to obligatory
professional standards, especially when these are linked to an
individual’s broader value perspective.
SELF-REALİZATİON AND PERSONAL COMMİTMENTS
 Personal commitments are relevant in many ways to professional
life. Most important, they create meaning: thereby they motivate
professionalism throughout long careers. Professions offer special
opportunities for meaningful work, which explains much of their
attraction to talented individuals.
WHİCH ETHİCAL THEORY İS BEST?
Just as ethical theories are used to evaluate actions, rules, and character,
ethical theories can themselves be evaluated.
Ethical theories are clear and coherent. They rely on concepts (ideas) that
are sufficiently clear to be applicable, and their various claims and
principles are internally consistent.
Ethical theories organize basic moral values in a systematic and
comprehensive way.
Ethical theories provide helpful guidance that is compatible with our most
carefully considered moral judgements about concrete situations.
WHICH ETHICAL THEORY IS BEST?
 An important role of a ethical theory is to improve our moral
insight into particular problems.
 In our view, some versions of rule-utilitarianism, right ethics, duty
ethics, virtue ethics, and self-realization ethics all satisfy the
criteria in high degrees.
ENGİNEERİNG AS SOCİAL EXPERİMENTS
To undertake a great work, and especially a work of a novel type,
means carrying out an experiment. It means taking up a struggle
with the forces of nature without the assurance of emerging as the
victor after the first attack- Louis Marie Henri Navier (1785-1836)
Bridge Builder and founder of structural analysis.
ENGINEERING AS SOCIAL EXPERIMENTS
 Experimentation is commonly recognized as playing an essential
role in the design process.
 Preliminary tests or simulations are conducted from the time it is
decided to convert a new engineering concept into its first rough
decision.
 Ex. A reservoir may do damage to a region’s social fabric or to its
ecosystem.
 Effective engineering relies upon knowledge gained about products
both before and after they leave the factory-knowledge needed for
improving current products and creating better ones. That is,
ongoing success in engineering depends upon gaining new
knowledge, as does ongoing success in experimentation.
ENGINEERING AS SOCIAL EXPERIMENTS
 Monitoring is thus as essential to engineering as it is to
experimentation in general. To monitor is to make periodic
observations and tests in order to check for both successful
performance and unintended side effects.
 But since the ultimate of a product’s efficiency, safety, cost-
effectiveness, environmental impact, and aesthetic value lies in
how well that product functions within the society.
LEARNING FROM THE PAST
 Usually engineers learn from their own earlier design and
operating results, as well as from those of other engineers, but
unfortunately that is not always the case.
 A lack of established channels of communication, misplaces pride
in not asking for information, embarrassment at failure or fear of
litigation, and plain neglect often impede the flow of such
information and lead to many repetitions of past mistakes.
 Examples:

 1-Titanic lacked a sufficient number of lifeboats decades after most

of the passengers and crew on the steamship Arctic had perished
because of the same problem
LEARNING FROM THE PAST
 2. Complete lack of protection against impact by shipping caused
Sweeden’s worst ever bridge collapse as a result of which eight
people were killed.
 3. In June 1966 a section of the Milford Haven Bridge in Wales
collapsed during construction.

 These examples illustrate why it is not enough for engineers to rely

on handbooks and computer programs without knowing the limits
of the tables and algorithims underlying their favorite tools.
LEARNING FROM THE PAST
 To be sure, engineering differs in some respects from standard
experimentation. Some of those very differences help to highlight
the engineer’s special responsibilities. Exploring the differences
can also aid our thinking about the moral responsibilities of all
those engaged in engineering.
Experimental control
One great difference arises with experimental control. In a standard
experiment this involves the selection, at random, of members for two
different groups. The members of one group recieve the special,
experimental treatment. Members of the other group, called the control
group, do not recieve that special treatment, although they are
subjected to the same environment as the first group in every other
respect.
ENGINEERING AS SOCIAL EXPERIMENTS
 In engineering, this is not the usual practice-unless the project is
confined to laboratory experimentation-because the experimental
subjects are human beings or finished and sold products out of the
experimenter’s control.
 This suggests that the view of engineering as social
experimentation.
 Social scientists monitor and collect data on differences and
similarities between existing educational systems that were not
initially set up as systematic experiments.