Engineering ethics professional obligations

Ethical Issues This case raises two interesting and important ethical issues. The first is how engineers should design consumer products intended for use in less techno-economically developed societies. The second concerns whether some or all engineers in an affluent developed country like the United States have an ethical obligation to devote some of their professional effort to benefitting needy poor people. 

This brings us to a second ethical issue raised by this case whether engineers in a country like the United States have an ethical obligation or responsibility to devote at least a part of their professional effort to benefitting people in great need. I shall approach this issue by relating a personal experience. 

In their post-trip reflections, the students did not explicitly use the expression ethical responsibility. However, I got the impression that several of them were wondering whether they did have some kind of obligation or duty to allocate at least a small part of their professional energy to engineering endeavors that would benefit those in great need. 

Optimization, Option Disclosure, and Problem Redefinition Derivative Moral Obligations of Engineers and the Case of the Composite-Material Bicycle, Professional Ethics, Vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 5-25. 

This formulation was used to define an obligation of power in Sen s account of political justice [17]. However, engineers rarely have the type of political power referred to by Sen. It is, therefore, proposed here to retain the definition but to refer instead to an opportunity cf professional capabilities. Such opportunity could be considered as a generalisation of the rule of rescue the compelling motivation to save endangered human life wherever possible. When we become aware of the need of others we are almost always free to walk away. Nevertheless, we are often moved to action by the challenge that confronts us. Such action is an ethical act, a response to the being who in a face speaks to the subject and tolerates only a personal response [18], as was discussed in Chap. 1. 

PL07 Recognize the roles and ethics of a professional engineer in fulfilling social, cultural and environmental obligations. 

The national movement to promote professionalization and ethics among engineers may thus be read as an innovative move to estabhsh the viabihty of a new household, the engineering profession, that functions both as an aid to corporate households and retains a primary obligation to the national household - one that may also serve as a pathway for engineers to work around those corporate households that have failed to fulfill their obligations at the national level (Wokutch and Shepard 1999). As Hideo Ohashi eloquently put it,... 

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