Ethics and engineering practice

A legal act is not necessarily ethical. The Russian dissident Alexandr Solzhenitsyn said, I have lived my life in a society where there was no rule of law. And that is a terrible existence. But a society where the rule of law is the only standard of ethical behavior is equally bad. Billionaire Jon Huntsman, the founder of the world s largest privately owned chemical company, said, We are not always required by law to do what is right and proper. Decency, for instance, carries no legal mandate (Huntsman 2005). 

In this modern society there is no argument that both the law and ethics are essential to the engineering profession. Practicing engineer Michael Garrett clearly separated the two and shows their philosophical differences  

The Code requires you to do the right thing and there may be a tendency to try to rationalize what is right versus simply what you want to do. This tendency can be enhanced when a code becomes too wordy or complex. The code should be considered a Thou shall rather than a Thou shall not document. Goldberg warns that ethics is the study of 

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