Washington Accords Graduate Requirements apply ethical principles, commit to professional ethics/responsibilities/norms of engineering practice, assess societal, health, safety, legal and cultural issues and consequent responsibilities.
Professional engineers must:
- Identify (sometimes competing) ethical concerns
- Analyze the issues underling the concerns
- Respond to the concerns
Module 2 Outcomes
Students demonstrate understanding of their ethical responsibilities to:
- Self manage in an orderly and ethical manner
- Balance public interest with those of employers/clients
- Uphold engineering profession standards
Students can identify/justify ethical course of action in complex situations
ENGR101 Revision
Values/Morals:
- Ethical values: individual standards/beliefs of what is right and proper
- Non-ethical values: desires (e.g. wealth, status) that are ethically neutral or orthogonal to ethical values
Ethics is the study of moral principles:
- What ought to be done
- What values/morals a person ought to adopt
Laws make up the minimal standards of conduct: actions can be legal but not ethical.
Workplace ethics: personal values + organizational values + external environment (government, norms)
Two parts to ethics:
- Discerning right from wrong
- Committing to do the right thing
Ethical theories:
- Rule-based: deontology
- Absolutist position; apply ethical rules in all circumstances
- What rules should be followed?
- People have fundamental rights that others have a duty to respect (but rights can conflict)
- Justice: actions must be fair and just
- Distributive/equity: people should not be treated differently based on arbitrary characteristics (discrimination, equal pay for equal work)
- Procedural/impartiality: rules clearly stated and consistently/impartially enforced
- Compensatory/fairness: compensation for injury by the responsible party (they had control over the matter)
- Ends-based: teleology
- The ends justify the means: acts are ethical when they achieve the best outcome (for whom?)
- Utilitarianism: cost-benefit analysis assessing short/long term impacts on all stakeholders; maximize overall happiness
- Does not care about the distribution of suffering/happiness, only the total amount
- Virtues-based
- If an act is what a virtuous person would do under the same circumstances
Some rule books:
-
Golden rule: treat others as you would wish to be treated
-
‘Prima Facie’ Duties Framework
- Fidelity: keep promises, don’t tell lies
- Reparation: fix what you have done wrong
- Gratitude
- Justice, beyond the letter of the law
- Beneficence: do good if you can
- Self-improvement
- Non-maleficence: do not harm others
-
Weinstein’s Five Ethical Principles
- Do no harm; prevent harm
- Make things better; do good
- Respect others
- Be fair
- Be compassionate
-
Kant universalizability imperative: if everyone acted according to some rule, what rule would produce the best world
Tests:
- Harms (teleology): do the benefits outweigh the harms, short- and long-term
- Reversibility (deontology, golden rule): would I make the same decision if I traded places
- Colleague (deontology, codes): what would my colleagues/professional code of ethics say
- Legality (deontology, law): would it violate the law or organizational policies
- Common-practice test (deontology, Kant): what if everyone behaved this way
- Publicity, hiding test: how would the action look on the news
TL;DR:
- Is it legal
- Stakeholder analysis; who is affected, how?
- Is it ‘right’
- Does it with with company/professional/personal values
- How will I feel afterwards
- Will it reflect poorly on the company/profession/me?
- Is there a better course of action
Rationalizations for unethical behavior:
- ‘It’s not really illegal’
- Is in everyone’s best interest
- No one will find out
- Organization will ‘protect’ you