5 Engineering Ethics

7.
Engineer as Employer
 An ethical climate is a working environment that is conducive to morally responsible
conduct.
 Within corporations it is produced by a combination of formal organization and
policies, informal traditions and practices, and personal attitudes and commit-ments.
 Engineers can make a vital contribution to such a climate, especially as they move
into technical management and then more general management positions.
 Professionalism in engineering would be threatened at every turn in a corporation
devoted primarily to powerful egos.
7.1 Managers and Engineers ( 146)
 Respect for authority is important in meeting organizational goals. Decisions must be

made in situations where allowing everyone to exercise unrestrained individual
discretion would create chaos.
 Moreover, clear lines of authority provide a means for identifying areas of personal
responsibility and accountability.
 The relevant kind of authority has been called executive authority: the corporate or
institutional right given to a person to exercise power based on the resources of an
organization.
 It is distinguishable from power (or influence) in getting the job done. It is
distinguishable, too, from expert authority: the possession of special knowledge, skill,
or competence to perform some task or to give sound advice.
 Employees respect authority when they accept the guidance and obey the
directives issued by the employer having to do with the areas of activity covered
by the employer’s institutional authority, assuming the directives are legal and
do not violate norms of moral decency.
 “Engineer-oriented companies” focus primarily on the quality of products.
Engineers’ judgments about safety and quality are given great weight, and they
are overridden rarely, when considerations such as cost and scheduling became
especially important.
 “Customer-oriented companies” make their priority the satisfaction of
customers. In these companies safety considerations are also given high priority,
but engineers are expected to be more assertive in speaking as advocates for
safety, so that it received a fair hearing amidst managers’ preoccupation with
satisfying the needs of customers.
 Because of this sharper differentiation of managers’ and engineers’ points of
view, communication problems tend to arise more frequently.
 Finally, “finance-oriented companies” make profit the primary focus.
In addition to having different roles and authority, managers and

engineers typically have different attitudes and approaches. Managers tend to be
more distanced from the technical details of jobs; they focus more on jobs in their
entirety, from wider perspectives; and they are more focused on people than
things.
7.2 Professional Rights
 Respect for the rights of engineers and others.
Engineers have several types of moral rights, which fall into the sometimes
overlapping categories of human, employee, contractual, and professional rights.
i. As humans, engineers have fundamental rights to live and freely pursue

their legitimate interests, which implies, for example, rights not to be unfairly
discriminated against in employment on the basis of sex, race, or age.
ii. As employees, engineers have special rights, including the right to receive
one’s salary in return for performing one’s duties and the right to engage in the
nonwork political activities of one’s choosing without reprisal or coercion from
employers.
iii. As professionals, engineers have special rights that arise from their
professional role and the obligations it involves.
Three professional rights have special importance:
(1) the basic right of professional conscience,

(2) the right of conscientious refusal, and
(3) the right of professional recognition.
1. Right of Professional Conscience. (148)

The right of professional conscience is the moral right to exercise professional
judgment in pursuing professional responsibilities.
 Pursuing those responsibilities involves exercising both technical judgment and

reasoned moral convictions. This right has limits, of course, and must be
balanced against responsibilities to employers and colleagues of the sort
discussed earlier.
 Engineering, like other professions, calls for morally complex decisions. It

requires autonomous moral judgment in trying to uncover the most morally
reasonable courses of action, and the correct courses of action are not always
obvious.
 As with most moral rights, the basic professional right is an entitlement giving one the
moral authority to act without interference from others. It is a “liberty right” that
places an obligation on others not to interfere with its proper exercise.
 Yet occasionally, special resources may be required by engineers seeking to exercise the
right of professional conscience in the course of meeting their professional obligations
 . For example, conducting an adequate safety inspection may require that special
equipment be made available by employers.
 Or, more generally, to feel comfortable about making certain kinds of decisions on a
project, the engineers involved need an ethical climate conducive to trust and
support, which management may be obligated to help create and sustain. In this way
the basic right is also in some respects a “positive right” placing on others an obligation
to do more than merely not interfere.
 There are two general ways to justify the basic right of professional conscience. One is
to proceed piecemeal by reiterating the justifications given for the specific professional
duties.
 Thus, duty ethics regards professional rights as implied by general duties to respect
persons, and rule-utilitarianism would accent the public good of allowing engineers to
pursue their professional duties.
 The second way is to justify the right of professional conscience directly. Rights ethics
justify the right of professional conscience by reference to the rights of the public not
to be harmed and the right to be warned of dangers from the “social experiments” of
technological innovation.
2. Right of Conscientious Refusal.
The right of conscientious refusal is the right to refuse to engage in unethical

behavior and to refuse to do so solely because one views it as unethical..
There are two situations to be considered:
(i) where there is widely shared agreement in the profession as to whether an
act is unethical and
(II) where there is room for disagreement among reasonable people over
whether an act is unethical.
 It seems clear enough that engineers and other professionals have a moral right to
refuse to participate in activities that are illegal and clearly unethical (for example,
forging documents, altering test results, lying, giving or taking bribes, or padding
payrolls).
 And coercing employees into acting by means of threats (to their jobs) plainly
constitutes a violation of this right of theirs.
3. Right of Recognition.
Engineers have a right of professional recognition for their work and

accomplishments. Part of this involves fair monetary remuneration, and part
nonmonetary forms of recognition.
The right to recognition, and especially fair remuneration, may seem to be
purely a matter of self-interest rather than morality, but it is both. Without a fair
remuneration, engineers cannot concentrate their energies where they properly
belong—on carrying out the immediate duties of their jobs and on maintaining up-to-
date skills through formal and informal continuing education.
Their time will be taken up by money worries, or even by moonlighting to maintain a
decent standard of living.
7.3 Employee Rights
 Employee rights are any rights, moral or legal, that involve the status of being an
employee. They overlap with some professional rights, and they also include
institutional rights created by organizational policies or employment agreements,
such as the right to be paid the salary specified in one’s contract.
 Human rights that exist even if unrecognized by specific contract arrangements.
 Large corporations ought to recognize a basic set of employee rights.
7.4 Privacy Right.
The right to pursue outside activities can be thought of as a right to personal privacy
in the sense that it means the right to have a private life off the job.
In speaking of the right to privacy here, however, we mean the right to control the
access to and the use of information about oneself.
As with the right to outside activities, this right is limited in certain instances by
employers’ rights, but even then who among employers has access to confidential
information is restricted. For example, the personnel division needs medical and life
insurance information about employees, but immediate supervisors usually do not.
Consider a few examples of situations in which the functions of employers

conflict with the right employees have to privacy:
1. Job applicants at the sales division of an electronics firm are required to

take personality tests that include personal questions about alcohol use and sexual
conduct.
2. A supervisor unlocks and searches the desk of an engineer who is away
on vacation without the permission of that engineer. The supervisor suspects the
engineer of having leaked information about company plans to a competitor and is
searching for evidence to prove those suspicions
3. A large manufacturer of expensive pocket computers has suffered
substantial losses from employee theft. It is believed that more than one
employee is involved. Without notifying employees, hidden surveillance
cameras are installed.
4. A rubber products firm has successfully resisted various attempts by a

union to organize its workers. It is always one step ahead of the union’s
strategies, in part because it monitors the phone calls of employees who
are union sympathizers. It also pays selected employees bonuses in
exchange for their attending union meet-ings and reporting on information
gathered.
It considered, but rejected as imprudent, the possibility of bugging the
rest areas where employees were likely to discuss proposals
made by union organizers.
7.5 Right to Equal Opportunity: Preventing Sexual Harassment.

Sex-ual harassment is a particularly invidious form of sex discrimination,
involving as it does not only the abuse of gender roles and authority relationships,
Sexual harassment is a display of power and aggression through sexual means

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7.

7.1 Managers and Engineers ( 146)

 Respect for authority is important in meeting organizational goals. Decisions must be

In addition to having different roles and authority, managers and

i. As humans, engineers have fundamental rights to live and freely pursue

(1) the basic right of professional conscience,

1. Right of Professional Conscience. (148)

 Pursuing those responsibilities involves exercising both technical judgment and

 Engineering, like other professions, calls for morally complex decisions. It

The right of conscientious refusal is the right to refuse to engage in unethical

Engineers have a right of professional recognition for their work and

7.3 Employee Rights

Consider a few examples of situations in which the functions of employers

1. Job applicants at the sales division of an electronics firm are required to

4. A rubber products firm has successfully resisted various attempts by a

7.5 Right to Equal Opportunity: Preventing Sexual Harassment.

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