Engineering Ethics: Professional Conduct

This assignment delves into engineering ethics, emphasizing the importance of honest and impartial behavior to protect public health, safety, and welfare. It explores how engineers should act in various situations to maintain confidence in their profession. Additionally, it examines different views on professional organizations: institutional vs instrumental.

Engineering Ethics
Engineering is an important and learned profession. As members of this profession, engineers
are expected to exhibit the highest standards of honesty and integrity. Engineering has a
direct and vital impact on the quality of life for all people. Accordingly, the services provided
by engineers require honest, impartiality, fairness and equity, and must be dedicated to the
protection of the public health, safety and welfare. Engineers must perform under a standard
of professional behavior which requires adherence to the highest principles of ethical
conduct.
Engineering is closely involved in human relations and in business and commerce. A great
many of the special problems in personal conduct met by engineers are likely to arise from
this fact. Ethics means something more than "law" and "morals" , it carries an additional
connotation of "rightness". The Code is a statement of the principles of "rightness", of broad
scope and with enough detail to enable an intelligent man to deduce for himself the course of
his own professional conduct. The essence of all professional codes is that the professional
man must be worthy, through his conduct, of the trust placed in him by the community and
his colleagues
To act every situation in a manner that will add to the confidence and esteem in which his
profession is held by the community. A profession is no better than its individual members. If
they do not have the professional attitude and live by the rules of the profession, they have no
profession. Most professional engineers adopt an institutional view of the organizations of the
profession: deserving, even requiring, the loyalty of each engineer as an expression of his
identity as a professional engineer. Organizations are the manifestation of the professional
entity and they require the giving of effort, loyalty and financial support without thought to
direct personal gain. Instrumental view of the professional organizations: support is given,
sometimes grudgingly, on the basis of an expected return in some tangible form. The
instrumental view should have no place in the value system of the man who aspires to true
professional status.