Question

Why professional ethics are important for engineers. Support your answers with an
suitable example?

Answer 1

Ethics and values are important factors that develop human beings as a social being. Ethics is relevant to you in your everyday life as at some point in your professional or personal life you will have to deal with an ethical question or problem. As an Engineer, you should acknowledge the fundamental importance of the values such as quality of life, health, human potential, empowerment, growth, excellence, responsibility, dignity, efficiency and authenticity for yourself and your profession. Professional ethics in engineering can be simply defined as the characteristics of moral values and conduct of engineers as both professionals and individuals. Engineers have a very important role in the development of society. So each decision taken by the engineers have a huge impact on the society and it is the reason why engineering and the professionals involved are highly respected.

Everyone should be educated with ethics so that a person can solve any problem in an ethical way and avoid conflicts. These ethics can play a major role in the decision-making process. There are many professional engineering bodies that develop necessary ethics codes the smooth functioning of activities. Professional engineering bodies like IEEE, ASME, IEI etc., have evolved comprehensive ethics codes relevant to their respective professions, based on the rich experience of their members. Independent organizations like NSPE have prepared value-based ethical codes applicable to all engineering professions.

Engineering is the way of finding a pratical solution. Both engineering and ethical problems do not have a single optimal solution. Both of these contain a range of solutions that are clearly right, relatively better or not appropriate at all. We have to find the most desired solution in an efficient way. In this context, ethical values become more important. Prompt and correct distinction and selection of the available options is critical in engineering. For example, a product designed or a service rendered may benefit a party but at the expense of the ecological balance of a place, or its social harmony. We can imagine the construction of a huge factory that affects the social life of people at that place. Ethics, in this case, probably dictates the use and strong enforcement of risk-benefit analysis option. Similarly, in cases where an engineer faces strong moral dilemma or even ethical or legal conflicts, engineering ethics seeks to go beyond the dictates of the law when there is no legal guideline for how to solve the conflict. Therefore, ethics empowers engineers and fosters in them the value of conscientious moral commitment.