As a profession that touches the lives and well-being of people, engineering has long considered itself to be guided by commonly held moral principles. These principles can be found in the examinations required of those seeking professional licensing, in the codes of conduct that shape and ...

Nearly ten years ago, Emmanuel Mignot, a Shell employee, was driving on a highway in a developing country when he was pulled over by a policeman, allegedly for speeding. The policeman asked him to pay $10 to avoid an official fine. The sun was beating down, there was no one else around, and he had ...

Engineers’ primary ethical obligation in the performance of their professional duties is to protect public health, safety, and welfare. This obligation is captured in the rules adopted by state licensing boards, echoed in the oaths of the Order of the Engineer and its Canadian corollary,¹ and ...

Engineering societies play a vital role in the field of engineering ethics. Convening meetings, developing seminars and educational events, publishing resources, providing continuing education, and highlighting important developments in the field are just some of their many activities to improve ...

In cases involving corporate misconduct, senior management may attempt to blame engineering staff for product or service defects or failures.

In the Volkswagen emission testing scandal, for example, at various times during the company investigation Volkswagen executives suggested that engineering ...

A common perception is that engineers’ responsibility is to protect the public from risk. This perception is reinforced in engineering design guidelines and standards that focus on minimizing the chance of failure for engineering systems. However, the reality of what the public is willing to ...

As Danny Glover put it, environmental injustice (EIJ) is about the fact that South-Central Los Angeles children have only one-third of the lung capacity of Santa Monica children (van Gelder 2001). South-Central LA is mostly black and heavily polluted; Santa Monica is mostly white and pristine. ...

At their core, science, engineering, and all forms of inquiry involve making sense of a complex world. Modeling is one way of reducing the complexity of the world by abstracting away details.

Computational modeling involves the use of computers to scale up mathematical models.¹ Computational ...

Estimates indicate that more than $500 billion is lost to corruption each year in the global engineering/construction (E/C) industry. While this economic loss is staggering, it pales in comparison to the losses suffered by people in need of water and wastewater projects, roads, schools, hospitals, ...

This article is based on a chapter from my forthcoming book, Engineering Ethics: Contemporary Debates, to be published by Yale University Press.

In 2010, after a two-year inquiry, a judge concluded that Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney had acted inappropriately when he accepted large amounts ...

RON LATANISION (RML): We are glad to have a chance to talk with you, Sal. I have always felt that education is a means of integrating people into the culture of not only a country but also the world. Given all the things you’ve done over the past 10 or so years, I am very impressed by the ...