You and
Your Job

Michael J. Rabins
Mark Holtzapple
Lee L. Lowery
Texas A&M University

In industry and academia, people are taking a renewed interest in engineering ethics. Many are beginning to realize that the practice of ethics actually rewards engineers by benefiting their employers and customers. This month, we discuss why ethics is important to the practicing engineer; in next month's article, we'll explain how you and your colleagues can become more ethical in your engineering.

Practicing engineering ethics benefits you, your company and your customers

Before beginning our discussion, we must first state one key premise. We assume that engineers and their managers will always opt for long-term company profits, good will, reputation and continuing viability, in lieu of immediate, ill-gotten profits.

Why it's happening

Several factors contribute to the growing awareness of engineering ethics. Each of these is explained below.

Current social context. The younger generation has been raised on a steady diet of ethical bad news in the media and at the dinner table. Examples include graft in the government, evangelists embezzling parishioners' funds, healthcare fraud, and so on. Young professionals-to-be are, more than ever, looking for ethical roots.

And industry has been hit by litigation over product liability, misconduct on government contracts, regulatory violations, harassment and others. In response, many firms have established ethics ombudsmen and hotlines to deal with possible problems. Firms' legal departments have become overburdened. Most agree that it would be far more economical to address the problems up front, by "preventive ethics."

SEEING SHADES OF GRAY

Real-life scenarios are rarely black and white. For an example of a typical discussion in ethics training, consider the moral rule: "People should not steal," and the following actions:

1. Breaking into a store and taking $3,000 in merchandise
2. "Borrowing" a friend's car indefinitely
3. Taking an unlocked bicycle
4. Developing a computer program on company time for your company, and then patenting a considerably improved version of the program under your own name
5. Borrowing a book from a friend, keeping it by mistake for a long time and then failing to return it because the friend has moved away
6. Using some ideas you developed at Firm A for a different process at Firm B
7. Using Firm A's management methods at Firm B
8. Picking up a quarter that you saw someone drop on the street
9. Failing to return a sheet of paper (or paper clip) you borrowed
10. Picking up a quarter that someone (you don't know who) has dropped on the street

There would be virtually universal agreement that actions 1­3 are examples of theft. There would be virtually universal agreement that 9 and 10 are not. There might be disagreement about 4­8. Most would consider 4 a type of theft.

Action 5 is something many of us have done. We might say that the action is justified, because the expense and trouble to us of returning the book are greater than the value of the book to our friend. This might be especially true if we knew the book was old and out of date. We would probably resist the use of the word "theft" to describe our action. Actions 6 and 7 might be considered less-clear examples of theft than 8, except for the potentially large amount of money involved in these two.

One consideration that makes it difficult to determine what is and what is not theft is that there is no single criterion that can be used to decide the issue. The most-obvious criterion is the monetary value of the property in question.

But this criterion will not always work. Snatching a dollar bill from an impoverished, elderly person is more clearly an example of theft than using an idea that you've developed at Company A for a very different application at Company B, even though the latter involves vastly greater sums of money than the first. In each ethical situation, a variety of considerations are relevant -- monetary value is only one.

Similar consideration can be applied to bribery. We agree that accepting bribes is a violation of professional ethics, but may not always find it easy to determine what is and is not a bribe. For most of us, not all gifts qualify as bribes, just as not all cases of taking another's property should be considered theft.

Deciding when a rule against taking bribes is violated requires common sense, discrimination and powers of moral deliberation. These should be addressed in one's professional training.

The Ethics Officers Assn. (EOA). The recently created EOA has its headquarters at the Bentley College of Business (Bentley, Mass.). Members are corporate-level officers with responsibility for their firms' ethical behavior. EOA lists about 300 members from Fortune 500 companies, who pay large fees to participate in annual meetings.

Some members believe that, to remain competitive, they can't afford not to join. Firms competing for top engineering talent simply must behave in an ethical manner. Their recruiters are facing ever-more-vocal student interviewees who probe prospective employers' policies on sensitive issues, such as the environment, public safety and differing professional opinions.

The EOA presently has two meetings per year. One is open to the public, in which members cite recent positive experiences. The other is an in-house affair, where company proprietary information is more likely to be shared.

The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). ABET has proposed, as a standard, "Engineering Criterion 2000." This is currently being tested at a few schools.

This standard doesn't prescribe an ethics course per se, but stipulates that a curriculum "must prepare students for engineering practice...incorporating engineering and realistic constraints that include most of the following considerations: economic, environmental, sustainability, manufacturability, ethical, health and safety, social and political."

Many schools are currently attempting to anticipate the new ABET requirements by one of several options:

Whichever option is selected, we predict that all engineering students will be exposed to the subject within the decade. In any case, these graduates will be more aware of, and more sensitive to, engineering ethics.

P.E. licensing examinations

In the fall of 1996, for the first time, ethics questions were included on the Fundamentals in Engineering exam: 5% of the questions were related to engineering ethics. The Civil Engineering Specialization Examination included three questions on engineering ethics, as well.

This emphasis on ethics shows a new encouragement of prior ethics training in engineers wishing to earn a P.E. license. It is safe to predict that future engineering graduates will be more educated and sophisticated in issues related to engineering ethics.

The new engineers

Whether your new employees work in R&D, design, production, maintenance, regulatory enforcement, sales or marketing, you'll likely find them taking vocal leadership positions on emerging issues that have never before arisen in the engineering marketplace. They'll be more concerned about the future health of the company and long-term consequences of present actions based upon utilitarian (i.e., cost-benefit) or respect-for-persons (i.e., company good will) arguments.

These new engineers will also be more likely to seek creative middle-way solutions to ethical dilemmas, to solve conflicting obligations without slighting individual rights or endangering the company. They'll be more effective in line-drawing situations, such as distinguishing between a permissible gift from a vendor and a bribe (box, p. 126).

Next month, we'll discuss how to become a more-ethical engineer.

Edited by Irene Kim

Authors

Michael J. Rabins, director of the Professionalism and Ethics Program of the College of Engineering at Texas A & M U. (TAMU; College Sta., TX; Tel.: 409-845-1251.), is on the Board of Professional Practice and Ethics of the American Soc. of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). He has taught engineering ethics for the past 8 years, and has coauthored ethics articles. He received B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering from MIT, Carnegie Institute of Technology and the U. of Wisconsin at Madison.

Mark Holtzapple received chemical engineering degrees from Cornell U. (B.S., 1978) and the U. of Pennsylvania (Ph.D., 1981). After U.S. Army service, he became a chemical engineering professor at TAMU, where he teaches and conducts research. He has produced 43 technical articles and seven patents. His text, Foundations of Engineering (McGraw-Hill, 1997) includes a chapter on engineering ethics. He has received many teaching awards, plus the 1996 Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award for a process to convert waste biomass to animal feed, chemicals and fuels.

Lee L. Lowery, Jr. received his Ph.D. from TAMU in 1967. A research engineer with the A&M Research Foundation and the Texas Transportation Institute, he is a professor of civil engineering at TAMU. A licensed P.E. and engineering consultant to many firms, he has received many teaching awards. He has taught courses in the aerospace, mechanical, architecture and civil engineering departments, and regularly introduces engineering ethics to his undergraduate and graduate systems-engineering classes.

 


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