Ethics Education in Engineering: Practices on and off the Campus

This paper will focus on two major methods for educating engineers in ethics. It is important to realize that two sets of standards exist within the field of engineering, both from the professional standards set within industries and from the personal moral standards held by engineers themselves. This article first examines the education of ethics within the workplace as some engineers have no previous training in ethics. Second, it discusses how ethics is introduced to engineers through university undergraduate and graduate courses. It will also evaluate whether ethics courses are more effective than the real-world application found through the professional setting. It concludes that it is best to incorporate a part of all of these methods of ethical training, but the least useful is that of teaching ethics to students in undergraduate programs with the hope of measuring these results by tests and assessments. Rather, it is more important to build students’ personal values, virtues, and then their ethical training will naturally occur, and result in engineers being more motivated to adhere to these ethical practices. As for research methods, information was gathered through database searches for articles relating to ethics within the engineering workplace. These articles were studied to determine the multiple ways of creating ethical standards for engineers. This process was completed by consideration for the historical development of these standards for promoting more ethical engineering

Biotechnology and the Creation of Ethics

Biotechnology promises to change the course of evolution. Rather than patiently waiting as natural selection channels the forces of biology into contouring the nature and character of the organisms that populate our world, biotechnology allows humans to directly manipulate the basis of life itself. By allowing the deliberate reorganization of the genetic programs of organisms, biotechnology affords the greatest revolution in scientific and cultural understanding in history. It also is beginning to severely strain our established concepts of right and wrong and to require us to rethink most of our basic moral assumptions.

Climate Change and Professional Responsibility: A Declaration of Helsinki for Engineers

In this paper, we argue that the professional engineering institutions ought to develop a Declaration of Climate Action. Climate change is a serious global problem, and the majority of greenhouse gas emissions come from industries that are enabled by engineers and represented by the engineering professional institutions. If the professional institutions take seriously the claim that a profession should be self-regulating, with codes of ethics that go beyond mere obedience to the law, and if they take their own ethical codes seriously, recognising their responsibility to the public and to future generations (and also recognising a duty of “responsible leadership”), the professional institutions ought to develop a declaration for engineers, addressing climate change. Our argument here is largely inspired by the history of the Declaration of Helsinki. The Declaration of Helsinki was created by the medical profession for the profession, and it held physicians to a higher standard of ethical conduct than was found in the legal framework of individual countries. Although it was not originally a legal document, the influence of the Declaration can be seen in the fact that it is now enshrined in law in a number of different countries. Thus, we argue that the engineering profession could, and should, play a significant role in the abatement of climate change by making changes within the profession. If the engineering profession sets strict standards for professional engineers, with sanctions for those who refuse to comply, this could have a significant impact in relation to our efforts to develop a coordinated response to climate change

Ethics of expert evidence

The use of expert evidence in courts has been problematic for many years and a focus on the ethics of witnesses has given rise to the widespread introduction of rules governing how experts may behave. But, in addition to the ethics of witnesses, the ethics of expert evidence also encompasses the ethics of lawyers; the financial and other costs of using experts; the use, or misuse, of science; the way claims to truth are made; and the impact on the law itself. In short, despite recent clarification of rules for witnesses, there remain significant issues with how the legal system makes use of expert testimony. This article explores some of those issues

Embryos as Patients? Medical Provider Duties in the Age of CRISPR/Cas9

The CRISPR/Cas9 genome engineering platform is the first method of gene editing that could potentially be used to treat genetic disorders in human embryos. No past therapies, genetic or otherwise, have been intended or used to treat disorders in existent embryos. Past procedures performed on embryos have exclusively involved creation and implantation (e.g., in-vitro fertilization) or screening and selection of already-healthy embryos (e.g., preimplantation genetic diagnosis). A CRISPR/Cas9 treatment would evade medical malpractice law due to the early stage of the intervention and the fact that it is not a treatment for the mother. In most jurisdictions, medical professionals owe no duty to pre-viable fetuses or embryos as such, but will be held liable for negligent treatment of the mother if the treatment causes injury to a born-alive child. This issue brief discusses the science of CRISPR/Cas9, the background legal status of human embryos, and the case for considering genetically engineered embryos as patients for purposes of medical malpractice law