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Teaching Professional Responsibilities of the Individual Engineer

Author(s): Elysa Koppelman, Ph.D.

Background
Pedagogical Topics
Web Resources and Bibliography

In addition to responsibilities of the engineering profession as a whole, engineers have individual responsibilities, such as those to their employer and clients. This section offers pedagogical advice for teaching engineering students about such responsibilities. In particular, it focuses on helping students to mediate among the potential conflicts of obligations that are likely to arise in the course of their work.

Integrating these topics within engineering courses will help students to see first hand the relevance of these issues to their work. Students in design courses can use moral imagination to anticipate moral situations that may arise when working on projects. This section offers information, course projects, and discussion techniques designed to help students learn to anticipate and face the many ethical concerns with which they will be faced as engineers.

Background

As Stephen Unger explains, engineers may find themselves in situations in which they believe their professional obligations conflict with obligations to their clients or to their employers or managers. For example, an engineer may have an opportunity to save the company (and perhaps future customers) money by getting supplies from an unproven or even "shady" supplier. Yet "bad supplies" can potentially put future customers' safety or the long-term economic status of the company at risk. Managers may disagree with a particular engineer's technical assessment of the status of a project. Managers may ask an engineer to work on a project that is counter to the engineer's personal ethics. Managers may not take seriously an engineer's ethical concerns about a project. Managers or other workers may try to usurp the work of engineers; not giving credit where credit is due. Indeed, engineers may find that there are conflicts between obligations to clients and obligations to employers. For example, suppose a client asks for a service and after telling him the price, he says he cannot afford it. The engineer knows he can get the service cheaper from a competitor. Should the engineer tell him about the competitor -- or let him go without getting what he needs? This section examines how such conflicts might be resolved.

Pedagogical Topics

Background Skills: Faced with ethical situations concerning safety, workplace issues, or intellectual property, engineers must answer two main questions. What should I do/what should be done? And how should I raise these concerns to my supervisor or co-workers? This section focuses on teaching students how to analyze choices in determining what to do and how and under what circumstances to approach management or coworkers with ethical concerns. Offering advice that can be approached from a variety of perspectives, this section can also be used to prompt discussion about how managers can be successful at mentoring and at creating a comfortable organizational atmosphere. Suggestions for assignments/projects are given that could serve as pre-assignments for the following three sections.
Responsibility for Safety: Engineers are personally responsible for the safety of those who will use or be affected by the projects they create. But concerns for safety must often be mediated with other concerns, such as the company or client's concerns for economic prosperity. This section offers pedagogical advice for teaching students how to recognize these often conflicting concerns and, drawing on the skills taught in the background section, how to think about ways in which these concerns can be reconciled.
Credit and Intellectual Property: Advances in technology have made collaborative projects commonplace and our economy has made the connection between ownership of ideas and profit incredibly strong. Thus, questions about who owns and can use intellectual ideas are very important for engineers. This section offers pedagogical advice for teaching students about fair credit and intellectual property.
Issues in the Workplace: The workplace offers a plethora of issues that affect engineers. In addition to issues specifically associated with the practice of engineering (concerns about quality, product safety, productivity), there are general issues that can arise in any workplace (harassment, prejudice, privacy). This section offers pedagogical advice for teaching students how to recognize and anticipate these concerns and how implement the response mechanisms taught in the background section to these concerns.

Web Resources and Bibliography

Engineering Ethics in a Corporate Setting: This page offers links to several pages within the Online Ethics Center and to pages maintained by others that depict and explain possible ethical situations that arise for engineers in a corporate setting. Pages include "Advice from The Texas Instruments Ethics Office," "Mini Cases from Lockheed Martin Corporation," and "On Being the Bearer of Bad News."
A Comparison of Ethical Concern Channels in Aerospace Corporations: John Evernhan composes a scenario in which a new engineer approaches a manager with an ethical concern. He then interviewed several managers at Aerospace Corporations to find out how they would handle the employee's concerns.
Ethics and Reverse Engineering: John Wallberg interviews several engineers from Texas Instruments to determine their views on reverse engineering.