Engineering, Business and Professional Ethics
With practical case studies and examples throughout, this book highlights the ethical dimension of engineering while showing how values and responsibility relate to everyday practice.
TABLE OF CONTENTS Engineering, Business and Professional Ethics
Chapter 1: Why be Ethical, or Whose Responsibility is it Anyway?
Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department says Werner von Braun
Tom Lehrer.
Introduction
At the outset we offer you working definitions of some key terms. These definitions will evolve throughout the book:
- Ethics
- The philosophical study of what is right or wrong in human conduct and what rules or principles should govern it. Hence the term is singular. This is often subdivided into meta-ethics, applied ethics and professional ethics.
- Meta-ethics
- The systematic study of the nature of ethics. This looks into issues such as how an ethical judgement can be justified and the possible theoretical underpinning of ethical reflection and practice.
- Applied Ethics
- The application of ethics in a particular area of practice, e.g. business or bio-ethics.
- Professional Ethics
- The ethical identity, codes and practices of particular professions, such as the professions followed by nurses, doctors, lawyers or engineers.
- Morality
- Morality often refers to standards of moral conduct right behaviour. In the history of philosophy there have been many attempts to differentiate the concept from ethics. However, it is most often used interchangeably with the term 'ethics', which is how we will use it.
- Engineering Ethics
- Engineering ethics is defined in the two ways:
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The study of moral issues and decisions confronting individuals and organizations involved in engineering.
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The study of related questions about moral conduct, character and relationship involved in technical development (Martin and Schinzinger 1989).
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Our study will focus on the professional and business ethics of the engineer,...
Copyright Simon Robinson, Ross Dixon, Christopher Preece and Krisen Moodley 2007 under license agreement with Books24x7
