Abdulaziz Alqahtani
Assignment 3
Borrowing from the National Society for Professional Engineering (NSPE), the author’s main point is to seek the attention of the engineering societies towards gearing
into sustainability. This means that the paper has seen it fit to revise the codes of ethics of such societies so that they can coincide with sustainable development
in their economic activities. According to the paper, among the numerous engineering societies in the United States (US), none have complied to sustainability in terms
of accounting for the engineer’s responsibility to coincide with the health, safety, and welfare of the general public. With this, the author finds it important to
make it a paramount clause for the engineers in order to instill social justice.
The inclusion of social justice is important as it not only works for the benefit of the public but also for the engineering profession in general. Furthermore, social
justice is a significant dimension altogether, when it comes to sustainable growth. When the societies embrace this dimension by recognizing its crucial role, it will
work to elevate the status of the engineering profession. This will work for the engineers not only as agents of social good but also as public intellectuals. However,
in order to realize this transformation, it would be easier if such standards and codes of ethics are incorporated in the upcoming undergraduate programs for
engineers.
With this, I agree with the standpoint of the author to the letter. The allegations that such adherence to social justice might interfere with the natural ecosystem
are simply baseless. In my opinion, such oppositions are based on inertia and the fear of change. Social justice with sustainable development does not advocate for any
modifications of the environment capable of causing damage in the near future. As a matter of fact, together with sustainable development, engineers will be keen in
making models that match with the microclimate of a given locality while at the same time ensuring that such a niche is suitable for mankind. In other words,
sustainability is a comprehensive step into ensuring engineers is more vigilant in their modifications and not the other way round.
With this understanding, it is no wonder that sustainability and social justice are associated with public health, safety, and welfare. In simpler words, in instilling
the contemporary code of conduct, the author has a positive intention that such ethics will make engineers more responsible for their creations, today and in the
future. This will be made possible as the ethics and codes of conduct will require the professionals to be more committed to their work. This is in terms of its impact
on the public and of course, the environment.
It is, therefore, pointless to argue that such positive change can cause mass killings of humans in the future. Besides, other relevant organizations have echoed the
need to revise the codes of ethics after evaluating their positive impact to the society. Looking at the positive side of things, the opposition can be a good tool for
evaluating the sectors that may have loopholes in terms of achieving the main agenda of sustainable growth and development. Besides, the main point is that after the
addition of sustainable development by the NSPE in 2007, most of the engineering societies are still reluctant in following suit, besides it being a requirement that
has been carefully analyzed and evaluated.
Sustaining Engineering Codes of Ethics
for the Twenty-First Century
Diane Michelfelder • Sharon A. Jones
Received: 7 April 2011 / Accepted: 6 September 2011 / Published online: 23 September 2011
Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
Abstract How much responsibility ought a professional engineer to have with
regard to supporting basic principles of sustainable development? While within the
United States, professional engineering societies, as reflected in their codes of
ethics, differ in their responses to this question, none of these professional societies
has yet to put the engineer’s responsibility toward sustainability on a par with
commitments to public safety, health, and welfare. In this paper, we aim to suggest
that sustainability should be included in the paramountcy clause because it is a
necessary condition to ensure the safety, health, and welfare of the public. Part of
our justification rests on the fact that to engineer sustainably means among many
things to consider social justice, understood as the fair and equitable distribution of
social goods, as a design constraint similar to technical, economic, and environmental
constraints. This element of social justice is not explicit in the current
paramountcy clause. Our argument rests on demonstrating that social justice in
terms of both inter- and intra-generational equity is an important dimension of
sustainability (and engineering). We also propose that embracing sustainability in
the codes while recognizing the role that social justice plays may elevate the status
of the engineer as public intellectual and agent of social good. This shift will then
need to be incorporated in how we teach undergraduate engineering students about
engineering ethics.
Keywords Engineering codes of ethics Engineering education
Paramountcy clause Social justice Sustainability
D. Michelfelder
Department of Philosophy, Macalester College, St. Paul, MN 55105, USA
e-mail: michelfelder@macalester.edu
S. A. Jones (&)
School of Engineering, University of Portland, Portland, OR 97203, USA
e-mail: joness@up.edu
123
Sci Eng Ethics (2013) 19:237–258
DOI 10.1007/s11948-011-9310-2
Introduction
The National Society for Professional Engineering (NSPE) revised its Code of
Ethics in 2007 to encourage engineers to ‘‘adhere to the principles of sustainable
development.’’ Similar organizations have stressed the need for engineers to support
these principles in the course of their professional practice. Further calls, however,
for engineers to consider the related issue of social justice have met with
considerable debate over what such inclusion may mean for engineering codes of
ethics (Scherer 2003). For example, Vesilind (2002) claims that ‘‘engineers can,
while staying well within the bounds of the present Codes of Ethics, destroy or
modify the environments that support the global ecosystem and in such manner kill
future humans on a grand scale’’ (92). Others, though, have argued that while
sustainability can be ‘‘engineered,’’ justice is a separate societal goal beyond the
scope of the engineer (Agyeman and Evans 2003; Agyeman 2005). There is also the
question of whether the addition of sustainability to the codes of ethics is redundant:
i.e., does the fundamental canon for all professional engineers to ‘‘hold paramount
the public’s welfare’’ already include a commitment to sustainability and perhaps
social justice as well? Even those who agree that sustainability, justice, and the
fundamental canon are not redundant, see the first two issues as outside of the
paramountcy clause, thus devaluing such adherence in professional practice,
perhaps even to the point of making such adherence supererogatory.
Much of the debate described above centers around the relationship among
sustainability, justice, and public health and safety. By better understanding this
relationship, the NSPE and other professional engineering organizations can
appropriately incorporate sustainability into engineering codes of ethics, and thus
exert a positive influence on the practice of engineering. We recognize there are
many critiques of these codes in terms of their ability to affect the individual
engineer who is often faced with many conflicting goals related to project execution.
Some of these critiques are presented in Davis (2001), even as the author tries to
dispel them. While we acknowledge the existence of these critiques, the
implementation of the codes is not the subject of this paper. Instead, we intend to
further discussion, particularly among professional engineers, of what should be
included and prioritized within the codes. We aim to suggest that sustainability
should be included in the paramountcy clause because it is a necessary condition to
ensure the safety, health, and welfare of the public. Our argument rests on
demonstrating that social justice in terms of both inter- and intra-generational equity
is an important dimension of sustainability (and engineering). We also propose that
embracing sustainability in the codes while recognizing the role that social justice
plays may elevate the status of the engineer as public intellectual and agent of social
good. This shift will then need to be incorporated in how we teach undergraduate
engineering students about engineering ethics.
Calls for the engineering profession to deepen its commitments to sustainability
and social justice and proposals to rephrase engineering ethics codes to better reflect
such commitments have mounted in recent years (see for example Baillie and
Catalano 2009; Catalano 2006a, b; Riley 2008.) Our approach adds to these calls by
emphasizing the need to include sustainability in the paramountcy clause of the
238 D. Michelfelder, S. A. Jones
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codes and by looking at social justice as a dimension of sustainability. We start our
discussion with an overview of what the term sustainability has come to mean, first
in terms of engineering codes of ethics and second, in terms of the engineering
profession itself. This overview demonstrates the uncertainties regarding how
sustainability currently meshes with engineering. We then show how the inclusion
of sustainability in the codes serves to address these uncertainties.
Sustainability and Engineering Codes of Ethics
The phrase ‘‘sustainable development’’ was formally added to the NSPE Code of
Ethics in 2007 and to ASCE’s code in 1996; however, it is missing from the codes
for the other traditional engineering professional organizations. And, both ASCE
and NSPE treat the term in different ways that affect its importance in terms of the
hierarchy of values within the codes.
The NSPE code includes six fundamental canons, followed by rules of practice
that provide guidance to engineers on how to adopt these canons as part of
professional practice. Neither the canons nor the rules of practice include any
reference to sustainability or to sustainable development. Instead, the six canons
stipulate the paramountcy clause in terms of the safety, health, and welfare of the
public, and refer to characteristics such as competency, loyalty, honor, reputation,
and honesty in the fulfillment of professional duties. Rounding out the NSPE code is
a list of nine professional obligations that, if adhered to, also help an engineer to
follow the code. Several professional obligations are closely tied to specific canons.
One of these nine professional obligations states that engineers shall at all times
strive to serve the public interest. It is here that one finds the phrase engineers are
encouraged to adhere to the principles of sustainable development, as one of four
suggestions for how to accomplish this professional obligation. In other words,
according to the NSPE, while engineers are encouraged to ‘‘adhere to the principles
of sustainable development’’ so that they fulfill their obligation to ‘‘strive to serve
the public interest,’’ they are not required to follow these sustainability principles to
‘‘hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public.’’ One is left to
conclude that NSPE does not view sustainable development as a necessary
condition for maintaining the public’s safety, health, and welfare.
ASCE uses the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology’s (ABET)
Code of Ethics as the framework for its own code. ASCE describes four
fundamental principles for civil engineers to follow to ensure compliance with the
canons, followed by the canons themselves, and then guidelines for how to practice
each canon. None of the four fundamental principles specifically includes
‘‘sustainability.’’ However, ASCE changed the canons in 1997 to include
sustainable development in the first and primary canon as follows: Engineers shall
hold paramount the safety, health and welfare of the public and shall strive to
comply with the principles of sustainable development in the performance of their
professional duties. And in 2009, ASCE adopted the following definition of
sustainable development: ‘‘Sustainable development is the process of applying
natural, human, and economic resources to enhance the safety, welfare, and quality
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of life for all of society while maintaining the availability of the remaining natural
resources.’’ However, despite the elevated importance of sustainability as compared
to NSPE, ASCE still sees the responsibility for the engineer in terms of
sustainability as secondary to safety, health, and welfare in that the engineer must
‘‘strive’’ for sustainable development, whereas he/she must ‘‘hold’’ safety, health,
and welfare of the public as paramount. Still, despite this difference in importance,
the location of sustainability in the first canon emphasizes that, at least for civil
engineers, sustainability is intricately tied to the public’s safety, health, and welfare.
Besides civil engineering, the other traditional engineering disciplines include
chemical, mechanical, and electrical engineering with the respective professional
associations of AIChE, ASME, and IEEE. None of these three associations
specifically includes sustainability in its codes of ethics, although each includes
reference to the environment. AIChE’s Code is relatively short and includes
environment in its paramountcy clause as follows: Members shall hold paramount
the safety, health and welfare of the public and protect the environment in
performance of their professional duties. IEEE’s Code is also relatively short and
includes environment in its paramountcy clause though in a different way: members
accept responsibility in making decisions consistent with the safety, health and
welfare of the public, and disclose promptly factors that might endanger the public
or the environment. The ASME Code, among the longest of the professional Codes,
also includes a reference to environment but not within the paramountcy clause.
Instead ASME places environment within an individual canon: engineers shall
consider environmental impact in the performance of their professional duties.
One could say that ASME, AIChE, and IEEE believe it is redundant to add
sustainability to the professional Codes because it is covered by the paramountcy
clause regarding safety, health, and welfare of the public. However, since all three
organizations include environment in their Codes in different ways, it is more likely
that these organizations have merely not progressed from environmental considerations
to the more inclusive set of considerations embodied by sustainability. In
other words, they include only the environmental arm of sustainability.
This assumption is supported by a review of a 2010 blog discussion on AIChE’s
website regarding the question of whether sustainability needs to formally be
included in AIChE’s code despite the inclusion of the term ‘‘environment.’’ This
recent discussion appears to have started as a result of a March 2010 meeting of the
Institute for Sustainability’s (IfS) First Regional Conference on Sustainability and
the Environment for the Pacific Northwest. The blog reveals support for the
inclusion of the broader concept of sustainability, as well as for the idea that codes
of ethics are living documents that must be reviewed and updated periodically
(AIChE 2010). Assuming then that environment is a proxy for how these
engineering professional societies will treat sustainability, AIChE is likely to place
sustainability within the paramountcy clause similar to ASCE; however with even
more of a responsibility for achieving such sustainability as an equal goal with
protecting the public’s safety, health, and welfare. On the other hand, while both
IEEE and ASME view negative impacts to the environment as something to be
avoided and/or disclosed, they appear to see environmental impacts as separate and
of less importance than human impacts.
240 D. Michelfelder, S. A. Jones
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In short, considerable variation exists among engineering disciplines in terms of
what each expects for its members professionally regarding responsibility for
environmental issues and the more general concept of sustainability. Even the codes
themselves are written for different objectives, e.g., ASCE’s code is written to provide
more detailed guidelines for how to practice civil engineering (primarily consulting),
as contrasted with IEEE’s code which is very general and articulates aspirations rather
than rules. In other words, ASCE’s code focuses more on the ‘‘doing’’ of engineering
while IEEE’s focuses more on the ‘‘being’’ that enables the practice of engineering,
though all codes include both aspects. Despite their differences, it appears that the
various engineering codes of ethics are moving towards including environmental
sustainability as an important professional responsibility that is not redundant with the
paramountcy clause, however is of lower priority.
The lower priority may be in part due to a belief that an engineered product can
have a direct impact on human safety, health, and welfare; however an engineered
product’s impact on the environment may only indirectly lead to an impact to
human society. In other words, sustainable development is still seen by the
engineering societies as an environmental issue that does not directly affect human
safety, etc. It also appears that the engineering professions anticipate that there are
some problems so severe in terms of public safety, health, and/or welfare, that an
engineer may need to violate sustainability principles, whether inter- or intragenerational,
to achieve acceptable solutions.
Sustainability and the Engineering Profession
Equating environment with sustainable development is understandable as seen
within the engineering codes. The initial formulation of the term sustainability
stems from use of the phrase ‘‘sustainable development’’ in the 1987 Report of the
World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future, more
commonly known as the Brundtland Report. As defined in this document,
sustainable development is development which meets the needs of the present
without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. This
definition grew out of the interest of the 1983 commission in finding strategies that
would reduce the global environmental impacts caused by development, such as
erosion from deforestation and climate change from increased energy use. In fact,
the objective for sustainable development was a natural result of the evolution of the
environmental movement from a focus on local problems to regional ones and then
to global issues resulting from the use of modern technology.
The meaning of sustainable development, and the more general term sustainability,
continues to evolve as they are applied to different contexts over time (Allenby
2009), and any review of the literature will reveal a multitude of definitions. Each
profession seems to have its own version of the term that is framed by the context of
what sustainability means for that sector. According to Bridger and Luloff (1999),
approaches to defining ‘‘sustainable development’’ have tended to fall into two
categories: Resource Maintenance versus Constrained Growth. While intergenerational
equity is central to both approaches, they differ in terms of how they construe
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the relationship between economic growth and environmental protection. Bridger and
Luloff (1999) use these interpretations and others to suggest that a critical dimension
of any ‘‘sustainable community’’ definition is that the community must first be
committed to social justice. And, despite the continued lack of an accepted universal
definition, for most, the terms ‘‘sustainable development’’ and ‘‘sustainability’’ now
encompass consideration of issues related to the environment, economy, and society.
Besides being influenced by the Brundtland Report, the inclusion of sustainability
within the engineering profession has also been affected by the evolution of
the profession itself. As described by Lucena et al. (2010), engineering in the
eighteenth century focused on transforming nature which led to the development of
networks to economically profit from such transformations while modernizing
communities using technology. In other words, engineering historically followed
more of a Constrained Growth philosophy as described by Bridger and Luloff
(1999). From the 1980s, engineering as a profession began to consider sustainable
development using more of a systems approach of interrelated networks, however as
of today, sustainability is still not seen as inherent to engineering in the way, to take
one example, economic efficiency is, at least as evidenced by engineering curricula.
While not universally accepted, there is one definition for sustainability that is
increasingly being seen as applicable to engineered systems, and has been adopted
by the American Academy of Environmental Engineers (AAEE) for a new
certification of practice test in sustainability. The certification of practice is a
specialty certification that one achieves in a subfield after attaining licensure and
substantial professional experience. The sustainability definition used by AAEE is:
Sustainability [in terms of engineering] is the design of human and industrial
systems to ensure humankind’s use of natural resources and cycles does not
lead to diminished quality of life due either to losses in future economic
opportunities or to adverse impacts on social conditions, human health, and
the environment. (Mihelcic et al. 2003, p. 5315)
To better see the implications of this definition, one must understand that the
standard engineering design process is essentially a decision-making process that
asks the engineer to determine what combination of alternatives is needed to solve a
particular societal problem with technical dimensions. As with any decision process,
the engineer establishes decision criteria and constraints e.g., the minimum load that
must be carried, the maximum deflections allowed, the allowable temperature range,
the minimum voltage, and so on. Based on the design criteria and the constraints,
the engineer evaluates a set of alternatives and selects the best solution to the
problem. This selection process typically involves making tradeoffs as often there is
no single alternative that effectively meets all conditions better than all others. In
addition, evaluating the alternatives often involves predicting the likely consequences
of various actions without having complete and certain information. Along
with regulations, professional standards, client desires, and best practices, the
engineering codes help an engineer to prioritize among the many competing design
criteria and constraints to select a course of action. As described by Lucena et al.
(2010), this design (or decision-making process) is a natural product of the view of
the engineer as a problem-solver facilitating technical modernization that
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unfortunately does not easily include ways to address those non-technical
dimensions that may be critical for sustainability.
Placed against the Brundtland Commission’s definition, the Mihelcic et al. (2003)
definition of sustainability clarifies what the ‘‘needs’’ are for current and future
generations in terms that can be more easily operationalized by engineers as design
criteria and constraints. In other words, from a sustainability perspective, the job of
an engineer is to design technological systems to meet societal demand (growth),
and in so doing, reasonably reduce negative impacts in terms of the range of
economic opportunities, social conditions, human health, and environmental health
for current and future generations. Standard measures can be used to quantify these
potential impacts e.g., economic opportunities may be defined in terms of changes
to industrial output, environmental health in terms of chemical and biological
emissions or natural resource depletion, and human health in terms of exposure to
chemical, biological, or physical risk. Social conditions remain as one of the broad
terms within the definition of sustainability that still requires further consideration,
but for this paper, we assume that measures of social impact can/will be developed.
We also need to understand how engineers traditionally incorporate such
‘‘sustainability’’ constraints as part of the traditional design process. Besides the
many technical constraints for engineered systems, it is almost always standard
practice for an engineer to consider the cost (or economic efficiency) of an
engineered system as a design constraint since most engineered systems must be
bought and sold.1 Similarly, in recent times, environmental laws and regulations
have set environmental health and human health constraints that engineers have
been required to include as part of the design process. Beyond regulations,
environmental sustainability has become a desired attribute for consumer products
with more and more voluntary codes such as LEED, Energy Star, etc. that affect
marketability. As with product cost, the engineer often considers anything that
affects marketability as part of the design process. In other words, engineers are
already used to considering several of the sustainability ‘‘needs’’ in terms of the
traditional design process, however, the way by which an engineer incorporates
these ‘‘needs’’ is often at the aggregate level, as we will now go on to describe.
In terms of product costs, the standard methods for engineering economic
analysis involve benefit-cost analysis: a technique that considers the total expected
benefits of one alternative versus its total expected costs as compared to similar
calculations for other alternatives. The expected costs and benefits are considered
over the life of the supply chain and expressed using a common basis such as
present worth. Benefit-cost analyses are limited to those benefits and costs that can
be assigned market values. In other words, impacts without market assessments are
not included in the analysis. While in an ideal world, the benefit-cost analysis results
in the selection of a Pareto-efficient solution, i.e., some are made better off while no
one is made worse off, this rarely happens. Instead, because of the aggregate nature
of the analysis, equity considerations are not formally included and thus not
1 Product cost should not be confused with the term economic opportunity contained within the Mihelcic
definition. Economic opportunity goes well beyond product cost to include those opportunities that
advance economic production in terms of goods and services.
Sustaining Engineering Codes of Ethics 243
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considered. For example, a project that results in lower energy costs for a region
may come as the result of displacing the source of income for a sub-population to
allow construction of a hydroelectric dam. There are numerous critiques of the
benefit-cost analysis method from these and other perspectives, a few of which
include Craig et al. (1993), de Graaff (1975), and Iverson (1994).
Similarly, except for specific regulated cases e.g., those involving an endangered
species, environmental impacts are also assessed using aggregate techniques. Life
cycle assessment (LCA) has become a very common technique to look at aggregate
environmental impacts across the supply chain. Essentially one sets the boundaries
for a consumer product; delineates its life cycle in terms of the supply chain from
raw materials to end-of-life; inventories the environmental emissions and natural
resource uses for each step of the supply chain; determines the aggregate impact of
that inventory in terms of standard environmental terms such as energy consumption,
pounds of carbon dioxide emissions, etc.; and evaluates methods to reduce the
aggregate impact, whether the impact is to eco-systems or human health. The LCA
technique represents an improvement over past techniques because environmental
impacts across the entire product life cycle (or supply chain) are considered rather
than just one aspect of the supply chain e.g., the manufacturing process. However,
because each particular impact is aggregated across the life cycle, certain subpopulations
are not considered as an engineer tries to minimize impact. For
example, a LCA may show that life-cycle chemical impacts are least for a particular
alternative, however the actual burden may be placed on one particular species
rather than spread across a variety of species. Critiques of the LCA technique tend
to revolve around the ideas that (a) too much detail makes it difficult to understand
the results, and (b) too much aggregation makes the results meaningless (Johnston
1997, among others). There are also critiques of LCA that suggest that if the tool is
to aid with sustainability assessments, it needs to go beyond environmental issues to
look at social ones as well (Dreyer et al. 2006).
Human health risk assessment represents a different approach from those two
tools in that specific populations are typically defined by the regulations and must be
considered. Some of these sub-populations include the workers in a facility, the
population living within a certain distance of the perimeter of a manufacturing plant,
or the target group who will use the product (a toy, a car, etc.). However, while
various alternatives are considered in terms of the human health risk to that target
population, these considerations are often couched in terms of absolute risk to the
population and not comparative risk for several populations. For example, a risk
analysis may show that the population within a part of a manufacturing facility is
exposed to a risk that is below the regulated level. However, a comparison is rarely
done to show how much that population’s risk has been increased as compared to
workers in another part of the facility. In addition, human health risk calculations
are typically performed only if required by a regulation, or to be factored into an
aggregate benefit-cost or LCA calculation. Similar issues exist with ecological risk
assessment.
In summary, the engineering profession is already incorporating various aspects
of sustainability as constraints in the traditional engineering design process because
of market requirements and existing regulations; however the overall approach
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reveals two primary problems. The first is that standard approaches to the
engineering design process do not consider the economic and social impacts to the
affected society. In other words those aspects of sustainability are missing and the
current treatment of sustainability (or environment) in the codes is insufficient. The
second problem for those sustainability issues that are addressed, is that the
engineering design process treats them at an aggregate level that does not consider
sub-populations along with the inherent equity and social justice issues.
But, should the engineering profession include these equity and social justice
issues as part of the decision process? We suggest that it should since all
engineering projects involve tradeoffs and these can often mean that some
populations may be impacted more than others. Such a revised approach recognizes
that while engineered systems impact product cost, environmental health, and
human health, these in turn impact the social and economic opportunities for a
community and for sub-populations within a community. To do so also means to
recognize that sustainability is a social justice concept.
Social Justice as a Dimension of Engineering Sustainability
What does it mean to say that sustainability is a ‘‘social justice concept’’? In saying
this, we mean that social justice is a necessary condition for the furtherance or
development of sustainability, rather than the other way around (as in, for example,
Barry 1999). Before going on, we also need to clarify what we are taking social
justice to be; as Riley (2008) has noted there are many approaches to and traditions
of social justice, and the very concept may be intrinsically open-ended in that
arriving at social justice is a ‘‘continuing process’’ and ‘‘ongoing struggle’’(1). In
this paper, we are taking social justice to be the fair and equitable distribution of
social goods and harms, benefits and burdens, across a diversity of communities and
populations, including populations underrepresented by virtue of considerations
such as economic status, race, age, gender, nationality, or physical capability.
In understanding social justice as distributive justice, we are drawing on the
highly influential theory of ‘‘justice as fairness’’ developed by the late Harvard
philosopher John Rawls. Others have developed deep and provocative associations
between Rawls’ theory of justice as fairness and sustainability (e.g., Miller 1999),
and Voorthuis and Gijbels (2010) have used this theory to defend the fairness of the
‘‘cradle-to-cradle’’ approach to design. Here we are turning to Rawls for two
reasons. The first is largely pragmatic and tied to the paramountcy clause as it
currently reads, the second is connected to the critique of benefit-cost analysis as
described above.
First, the paramountcy clause as it currently reads obligates engineers, through
what they design, to support the public, social goods of health, safety, and welfare.
Succinctly put, the ‘‘fairness’’ in Rawls’ theory of justice as fairness comes from the
idea that the ideal principles of justice are ones that arise from deliberation under
conditions that are fair to all participants (so-called ‘‘rational contractors’’) involved
(Rawls 1971). These conditions turn out to be conditions of uncertainty: none of the
participants know what place in society they would occupy in the society whose
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principles of justice they are deliberating toward. Rawls claims that under these
conditions, participants would end up agreeing that all liberties, opportunities, and
other primary social goods ought to be distributed equally, except when a different
distribution would make everyone in society better off (54). On the surface of
things, it might seem as though making social justice out to be a paramount
engineering concern is taking a very large conceptual step, if not a leap. But, when
we look at the paramountcy clause as identifying particular goods that engineers
need to be concerned about producing, the step to saying they should also be
concerned about how these goods are distributed seems to be one that is shorter and
follows more naturally.
Second, we have already seen how attention to the impacts of engineering
decisions on sub-populations within communities puts a strain on the typical
benefit-cost analysis used in making these decisions. Taking the perspective of
sustainability as a justice concept further increases this strain. This perspective
demands that, when projecting impacts on future generations, care be taken not to
look at these generations simply as aggregate population wholes (as, for example,
‘‘humanity,’’ in Mihelcic’s et al. 2003 definition of sustainability). We can see
further limits of using benefit-cost analysis in the context of sustainable design
projects by drawing upon Rawls’ understanding of how a rational contractor, under
conditions of uncertainty, would go about making decisions. In discussing this
point, we will first look at the difficulties in predicting the socio-environmental
impacts of engineering projects and processes in a world where patterns of causation
are becoming ever more increasingly complex. Our second consideration relates to
the idea that, as a social justice concept, taking sustainability as an important design
criterion means paying attention not only to equity in the distribution of socioenvironmental
burdens, but also of environmental and other social benefits, whose
value may prove resistant to expression in economic terms.
1. In 2005, the London-based non-profit Forum for the Future published About
Time: Speed, Society, People and the Environment, a slim volume designed to
deepen public understanding of sustainability through a multi-disciplinary
exploration of its relationship to time. The British ethicist Mary Warnock began
her contribution to this volume by observing that a primary distinguishing feature
of human as opposed to non-human animals is our ability to envision the future.
Our everyday practices of ethical reasoning, Warnock went on to say, highlight
this feature, ‘‘…in the real world, and especially in the world of political decisionmaking,
we are all to some extent at least utilitarians’’ (Warnock 2005).
Warnock’s observation is fitting: it is hard to imagine anyone would seriously
disagree with it. Still, if we are all to some extent at least utilitarians, we are at best
imperfect ones under ordinary circumstances. Due to the daunting challenges posed
to our ability to imagine the future posed by global climate change, we are growing
more imperfect all the time. We know that, once developed, technologies and
technological systems have unforeseen (and unforeseeable) consequences. Ordinarily,
these impacts do not challenge our conventional ways of thinking about the
relations of cause and effect. They often result from users taking a technology in a
direction different from that intended by the original designers. While global climate
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change also leads to unintended consequences, these can be unintended consequences
of a different sort. As some have pointed out (Jamieson 1992, 1996; Scherer
2003), global climate change creates a context in which we can anticipate that causes
will lead to unpredictable effects along a variety of dimensions, including:
• Scope and scale, which could be unprecedented;
• Severity of impacts on particular geographical regions and human societies may
vary considerably; the well-being of some populations may be sharply
compromised while other populations would be better off;
• Cumulative impacts: countless similar causes may produce countless similar
effects that when taken individually have a negligible adverse impact; when
combined, the negative impact is massive;
• Synergy: effects may interact with one another in unexpected ways, with
deleterious consequences.
As engineers develop projects designed to counter the effects of global climate
change and to promote sustainability, they need to take these new kinds of
unpredictable causal relations into account. It is not hard for example to discern
difficulties involved in predicting the effects of innovative ventures in geoengineering,
such as the international Silver Lining research project (www.
silverliningproj.org) aimed at propelling sea water droplets upwards to create
clouds to reflect sunlight back into the atmosphere. But the design processes of even
more conventional engineering projects to address sustainability are also caught up
in the new uncertainties of causal relations. Let us go back for a moment to Mihelcic’s
definition of sustainable engineering. In order to determine whether any
particular system’s design would be able to help counter the impacts of climate
change, it is necessary to project a pattern that climate change might take, a
demanding task made even more demanding by the causal relations just mentioned.
Rawls comes into the picture when we ask how these new relations call the use of
benefit-cost analysis in engineering into question. It is reasonable to imagine he
would have agreed with Warnock’s observation of how we normally (and
rationally) approach decision-making under the ordinary circumstances of everyday
life. Because in these situations we have a fairly good idea of what the probabilities
are with regard to alternative courses of action, we turn to the principle of utility to
maximize aggregate expected value. When in the classroom, one introduces Rawls’
discussion of principles of rational choice by asking students to choose between
coin flip games, a typical undergraduate with a minimal knowledge of economics
will likely choose a game where the expected value is higher (e.g., ‘‘heads you get
$100/tails you lose $10) than another game where she or he could also choose (e.g.,
‘‘heads you get $10/tails you lose $2) and thereby maximize expected value ($45 vs.
$4). But in some cases where the probabilities of winning or losing are not easily
determined, students tend to gravitate toward the outcome that answers the question:
‘‘What is the least worst thing that could happen to me?’’—in other words, they will
use maximin as a principle of rational choice. As Rawls has argued, it would be
rational for individuals who had no knowledge of their place in life, including to
which generation they belonged, to use this principle when deciding what principles
of justice they should endorse (Rawls 1971).
Sustaining Engineering Codes of Ethics 247
123
Of course, the position of engineers designing solutions for problems in the
context of the unpredictability of the ‘‘new’’ causal relations is quite different from
that occupied by the rational contractors in Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. Still, Rawls’
perspective is a particularly valuable one within the context of thinking about
sustainability as a social justice concept. It not only underscores the limitations of
the use of benefit-cost analysis within the context of sustainable engineering
practices, but also points to an alternative principle of rational choice in decisionmaking
where probabilities are difficult to determine and social justice is at stake.
2. In his definition of sustainability, Mihelcic et al. 2003 focuses on the need to
fairly distribute the adverse impacts of engineering projects. Social justice,
however, involves not only a fair distribution of burdens and harms, but also of
goods and benefits. It is tempting to think that this comes down to the same
thing, in that a fair distribution of burdens would be nothing other than a fair
distribution of benefits when seen from the opposite perspective: in this sense
clean, quality air is nothing other than the absence of a polluted atmosphere.
Imagine that a new major transportation project is projected to meet the US
Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) 2010 air quality control standards
for 1-h nitrogen dioxide emissions across all affected communities. We can
then affirm that the burdens (some exposure to nitrogen dioxide) as well as the
benefits (lack of adverse exposure to nitrogen dioxide, as defined by the EPA
standard) have been fairly allocated. But engineering for sustainability, taken as
a social justice concept, also involves the fair distribution of benefits which are
not directly the opposite of burdens defined by technical standards. Such
benefits are especially resistant to being captured in standard economic terms,
such as willingness-to-pay (see for example Sagoff 2004, 2007), and to
conventional engineering benefit-cost analysis.
Turning to an example may help to bring out this point more clearly. In the past
few years, a number of programs designed to promote sustainable transportation
choices within community and neighborhood contexts have sprung up around the
US. One example is the Eugene, Oregon SmartTrips, a project funded in 2010 by
the EPA’s Climate Showcase Communities grants program. If met, the goals of
Eugene SmartTrips, such as reducing the amount of CO2 emissions by some 14,000
pounds per year and the number of drive-alone vehicle trips by 12% in the covered
communities, would serve to further overall environmental quality by reducing
greenhouse gas emissions. In this case, a benefit to a general (aggregate) population
would result from mitigating an environmental burden shared by all involved.
SmartTrips programs were not designed to connect sustainability with social justice.
But, if we turn our attention to sub-populations served by communities with such
programs, we can imagine how such a connection could be made, and so bring to
the fore a benefit of improved quality of life that cannot easily be rendered in
quantifiable terms.
The neighborhood of Highland Park, Minnesota, along with being the home of
one of the authors of this paper, is both a site of St. Paul, Minnesota Smart Trips as
well as a NORC, or Naturally Organizing Retirement Community, defined as a
community in which a significant portion of the population is aging and intends to
248 D. Michelfelder, S. A. Jones
123
stay in place as they do. Nearly one-quarter of its residents are 65 or older; almost
half of those within this group have an annual income of $30,000 or less, and 30%
own no vehicle at all (www.norcstpaul.com). Given this set of characteristics, it
might seem reasonable not to focus directly on this sub-population within the
context of a Smart Trips program, as a sizable proportion does not drive and, of
those who do, it can reasonably be assumed that most of them are not driving to
make a daily commute. Although the greatest percentage of reductions in greenhouse
gas emissions can come from reductions in single-driver commuting trips,
enabling those who fall under the NORC classification to be more mobile using
local ride-sharing and other options may not only result in lowered emissions, but
also in improving the ability of these residents to achieve their goals of aging in
place; and, by so doing, to help preserve their dignity as well.
In this particular example, attending to sustainability would add to the quality of
life of those in this community in two ways. It would increase dignity through
allowing for those with relatively modest incomes to age in place, and it would
decrease the overall amount of greenhouse gas emissions. With the latter, a benefit is
obtained by mitigating a burden. With the former benefit, however, there is no
contrasting existing burden to be mitigated, as it is not a matter of replacing a deficit
of dignity with its opposite, but rather of maintaining the dignity of a specific
community demographic. This benefit accrues to that sub-population only: it would
be difficult, for instance, to attach meaning in this context to the idea of ‘‘commuting
with dignity.’’ Given that the value of dignity is not readily convertible into economic
terms, this example points to the difficulty of accommodating sustainability, taken as
a social justice concept, within the framework of benefit-cost analysis.
By highlighting these considerations, it might seem as though we may have
inadvertently veered away from the primary claim of this paper: namely, that
sustainability, understood as including a dimension of social justice, ought to have
equal status with safety, health, and welfare in the paramountcy clause of engineering
codes of ethics. This, though, is not the case. First, the example just given indicates
how attention to sustainability as a social justice concept can have a direct, positive
impact on both the environment and on human welfare. Second, this particular
section has pointed to the scope of change at stake in including sustainability in the
paramountcy clause. The scope of change goes beyond the ethical responsibilities of
engineers to reach more basic and deep-seated engineering practices.
Catalano (2006a, b) has also suggested changing the paramountcy clause of
engineering codes of ethics for the purpose of strengthening the profession’s
commitment to sustainability and social justice. He does not however aim to
strengthen this commitment by directly referring to sustainability or social justice
within the codes; rather, he would substitute the phrase ‘‘the identified integral
community’’ for ‘‘the public.’’ Catalano’s justification for this substitution is based
on the idea that sustainable engineering design needs not only to look at the impacts
on humans but also on animals and even ecosystems. As pointed out in the section
on sustainability and the engineering codes of ethics, a number of engineering
professional organizations are already taking steps to modify their codes of ethics in
order to reflect environmental sustainability as an important professional commitment.
While we agree with Catalano that sustainable design needs to take such a
Sustaining Engineering Codes of Ethics 249
123
breadth of impacts into account, we believe changing the codes directly by
strengthening their explicit commitment to sustainability (and so to social justice) is
pragmatically preferable than strengthening this commitment indirectly through
making the substitution Catalano proposes.
Including a concern for sustainability with the paramountcy clause of the codes
is, moreover, not simply additive. It is potentially transformative, not only with
respect to engineering practice, but also, as the next section will attempt to bring
out, with respect to the role of the professional engineer in public life itself.
Sustainability, Social Justice, and the Status of Professional Engineers
As mentioned immediately above, in this section of this paper we aim to show that a
collateral but still very significant effect of adding sustainability in the way we have
been interpreting it to the paramountcy clause of the codes may be to elevate the
status of the professional engineer within the US. As we mentioned when reviewing
the engineering codes of ethics, we find that professional engineers are called upon
both to do and to be. In other words, practitioners are called upon to do by holding
paramount the health, welfare, and safety of the general public. And, they are also
called upon to be by incorporating particular virtues into their lives that can be
exercised in the course of their professional practice. In the context of the codes of
ethics, such being and doing are integrated with one another. To put this in another
way, it is through being virtuous that the commitments named in the paramountcy
clause of the codes can be sustained.
One of the ways this connection between being and doing can be clearly seen is
through looking at the place of honesty in the NSPE code of ethics.2 Within the
NSPE code, injunctions to be honest and truthful appear both centrally and often. Of
the six fundamental canons, two directly and one indirectly enjoin an engineer to be
honest. By comparison, only one of the fundamental canons demands that an
engineer be loyal. Other injunctions to be honest are embedded throughout the rules
of practice and statements of professional obligations. For instance: Engineers shall
be objective and truthful in professional reports, statements, or testimony (II.3.a.);
Engineers shall not falsify their qualifications or permit misrepresentations of their
or their associates’ qualifications (II.5.a); Engineers shall be guided in all their
relations by the highest standards of honesty and integrity (III.1); Engineers shall
avoid all conduct or practice that deceives the public (III.3).
If we were to draw a line connecting these injunctions to the need to ‘‘hold
paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public,’’ it would pass directly
through engineering work understood as the technical design of an object or process.
When engineers act dishonestly with respect to falsifying their qualifications, they
may compromise their ability to design a particular artifact in a way that would
guarantee the safety of the public. If, for example, in the process of writing a proofof-concept
report an engineer deliberately exaggerated the claims for a particular
2 We will let this code of ethics serve as a ‘‘proxy’’ for other engineering codes, as the latter have been
shaped by the former (Vesilind 2002).
250 D. Michelfelder, S. A. Jones
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innovation, the misrepresentation could also be detrimental to the public’s welfare.
In general, being honest supports ‘‘doing engineering’’ in such a way that the
commitments to the paramountcy clause can be successfully maintained.
Suppose we now take a step back from drawing a connection between being and
doing in terms of the NSPE code of ethics, and look at the larger framework within
which this connection is drawn. Two features stand out that will be important in
considering how adding sustainability to the commitments which an engineer must
hold paramount does more than simply expand the set of obligations of professional
engineers. One feature has already been mentioned. As it currently stands, the NSPE
code of ethics understands engineering work to be defined by its technical nature. It
is within the framework of this definition that engineering work can be said to have
social and ethical ‘‘impacts’’ on the public. A second feature is that as a professional
practitioner, the engineer is not immediately situated as a member of the public
itself. These two features parallel one another. The engineer’s work is taken to be
primarily technical in character, not social. And the engineer is primarily situated
within the firm or other place of employment—in other words, within a community
of other professionals and not within the public at large. Much like the NSPE code
encourages engineers to adhere to the principles of sustainable development, it also
encourages, but does not obligate, engineers to participate in civic affairs (III.2.a.)
To say in a code of ethics that professional engineers ought to hold sustainability
as a justice concept paramount along with the public’s health, safety, and welfare is
to transform and reframe this connection between being and doing. In some sense,
integrating sustainability into the design of engineering projects represents an
additional constraint, but because sustainability is a normative concept it also
represents a moral vision. Holding sustainability paramount is to recognize that the
process of engineering work is something other than a movement from technical
design to social impacts. Rather, it is to acknowledge that engineering work is itself
techno-social in character from the very beginning of the design process.
It is also to acknowledge that the engineer, as a professional with a responsibility
for social change, is, if not uniquely, then at least specially situated within the public
as a whole. Much like ethical responsibility in general, the responsibility for acting
so as to build more sustainable, just communities is a distributed one. Sustainability
is everyone’s business. Still, while engineers are not the only ones responsible for
sustainability, they are quite well placed to influence members of the general public,
who in turn can make their preferences known to political leaders to value
sustainability more highly than it is presently valued.
In other words, within a context of distributed responsibility for sustainability,
engineers have a lead role to play with respect to influencing public opinion. In this
role, engineers would not simply be one participant among others in public affairs,
but would play a critical role akin to that of a public intellectual. In a recent article
appearing in the professional magazine of ASME, Slabbert argued that ‘‘engineers
must move into a central place in this nation’s intellectual life, rather than
occupying a technical advisory role on the side’’ (2010). Slabbert’s plea for
engineers to rediscover their place in American intellectual life is predicated on his
hope that they will articulate a ‘‘new vision’’ of America’s ‘‘technological future’’
from which greater public demand for innovative technologies and consequently a
Sustaining Engineering Codes of Ethics 251
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reindustrialization of the American economy will directly follow. While in this
paper we are approaching the matter of reconnecting engineers with public life from
a different starting-point than Slabbert, we have come to a similar conclusion. And,
in making a case for the importance of revising engineering codes of ethics to
include holding sustainability as a justice concept paramount, we are suggesting a
specific avenue by means of which this reconnection might take place. By means of
this reconnection, we are hoping that the public image of engineering as a whole
may be improved.
For the public image of engineering as a whole to be bettered, however, the voice
of the engineer as a public intellectual must be a credible one. In order to bring
about social change, she or he must be seen as a person ‘‘of integrity and character
who can act of the basis of principles and ideas’’ (Jamieson 1992). The sheer
strength of professional position is a necessary, but insufficient basis for an engineer
to convincingly articulate to the general public why sustainability is an important
value for everyone to share. She or he must also have the necessary social capital for
her or his voice to make a positive difference. That social capital is public
credibility or trustworthiness. Most recently in the US, public trust in the credibility
of engineering was negatively affected by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Here, in his role as (at the time) CEO of British Petroleum and so its chief public
spokesperson, Tony Hayward received widespread negative publicity for the
‘‘shape-shifting,’’ misleading character of his communications to the general public
regarding the extent and seriousness of this event. But, if reconnecting to the public
sphere means regaining public trust, it is important that the commitment to
sustainability be supported and animated by social virtues, ones necessary for
trustful interactions to take place among persons. To return to the distinction
between ‘‘being’’ and ‘‘doing’’ raised at the beginning of this section, once the
‘‘doing’’ of engineering is expanded to include holding sustainability paramount, the
‘‘being virtuous’’ necessary to sustain sustainability within engineering codes of
ethics would also need to be expanded so as to encompass more of the social virtues.
What, more specifically, would some of these social virtues be? To give this
question the attention it deserves would be the subject for another paper. We can
though say that on the list would be virtues such as humility, openness, and, of
course, honesty. Jamieson (1992) has argued that it is necessary to cultivate humility
in order to address global problems of climate change; a professional who exercises
humility acknowledges that she or he does not have all the answers. A person with
openness is an expert listener, taking seriously what others have to say, and so
helping to establish trust. Honesty already occupies a prominent place within
engineering codes of ethics, as we have seen with respect to the NSPE code. Its
meaning in the NSPE code is fundamental: accurately representing to others what
one knows to be the case. We can find a parallel to this in Scherer’s (2003) work on
the ethics of sustainable energy, where he highlights the importance of honesty in
providing a clear and accurate depiction of the risks involved with the development
of new energy technologies. But, Scherer also calls for honesty to be a part of an
ethics of sustainable energy for the role it plays in identifying and underscoring the
difficulties of achieving sustainable energy. Facing up to the complexities of a
problem can be seen as being part of an expanded notion of honesty. Such an
252 D. Michelfelder, S. A. Jones
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expanded notion of honesty, one that goes beyond the avoidance of deceptive acts
that would represent an engineered object as other than it actually is to a larger social
context, would be one of the social virtues we have in mind as being necessary to
support sustainability as a responsibility within the paramountcy clause.
As Mitcham has pointed out in an account of the development of the various
codes of engineering ethics within the US, these codes began as an articulation of
the duties that professional engineers owed to their employers, clients, and coworkers
(2009). In this context what engineers had most to ‘‘be’’ was to be loyal,
with responsibilities for public welfare and its associated emphasis on the virtue of
honesty coming at a later point in the codes’ development. In showing the historical,
contingent development of the codes, Mitcham opens the way for speculating as to
what the next step in their development might be. Without directly referring to the
codes, Mitcham wonders whether the next step in engineering ethics might be a
policy turn, a turn that would reflect a shift away from individualistic-based
engineering ethics toward a more ‘macro’ approach that could contribute to
changing existing institutions and policies and so to transforming the way that
engineering is taught and practiced (see especially Herkert 2009, pp. 46–48). In
arguing in this paper for a revision of the paramountcy clause and for a greater
emphasis on an expanded concept of honesty and other social virtues, our approach
has strong elements of the individualistic-based tradition. Still, our belief that such
changes will help to open the door for engineers to serve as public intellectuals can
be seen as aligned with an impetus for change at the institutional level, including, as
described in the next section, with undergraduate engineering education itself.
Undergraduate Engineering Education and the Codes
Currently US undergraduate engineering enrollments are stagnant, with female
representation at 18% (relatively unchanged from the 1980s), and with US ethnic
minority representation at just under 24% with Asian Americans included (Gibbons
2009). At the graduate school level, more than half of all students enrolled in
graduate engineering programs are foreign nationals, a further indication of the
declined image of engineering among US nationals (National Science Foundation
2007). An enhanced image of the engineer as a public intellectual whose work brings
about positive social change may encourage more US students and more diverse
students among them to consider engineering as a major and career choice. This
suggestion aligns with a study stemming from the Michigan Study of Adolescent
Life Transitions that concluded that one of the key factors influencing a girl’s choice
to pursue a mathematically-based major such as engineering is how much she values
working with and for people (Linver et al. 2002). While the study focused on girls,
social connections may have an important role on the overall perception of the
engineering profession and who chooses to become part of that profession.
Change to the engineering codes of ethics comes from the profession itself i.e.,
engineers. While the codes reflect the way engineers should ‘‘do’’ engineering and
‘‘be’’ engineers, the initial view of the profession most often begins in the
undergraduate classroom. At the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics
Sustaining Engineering Codes of Ethics 253
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Mini-Conference in 2010, the authors of this paper participated as discussants on a
panel exploring engineering sustainability and justice and why the current model for
engineering education needs to change if graduates can be expected to think about
justice in the context of their profession and work. As is hopefully obvious from the
previous discussion, educating future engineers to think about justice associated
with the global technological system requires thinking beyond technology as the
answer to human needs to technology as part of the solution in contexts where
justice is the integral need. We do not intend for our suggestions to be a roadmap for
curricular change as that is not the focus for this paper; instead they are intended to
stimulate further discussion. We do recognize that changes such as these will be
challenging for engineering educators, particularly due to ABET accreditation
requirements.
Current ABET requirements mean that all engineering students in accredited
programs must learn about engineering ethics, however the coverage of engineering
ethics varies depending on what approach a program takes. Some institutions have
found ways to ensure that traditional engineering courses also require that students
know the codes of ethics and how they influence engineering decision-making.
Other colleges use full-fledged courses that help engineering students develop
frameworks based on a fundamental understanding of moral theories, and how these
theories in addition to the codes can be used to help with difficult decisions. Such
varying coverage at the undergraduate level cannot guarantee that all engineering
students know much more than the code of ethics for their discipline even if some
are more broadly educated.
Some engineering disciplines have embraced sustainability as being important to
limit impacts to future (human) generations caused by projects today. In particular,
several engineering disciplines are closely connected to such a definition of
sustainability because their projects have a direct association with the impacts e.g., a
transportation project through forests, or filling in a wetland for development.
However, other engineering disciplines are more removed from the impact because
the impact often depends on how the engineered device is used by society; in other
words human behavior matters and the engineer does not control that, or so he or
she thinks. As such, educational approaches also differ by disciplines in terms of
their view of the direct impact of sustainability and this further explains why the
codes differ on this issue. Again, such varying coverage cannot guarantee that
students and/or professionals know much more than the code of ethics for their
discipline.
Even for an engineer who belongs to a discipline where the sustainability impact
is direct and he or she has been exposed to the relevant code of ethics, the phrases
‘‘sustainable development’’ and ‘‘hold paramount the safety, health and welfare of
the public’’ do not necessarily imply that justice considerations must be made, or
that some situations may present moral dilemmas in terms of sustainability versus
justice. As stated before and used here as an example, engineering is based on
designing a solution to a problem within a set of constraints and one of the
constraints embedded throughout the education process is that of cost-effectiveness.
To add the justice constraint means that part of the problem-solving method requires
not just this calculation of cost-effectiveness, but also the determination of the
254 D. Michelfelder, S. A. Jones
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distribution of benefits and costs among sub-populations. Traditional engineering
economic analysis does not include frameworks for making this determination, but
more important, this determination is not embedded as a constraint in engineering
analysis. As such, even if the codes are modified to include sustainability in the
paramountcy phrase, there will need to be deliberate efforts to modify the way
engineering is taught such that social justice is routinely included as a constraint in a
similar way that operation and maintenance costs are routinely included as
constraints.
This problem of separating educational topics about justice from sustainability
and even from ethics in the classroom is not unique to engineering; it can also be
found in ethics education in the humanities including where one might least expect
it to appear—in environmental ethics. As an example, environmental ethics has tried
to respond to the challenge of including other issues by ‘‘scaling up’’ and a couple of
things have happened. Environmental ethics textbooks have grown e.g., from a
500-page book in one semester to 800 pages in the next semester. But, this is
secondary to the fact that even as volumes get larger, sustainability tends to be
addressed in one section and justice in another, so that students exposed to one of
these topics might not be exposed to the other. Some of this can be traced to the
temptation within teaching ethics to play it safe. In this context, playing it safe
consists of holding the material off to one side and the social off to the other, rather
than approaching the teaching of ethics in terms of thinking what is to be human as
being embedded within social-material or social-technical systems.
In summary, there is no current expectation that a student who has received a
traditional undergraduate engineering education knows the meaning of social justice
and its relationship to sustainability, much less how to address such issues in
practice. If a practitioner has this ability, that expertise was gained via engineering
experience over a career and not from the classroom. Making sure that students
know how to include social justice as part of a sustainability design constraint would
require rethinking the educational model to incorporate ways for students to learn
about distributive justice and equity issues and to provide them with frameworks to
handle these social considerations in the context of their discipline. This is just one
aspect of the recent interest in national education circles to find ways to build
bridges between engineering and the liberal arts to better prepare engineering
practitioners of the future to tackle the more complex social-technical issues we face
while ensuring that we have a populace with the technological literacy needed for
the twenty-first century.
Concluding Thoughts
In this paper, we make the case that the engineering disciplines as embodied by the
codes of ethics need to reaffirm the importance of sustainability and social justice as
integral to both the practice of engineering and the essence of what it means to be an
engineer. The additional benefits of such reaffirmation include elevating the status
of the engineer as public intellectual and agent of social good. We also suggest that
the engineering educational model will need to change to support such aspirations.
Sustaining Engineering Codes of Ethics 255
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Using the ASCE Code of Ethics as a starting point for the codes across the
profession, we present the following rewording of the main canon and the guidelines
for how to practice that canon. We hope that these suggestions prove as a fruitful
platform for further discussions to ensure that the engineering codes of ethics meet
the needs of the twenty-first century.
Engineers shall hold paramount the safety, health and welfare of the public and
the sustainable design of human and industrial systems in the performance of
their professional duties.
Engineers shall recognize that the lives, safety, health, and welfare of the general
public and the environment, along with the distribution of such impacts, are
dependent upon engineering judgments, decisions and practices incorporated into
structures, machines, products, processes, and devices.
(a) Engineers shall approve or seal only those design documents, reviewed or
prepared by them, which are determined to be safe for public health, welfare,
and sustainability in conformity with accepted engineering standards.
(b) Engineers whose professional judgment is overruled under circumstances
where the safety, health and welfare of the public and its sub-populations are
endangered, or the principles of sustainable development ignored, shall inform
their clients or employers of the possible consequences.
(c) Engineers who have knowledge or reason to believe that another person or firm
may be in violation of any of the provisions of Canon 1 shall present such
information to the proper authority in writing and shall cooperate with the
proper authority in furnishing such further information or assistance as may be
required.
(d) Engineers should seek opportunities to be of constructive service in civic
affairs and work for the advancement of the safety, health, well-being, and
sustainability of their communities and the sub-populations within those
communities.
(e) Engineers should be committed to improving their communities and the subpopulations
within those communities by adherence to the principles of
sustainable development and social justice so as to enhance the quality of life
of the general public.
Acknowledgments A version of this paper was presented at the 2010 meeting of the Forum for
Philosophy, Engineering, and Technology (fPET) at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado.
We want to thank the anonymous reviewers who considered our abstract for this conference for their
constructive and helpful suggestions, as well as those who reviewed this paper for publication in this
journal.
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