The Ethics of Professional Engineers Mohammad A. Radwan Electronics and Communications Department Faculty of Engineering, Cairo University Giza, Egypt mradwan@eng.cu.edu.eg Abstract—This work presents a survey about the ethics of professional engineers. It summarizes the aspects of the engineering ethics and their reflection to our life. It also shows the importance of applying the engineering codes of ethics either for the engineer, or the society, showing the good and bad sides of these behaviors. Briefly, it is strongly recommended for the engineer to behave in ethical way, as it is a big responsibility for saving people’s lives. Keywords—code of ethics, engineering ethics, ethical thinking, professional, responsibilities, safety. I. INTRODUCTION T HE engineering work has a lot of risks, especially when it is related directly to the people’s life. There are well-known cases from the history of engineering that made the study of engineering ethics a must to save people’s life. For example, in 1986, we remember the Space …show more content…
The function and main points are presented through two well-known examples; the codes of IEEE and the code of NSPE. They exhibit some similarities and some differences; for example, IEEE code is short and more general. NSPE code is long and has detailed explanation. IEEE code is focusing on protecting the environment rather than indicating the employer’s responsibility. NSPE code is focusing on the engineer’s duty at the first place, showing his responsibilities before going into details through the rest of code. IV. ETHICAL ISSUES IN ENGINEERING PRACTICE There are many critical issues that are related directly to people’s safety. However, this kind of issues neither could be avoided nor completely adopted, as their applications could be very important and essential to the society. In the following part, two major issues are discussed; the environmental ethics, and the computer