Integrity and the Ethical Responsibilities of Engineers

Abstract

Engineering is a unique profession in many ways. It is the oldest professional activities whose practitioners can be held to account for their failures, according to publicly promulgated standards. This is partly because engineering is such a pervasive profession, but also because engineering “failures” are usually highly visible and sometimes spectacular. Engineers go to enormous lengths to avoid “failure”. However, the public has little understanding of what engineers do, because they do not understand the nature of risk or the limited extent to which individual engineers are responsible for the construction, use and maintenance of their designs. Integrity is explained in this chapter as not so much a virtue but rather as a coherence or synthesis of the virtues, including an unwillingness to compromise ones values for gain. Professional integrity requires a commitment to the goals and values of the profession, and a person of integrity will not take up such a profession unless they can do so without compromising their personal values and ideals. Because of the complex nature of engineering as a profession, engineering integrity is also complex, and engineering education should emphasize this.

Parts of this chapter that deal with the concept of integrity will appear in a monograph on integrity to be published by the Centre for Civilisational Dialogue, University of Malaya, in 2008.