ENSC 406 Tutorials: Introduction

Why study engineering ethics?

Ethics is an important aspect of engineering education because the devices, systems, structures, and processes engineers design impact public health and safety, affect the environment, and help shape society. Any professional group entrusted with such powers must be held accountable for the actions of its members. Engineering, like medicine and law, is a self-regulated profession, meaning that the members of the profession are responsible for ensuring that they and their colleagues maintain professional standards of conduct and take responsibility for protecting public health and safety.

A self-regulating profession generally takes responsibility for ensuring that anyone working without a license is stopped from practicing the profession. The situation in engineering is complicated: while fields such as civil engineering are highly regulated in this regard, less traditional, high-tech fields such as computer engineering are populated by non-licensed practitioners. Although not directly regulated by a professional association such as APEG-BC, non-licensed engineers can be held accountable to society through the courts and can face penalties for failing to uphold professional standards of conduct.

Studying engineering ethics helps ensure that all graduates, whether they later seek PEng status or not, have the following basic skills and understanding:

•	clear understanding of what constitutes professional standards of conduct
•	awareness of the sorts of ethical issues faced by practicing engineers
•	techniques for analyzing ethical dilemmas
•	the ability to think critically and independently when faced with context-sensitive problems that have no one right answer and no win-win solution

What are the tutorials about?

ENSC 406 is a course in critical thinking, with the tutorials focusing on ethical problem solving. Everyone needs training in how to analyze complex problems in order to resolve them ethically. A personal sense of right and wrong is necessary but insufficient; ethical problem solving also requires anticipating what is not immediately obvious and developing the ability to view a situation from different perspectives. You must be prepared for situations in which ethical principles conflict and the law is unclear on what you should do. Ethical dilemmas are open-ended problems with a range of appropriate and inappropriate solutions, some better and some worse than others.

The main course materials for the tutorials are Fledderman’s text Engineering Ethics and the APEG-BC code of ethics, which is the last page of the association's bylaws. Applying the code of ethics and using the techniques for ethical problem solving offered in the textbook to address a wide range of ethical dilemmas will help you achieve the goals of this part of the course:

• a fuller understanding of how codes of ethics guide professional standards of conduct
• practice applying independent, critical thinking to solve ethical dilemmas
• greater sensitivity to the sorts of situations that develop into ethical dilemmas

What’s the homework?

Homework will appear on the page for the week it is due. There is no tutorial for the first week, but lots of homework for week two. Please move to week 2 to discover how to prepare for the first tutorial.