Ethics in Engineering Practice and Research is about professional responsibilities of engineers and applied scientists. It is about professional responsibilities: the character of problem situations in which those responsibilities must be fulfilled and the moral skills for fulfilling them. Interspersed throughout the text are open-ended scenarios that present ethically significant situations of the sort engineers and applied scientists commonly encounter. These have been set apart in centered boxes to aid the use of them in group discussion and for homework assignments. Also set apart from the text, in boxes, are fine points, which may enhance the reader's understanding but are not essential to the main argument. Most of these fine points concern philosophical issues.

Individual Credit and the Ownership of Innovation

The best-known philosophical argument for the existence of property rights is that of John Locke, mentioned in Section 4 of the introduction. Locke argued that people have some rights that are “natural” in the sense that they exist prior to any contracts or agreements; among these are certain property rights. The basic right for which Locke argues is the right to the fruits of one's labor. Locke assumes the right to one's own body and argues that if one performs work or mixes one's labor with some freely available material, one owns the product. Locke gives the example of gathering acorns leading to one's ownership of the resulting accumulation of acorns. (Acorns are nourishing although bitter tasting. They were plentiful in England, and sometimes people had subsisted on them.) Locke recognized that people might make trades and other agreements that lead to the acquisition of property rights other than those that are the direct fruits of one's labor.

By extension (and assuming one has a right to one's own mind or intellect parallel to one's right to one's body), one may argue that intellectual labor involved in the creation of research, artistic, and technological works provides the basis of property rights. If the creators of the product in question are paid for producing the product, then arguably the product and any resulting trademarks, patents, copyrights, or other property rights belong to the employer or client who paid them (although the creators still deserve credit as authors or inventors of those patented or copyrighted creations). Saying that patents and copyrights are “property rights” and therefore alienable allows that they may not reside with the creators of the items patented or copyrighted.

I want to die proud of having been an engineer. Since that can happen only if we engineers behave ethically, and since I see a connection between this book and gracious professionalism, I am very enthusiastic about Dr. Whitbeck's effort to help us think effectively and somewhat pragmatically about professional ethics. Everyone, professionals in particular, must expect ethically complex situations to arise. When that happens, each of us badly needs a self-image that includes conviction that our intellect and heart can help make choices that will dramatically affect the course of events. That point of view will not materialize out of the ether. It must be nurtured and encouraged. This book will help seasoned professionals clarify their approach to their own behaviors, and this book can profoundly affect those who face a messy situation for the first time.

Professions and Norms of Professional Conduct

Professions are those occupations that both require advanced study and mastery of a specialized body of knowledge, and undertake to promote, ensure, or safeguard some aspect of others??? well-being. This chapter examines the norms and standards of good conduct in professional practice. Ethical (and sometimes legal) requirements also exist for nonprofessionals when their work immediately affects the public good. For example, food handlers are bound by sanitary rules. Arguably, many moral rules apply equally in all work contexts. All should be honest, for example. What is distinctive about the ethical demands professions make on their practitioners is the combination of the responsibility for some aspect of others??? well-being and the complexity of the knowledge and information that they must integrate in acting to promote that well-being.