The Social Responsibilities of Engineers

Utilitarianism is a system of prescriptive ethics that defines "good" as happiness or fun (Thompson & Thompson, 1997, p. 22). There argon to approaches to the application of the concept of utilitarianism: (1) flecking to bear the greatest good for the greatest number of people; or (2) acting to achieve a stated goal, i.e., the end justifies the delegacy (Thompson & Thompson, 1997).

Deontology is a system of ethics based on the tenets that (1) a set of virtuous rules exists which humans must follow, and (2) the principles underlying these chaste rules are unchanging. Deontology is a difficult honest system to prosecute because different people may adhere to different sets of moral rules (Thompson & Thompson, 1997).

The ethical system of natural police holds that actions are ethically correct when they are in accord with the end economic consumption of human nature and human goals (Thompson & Thompson, 1997). Thus, the do good and annul evil maxim of natural truth ethics encompasses the ethical principles of beneficence and nonmaleficence. Even within the system of natural law ethics, however, conflicts may arise in decision-making because a theist testament conceive human nature and human goals in mavin way, while a non-theist may conceive of those concepts in a quite different way (Sims, 1994).

In the contemporary period, utilitarianism and deontology run away to command the greatest level of attention in ethical consid

In addition to act and rule utilitarianism, utilitarian philosophy is also categorized as (1) egoistic or universalistic, (2) hedonistic or idealistic, and (3) normative or descriptive. These latter distinctions may apply to either act or rule utilitarianism. The egoistic/universalistic distinction depends upon whether the only consequences considered are those that apply only to the agent effecting an action, or whether the consequences change purchase order as a whole, or the consequences affecting all sentient beings are considered. Obviously, such distinctions are relevant to the capturement of utilitarian-based law applicable to the protection of the environment.

Do engineers befuddle a accessible responsibility?

Of course, engineers, as is true of all other persons, have a social responsibility. Can engineers control the social consequences of the technologies that they develop or apply? The conclusion in relation to this scruple must be that engineers green goddessnot control the social consequences of the technologies that they develop and apply. What engineers can do, however, is make decisions based in ethics that will optimise the probability that socially beneficial outcomes in both the short-term and the long-term will stem from their practice.

Principlism is an approach to reasoning slightly ethical occupations that proceeds in the main not deductively from higher-order theory, or inductively from a detailed attention toward the situation presented, but from middle-level principles down to the case presented. The four principles involved in the principalism transition are (1) autonomy, (2) beneficence, (3) nonmaleficence, and (4) justice (Goldstein & Rubin, 1996).

Another significant problem affecting utilitarian evaluation is the identification of the consequences of an act. It is often difficult to the predict of impossibility to identify all of the consequences of a specific act. The problem is especially relevant to long-term outcomes. When the incident occur
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