Abdulaziz Alqahtani
Assignment 3
Borrowing from the National Society for Professional Engineering (NSPE), the author’s main point is to seek the attention of the engineering societies towards gearing
into sustainability. This means that the paper has seen it fit to revise the codes of ethics of such societies so that they can coincide with sustainable development
in their economic activities. According to the paper, among the numerous engineering societies in the United States (US), none have complied to sustainability in terms
of accounting for the engineer’s responsibility to coincide with the health, safety, and welfare of the general public. With this, the author finds it important to
make it a paramount clause for the engineers in order to instill social justice.
The inclusion of social justice is important as it not only works for the benefit of the public but also for the engineering profession in general. Furthermore, social
justice is a significant dimension altogether, when it comes to sustainable growth. When the societies embrace this dimension by recognizing its crucial role, it will
work to elevate the status of the engineering profession. This will work for the engineers not only as agents of social good but also as public intellectuals. However,
in order to realize this transformation, it would be easier if such standards and codes of ethics are incorporated in the upcoming undergraduate programs for
engineers.
With this, I agree with the standpoint of the author to the letter. The allegations that such adherence to social justice might interfere with the natural ecosystem
are simply baseless. In my opinion, such oppositions are based on inertia and the fear of change. Social justice with sustainable development does not advocate for any
modifications of the environment capable of causing damage in the near future. As a matter of fact, together with sustainable development, engineers will be keen in
making models that match with the microclimate of a given locality while at the same time ensuring that such a niche is suitable for mankind. In other words,
sustainability is a comprehensive step into ensuring engineers is more vigilant in their modifications and not the other way round.
With this understanding, it is no wonder that sustainability and social justice are associated with public health, safety, and welfare. In simpler words, in instilling
the contemporary code of conduct, the author has a positive intention that such ethics will make engineers more responsible for their creations, today and in the
future. This will be made possible as the ethics and codes of conduct will require the professionals to be more committed to their work. This is in terms of its impact
on the public and of course, the environment.
It is, therefore, pointless to argue that such positive change can cause mass killings of humans in the future. Besides, other relevant organizations have echoed the
need to revise the codes of ethics after evaluating their positive impact to the society. Looking at the positive side of things, the opposition can be a good tool for
evaluating the sectors that may have loopholes in terms of achieving the main agenda of sustainable growth and development. Besides, the main point is that after the
addition of sustainable development by the NSPE in 2007, most of the engineering societies are still reluctant in following suit, besides it being a requirement that
has been carefully analyzed and evaluated.
Sustaining Engineering Codes of Ethics
for the Twenty-First Century
Diane Michelfelder • Sharon A. Jones
Received: 7 April 2011 / Accepted: 6 September 2011 / Published online: 23 September 2011
Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
Abstract How much responsibility ought a professional engineer to have with
regard to supporting basic principles of sustainable development? While within the
United States, professional engineering societies, as reflected in their codes of
ethics, differ in their responses to this question, none of these professional societies
has yet to put the engineer’s responsibility toward sustainability on a par with
commitments to public safety, health, and welfare. In this paper, we aim to suggest
that sustainability should be included in the paramountcy clause because it is a
necessary condition to ensure the safety, health, and welfare of the public. Part of
our justification rests on the fact that to engineer sustainably means among many
things to consider social justice, understood as the fair and equitable distribution of
social goods, as a design constraint similar to technical, economic, and environmental
constraints. This element of social justice is not explicit in the current
paramountcy clause. Our argument rests on demonstrating that social justice in
terms of both inter- and intra-generational equity is an important dimension of
sustainability (and engineering). We also propose that embracing sustainability in
the codes while recognizing the role that social justice plays may elevate the status
of the engineer as public intellectual and agent of social good. This shift will then
need to be incorporated in how we teach undergraduate engineering students about
engineering ethics.
Keywords Engineering codes of ethics Engineering education
Paramountcy clause Social justice Sustainability
D. Michelfelder
Department of Philosophy, Macalester College, St. Paul, MN 55105, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
S. A. Jones (&)
School of Engineering, University of Portland, Portland, OR 97203, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
123
Sci Eng Ethics (2013) 19:237–258
DOI 10.1007/s11948-011-9310-2
Introduction
The National Society for Professional Engineering (NSPE) revised its Code of
Ethics in 2007 to encourage engineers to ‘‘adhere to the principles of sustainable
development.’’ Similar organizations have stressed the need for engineers to support
these principles in the course of their professional practice. Further calls, however,
for engineers to consider the related issue of social justice have met with
considerable debate over what such inclusion may mean for engineering codes of
ethics (Scherer 2003). For example, Vesilind (2002) claims that ‘‘engineers can,
while staying well within the bounds of the present Codes of Ethics, destroy or
modify the environments that support the global ecosystem and in such manner kill
future humans on a grand scale’’ (92). Others, though, have argued that while
sustainability can be ‘‘engineered,’’ justice is a separate societal goal beyond the
scope of the engineer (Agyeman and Evans 2003; Agyeman 2005). There is also the
question of whether the addition of sustainability to the codes of ethics is redundant:
i.e., does the fundamental canon for all professional engineers to ‘‘hold paramount
the public’s welfare’’ already include a commitment to sustainability and perhaps
social justice as well? Even those who agree that sustainability, justice, and the
fundamental canon are not redundant, see the first two issues as outside of the
paramountcy clause, thus devaluing such adherence in professional practice,
perhaps even to the point of making such adherence supererogatory.
Much of the debate described above centers around the relationship among
sustainability, justice, and public health and safety. By better understanding this
relationship, the NSPE and other professional engineering organizations can
appropriately incorporate sustainability into engineering codes of ethics, and thus
exert a positive influence on the practice of engineering. We recognize there are
many critiques of these codes in terms of their ability to affect the individual
engineer who is often faced with many conflicting goals related to project execution.
Some of these critiques are presented in Davis (2001), even as the author tries to
dispel them. While we acknowledge the existence of these critiques, the
implementation of the codes is not the subject of this paper. Instead, we intend to
further discussion, particularly among professional engineers, of what should be
included and prioritized within the codes. We aim to suggest that sustainability
should be included in the paramountcy clause because it is a necessary condition to
ensure the safety, health, and welfare of the public. Our argument rests on
demonstrating that social justice in terms of both inter- and intra-generational equity
is an important dimension of sustainability (and engineering). We also propose that
embracing sustainability in the codes while recognizing the role that social justice
plays may elevate the status of the engineer as public intellectual and agent of social
good. This shift will then need to be incorporated in how we teach undergraduate
engineering students about engineering ethics.
Calls for the engineering profession to deepen its commitments to sustainability
and social justice and proposals to rephrase engineering ethics codes to better reflect
such commitments have mounted in recent years (see for example Baillie and
Catalano 2009; Catalano 2006a, b; Riley 2008.) Our approach adds to these calls by
emphasizing the need to include sustainability in the paramountcy clause of the
238 D. Michelfelder, S. A. Jones
123
codes and by looking at social justice as a dimension of sustainability. We start our
discussion with an overview of what the term sustainability has come to mean, first
in terms of engineering codes of ethics and second, in terms of the engineering
profession itself. This overview demonstrates the uncertainties regarding how
sustainability currently meshes with engineering. We then show how the inclusion
of sustainability in the codes serves to address these uncertainties.
Sustainability and Engineering Codes of Ethics
The phrase ‘‘sustainable development’’ was formally added to the NSPE Code of
Ethics in 2007 and to ASCE’s code in 1996; however, it is missing from the codes
for the other traditional engineering professional organizations. And, both ASCE
and NSPE treat the term in different ways that affect its importance in terms of the
hierarchy of values within the codes.
The NSPE code includes six fundamental canons, followed by rules of practice
that provide guidance to engineers on how to adopt these canons as part of
professional practice. Neither the canons nor the rules of practice include any
reference to sustainability or to sustainable development. Instead, the six canons
stipulate the paramountcy clause in terms of the safety, health, and welfare of the
public, and refer to characteristics such as competency, loyalty, honor, reputation,
and honesty in the fulfillment of professional duties. Rounding out the NSPE code is
a list of nine professional obligations that, if adhered to, also help an engineer to
follow the code. Several professional obligations are closely tied to specific canons.
One of these nine professional obligations states that engineers shall at all times
strive to serve the public interest. It is here that one finds the phrase engineers are
encouraged to adhere to the principles of sustainable development, as one of four
suggestions for how to accomplish this professional obligation. In other words,
according to the NSPE, while engineers are encouraged to ‘‘adhere to the principles
of sustainable development’’ so that they fulfill their obligation to ‘‘strive to serve
the public interest,’’ they are not required to follow these sustainability principles to
‘‘hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public.’’ One is left to
conclude that NSPE does not view sustainable development as a necessary
condition for maintaining the public’s safety, health, and welfare.
ASCE uses the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology’s (ABET)
Code of Ethics as the framework for its own code. ASCE describes four
fundamental principles for civil engineers to follow to ensure compliance with the
canons, followed by the canons themselves, and then guidelines for how to practice
each canon. None of the four fundamental principles specifically includes
‘‘sustainability.’’ However, ASCE changed the canons in 1997 to include
sustainable development in the first and primary canon as follows: Engineers shall
hold paramount the safety, health and welfare of the public and shall strive to
comply with the principles of sustainable development in the performance of their
professional duties. And in 2009, ASCE adopted the following definition of
sustainable development: ‘‘Sustainable development is the process of applying
natural, human, and economic resources to enhance the safety, welfare, and quality
Sustaining Engineering Codes of Ethics 239
123
of life for all of society while maintaining the availability of the remaining natural
resources.’’ However, despite the elevated importance of sustainability as compared
to NSPE, ASCE still sees the responsibility for the engineer in terms of
sustainability as secondary to safety, health, and welfare in that the engineer must
‘‘strive’’ for sustainable development, whereas he/she must ‘‘hold’’ safety, health,
and welfare of the public as paramount. Still, despite this difference in importance,
the location of sustainability in the first canon emphasizes that, at least for civil
engineers, sustainability is intricately tied to the public’s safety, health, and welfare.
Besides civil engineering, the other traditional engineering disciplines include
chemical, mechanical, and electrical engineering with the respective professional
associations of AIChE, ASME, and IEEE. None of these three associations
specifically includes sustainability in its codes of ethics, although each includes
reference to the environment. AIChE’s Code is relatively short and includes
environment in its paramountcy clause as follows: Members shall hold paramount
the safety, health and welfare of the public and protect the environment in
performance of their professional duties. IEEE’s Code is also relatively short and
includes environment in its paramountcy clause though in a different way: members
accept responsibility in making decisions consistent with the safety, health and
welfare of the public, and disclose promptly factors that might endanger the public
or the environment. The ASME Code, among the longest of the professional Codes,
also includes a reference to environment but not within the paramountcy clause.
Instead ASME places environment within an individual canon: engineers shall
consider environmental impact in the performance of their professional duties.
One could say that ASME, AIChE, and IEEE believe it is redundant to add
sustainability to the professional Codes because it is covered by the paramountcy
clause regarding safety, health, and welfare of the public. However, since all three
organizations include environment in their Codes in different ways, it is more likely
that these organizations have merely not progressed from environmental considerations
to the more inclusive set of considerations embodied by sustainability. In
other words, they include only the environmental arm of sustainability.
This assumption is supported by a review of a 2010 blog discussion on AIChE’s
website regarding the question of whether sustainability needs to formally be
included in AIChE’s code despite the inclusion of the term ‘‘environment.’’ This
recent discussion appears to have started as a result of a March 2010 meeting of the
Institute for Sustainability’s (IfS) First Regional Conference on Sustainability and
the Environment for the Pacific Northwest. The blog reveals support for the
inclusion of the broader concept of sustainability, as well as for the idea that codes
of ethics are living documents that must be reviewed and updated periodically
(AIChE 2010). Assuming then that environment is a proxy for how these
engineering professional societies will treat sustainability, AIChE is likely to place
sustainability within the paramountcy clause similar to ASCE; however with even
more of a responsibility for achieving such sustainability as an equal goal with
protecting the public’s safety, health, and welfare. On the other hand, while both
IEEE and ASME view negative impacts to the environment as something to be
avoided and/or disclosed, they appear to see environmental impacts as separate and
of less importance than human impacts.
240 D. Michelfelder, S. A. Jones
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In short, considerable variation exists among engineering disciplines in terms of
what each expects for its members professionally regarding responsibility for
environmental issues and the more general concept of sustainability. Even the codes
themselves are written for different objectives, e.g., ASCE’s code is written to provide
more detailed guidelines for how to practice civil engineering (primarily consulting),
as contrasted with IEEE’s code which is very general and articulates aspirations rather
than rules. In other words, ASCE’s code focuses more on the ‘‘doing’’ of engineering
while IEEE’s focuses more on the ‘‘being’’ that enables the practice of engineering,
though all codes include both aspects. Despite their differences, it appears that the
various engineering codes of ethics are moving towards including environmental
sustainability as an important professional responsibility that is not redundant with the
paramountcy clause, however is of lower priority.
The lower priority may be in part due to a belief that an engineered product can
have a direct impact on human safety, health, and welfare; however an engineered
product’s impact on the environment may only indirectly lead to an impact to
human society. In other words, sustainable development is still seen by the
engineering societies as an environmental issue that does not directly affect human
safety, etc. It also appears that the engineering professions anticipate that there are
some problems so severe in terms of public safety, health, and/or welfare, that an
engineer may need to violate sustainability principles, whether inter- or intragenerational,
to achieve acceptable solutions.
Sustainability and the Engineering Profession
Equating environment with sustainable development is understandable as seen
within the engineering codes. The initial formulation of the term sustainability
stems from use of the phrase ‘‘sustainable development’’ in the 1987 Report of the
World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future, more
commonly known as the Brundtland Report. As defined in this document,
sustainable development is development which meets the needs of the present
without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. This
definition grew out of the interest of the 1983 commission in finding strategies that
would reduce the global environmental impacts caused by development, such as
erosion from deforestation and climate change from increased energy use. In fact,
the objective for sustainable development was a natural result of the evolution of the
environmental movement from a focus on local problems to regional ones and then
to global issues resulting from the use of modern technology.
The meaning of sustainable development, and the more general term sustainability,
continues to evolve as they are applied to different contexts over time (Allenby
2009), and any review of the literature will reveal a multitude of definitions. Each
profession seems to have its own version of the term that is framed by the context of
what sustainability means for that sector. According to Bridger and Luloff (1999),
approaches to defining ‘‘sustainable development’’ have tended to fall into two
categories: Resource Maintenance versus Constrained Growth. While intergenerational
equity is central to both approaches, they differ in terms of how they construe
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the relationship between economic growth and environmental protection. Bridger and
Luloff (1999) use these interpretations and others to suggest that a critical dimension
of any ‘‘sustainable community’’ definition is that the community must first be
committed to social justice. And, despite the continued lack of an accepted universal
definition, for most, the terms ‘‘sustainable development’’ and ‘‘sustainability’’ now
encompass consideration of issues related to the environment, economy, and society.
Besides being influenced by the Brundtland Report, the inclusion of sustainability
within the engineering profession has also been affected by the evolution of
the profession itself. As described by Lucena et al. (2010), engineering in the
eighteenth century focused on transforming nature which led to the development of
networks to economically profit from such transformations while modernizing
communities using technology. In other words, engineering historically followed
more of a Constrained Growth philosophy as described by Bridger and Luloff
(1999). From the 1980s, engineering as a profession began to consider sustainable
development using more of a systems approach of interrelated networks, however as
of today, sustainability is still not seen as inherent to engineering in the way, to take
one example, economic efficiency is, at least as evidenced by engineering curricula.
While not universally accepted, there is one definition for sustainability that is
increasingly being seen as applicable to engineered systems, and has been adopted
by the American Academy of Environmental Engineers (AAEE) for a new
certification of practice test in sustainability. The certification of practice is a
specialty certification that one achieves in a subfield after attaining licensure and
substantial professional experience. The sustainability definition used by AAEE is:
Sustainability [in terms of engineering] is the design of human and industrial
systems to ensure humankind’s use of natural resources and cycles does not
lead to diminished quality of life due either to losses in future economic
opportunities or to adverse impacts on social conditions, human health, and
the environment. (Mihelcic et al. 2003, p. 5315)
To better see the implications of this definition, one must understand that the
standard engineering design process is essentially a decision-making process that
asks the engineer to determine what combination of alternatives is needed to solve a
particular societal problem with technical dimensions. As with any decision process,
the engineer establishes decision criteria and constraints e.g., the minimum load that
must be carried, the maximum deflections allowed, the allowable temperature range,
the minimum voltage, and so on. Based on the design criteria and the constraints,
the engineer evaluates a set of alternatives and selects the best solution to the
problem. This selection process typically involves making tradeoffs as often there is
no single alternative that effectively meets all conditions better than all others. In
addition, evaluating the alternatives often involves predicting the likely consequences
of various actions without having complete and certain information. Along
with regulations, professional standards, client desires, and best practices, the
engineering codes help an engineer to prioritize among the many competing design
criteria and constraints to select a course of action. As described by Lucena et al.
(2010), this design (or decision-making process) is a natural product of the view of
the engineer as a problem-solver facilitating technical modernization that
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unfortunately does not easily include ways to address those non-technical
dimensions that may be critical for sustainability.
Placed against the Brundtland Commission’s definition, the Mihelcic et al. (2003)
definition of sustainability clarifies what the ‘‘needs’’ are for current and future
generations in terms that can be more easily operationalized by engineers as design
criteria and constraints. In other words, from a sustainability perspective, the job of
an engineer is to design technological systems to meet societal demand (growth),
and in so doing, reasonably reduce negative impacts in terms of the range of
economic opportunities, social conditions, human health, and environmental health
for current and future generations. Standard measures can be used to quantify these
potential impacts e.g., economic opportunities may be defined in terms of changes
to industrial output, environmental health in terms of chemical and biological
emissions or natural resource depletion, and human health in terms of exposure to
chemical, biological, or physical risk. Social conditions remain as one of the broad
terms within the definition of sustainability that still requires further consideration,
but for this paper, we assume that measures of social impact can/will be developed.
We also need to understand how engineers traditionally incorporate such
‘‘sustainability’’ constraints as part of the traditional design process. Besides the
many technical constraints for engineered systems, it is almost always standard
practice for an engineer to consider the cost (or economic efficiency) of an
engineered system as a design constraint since most engineered systems must be
bought and sold.1 Similarly, in recent times, environmental laws and regulations
have set environmental health and human health constraints that engineers have
been required to include as part of the design process. Beyond regulations,
environmental sustainability has become a desired attribute for consumer products
with more and more voluntary codes such as LEED, Energy Star, etc. that affect
marketability. As with product cost, the engineer often considers anything that
affects marketability as part of the design process. In other words, engineers are
already used to considering several of the sustainability ‘‘needs’’ in terms of the
traditional design process, however, the way by which an engineer incorporates
these ‘‘needs’’ is often at the aggregate level, as we will now go on to describe.
In terms of product costs, the standard methods for engineering economic
analysis involve benefit-cost analysis: a technique that considers the total expected
benefits of one alternative versus its total expected costs as compared to similar
calculations for other alternatives. The expected costs and benefits are considered
over the life of the supply chain and expressed using a common basis such as
present worth. Benefit-cost analyses are limited to those benefits and costs that can
be assigned market values. In other words, impacts without market assessments are
not included in the analysis. While in an ideal world, the benefit-cost analysis results
in the selection of a Pareto-efficient solution, i.e., some are made better off while no
one is made worse off, this rarely happens. Instead, because of the aggregate nature
of the analysis, equity considerations are not formally included and thus not
1 Product cost should not be confused with the term economic opportunity contained within the Mihelcic
definition. Economic opportunity goes well beyond product cost to include those opportunities that
advance economic production in terms of goods and services.
Sustaining Engineering Codes of Ethics 243
123
considered. For example, a project that results in lower energy costs for a region
may come as the result of displacing the source of income for a sub-population to
allow construction of a hydroelectric dam. There are numerous critiques of the
benefit-cost analysis method from these and other perspectives, a few of which
include Craig et al. (1993), de Graaff (1975), and Iverson (1994).
Similarly, except for specific regulated cases e.g., those involving an endangered
species, environmental impacts are also assessed using aggregate techniques. Life
cycle assessment (LCA) has become a very common technique to look at aggregate
environmental impacts across the supply chain. Essentially one sets the boundaries
for a consumer product; delineates its life cycle in terms of the supply chain from
raw materials to end-of-life; inventories the environmental emissions and natural
resource uses for each step of the supply chain; determines the aggregate impact of
that inventory in terms of standard environmental terms such as energy consumption,
pounds of carbon dioxide emissions, etc.; and evaluates methods to reduce the
aggregate impact, whether the impact is to eco-systems or human health. The LCA
technique represents an improvement over past techniques because environmental
impacts across the entire product life cycle (or supply chain) are considered rather
than just one aspect of the supply chain e.g., the manufacturing process. However,
because each particular impact is aggregated across the life cycle, certain subpopulations
are not considered as an engineer tries to minimize impact. For
example, a LCA may show that life-cycle chemical impacts are least for a particular
alternative, however the actual burden may be placed on one particular species
rather than spread across a variety of species. Critiques of the LCA technique tend
to revolve around the ideas that (a) too much detail makes it difficult to understand
the results, and (b) too much aggregation makes the results meaningless (Johnston
1997, among others). There are also critiques of LCA that suggest that if the tool is
to aid with sustainability assessments, it needs to go beyond environmental issues to
look at social ones as well (Dreyer et al. 2006).
Human health risk assessment represents a different approach from those two
tools in that specific populations are typically defined by the regulations and must be
considered. Some of these sub-populations include the workers in a facility, the
population living within a certain distance of the perimeter of a manufacturing plant,
or the target group who will use the product (a toy, a car, etc.). However, while
various alternatives are considered in terms of the human health risk to that target
population, these considerations are often couched in terms of absolute risk to the
population and not comparative risk for several populations. For example, a risk
analysis may show that the population within a part of a manufacturing facility is
exposed to a risk that is below the regulated level. However, a comparison is rarely
done to show how much that population’s risk has been increased as compared to
workers in another part of the facility. In addition, human health risk calculations
are typically performed only if required by a regulation, or to be factored into an
aggregate benefit-cost or LCA calculation. Similar issues exist with ecological risk
assessment.
In summary, the engineering profession is already incorporating various aspects
of sustainability as constraints in the traditional engineering design process because
of market requirements and existing regulations; however the overall approach
244 D. Michelfelder, S. A. Jones
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reveals two primary problems. The first is that standard approaches to the
engineering design process do not consider the economic and social impacts to the
affected society. In other words those aspects of sustainability are missing and the
current trea