A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology

1. The Birth of a Discipline

Engineering ethics is an academic research field which can be first traced back to the United States at the end of the 1970s. In this specific context, this discipline has taken its roots in a former ethical reflection developed by professional organizations. Following the model of the British Institute of Civil Engineers, the American associations drafted numerous “codes of ethics” at the beginning of the twentieth century (AICE in 1911, AiChE and AIEE in 1912, ASME and ASCE in 1914). They also attempted, unsuccessfully, to reach an agreement on a common text. In the middle of the 1970s, most of them converged on the code put forward by the Engineers’ Council for Professional Development (now the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology [ABET]).

The end of the 1970s marked a turning-point for engineering ethics, thanks to the financial support of the National Science Foundation (NSF), which allowed the creation of teams made up of philosophers and engineers. These teams achieved the first specialized conferences (CSEP of the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1982: Weil 1983), published manuals (Baum and Flores 1978, Schaub and Pavlovic 1983, Martin and Schinzinger 1983–95, Harris et al. 1995, Whitbeck 1998) and essays (Unger 1994, Davis 1998). They put on line many codes of ethics (CSEP) as well as case studies for pedagogical use (Murdough Center of Texas A&M University 1992, CSES Western Michigan University 1995). The NSF also contributed ...