A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology

2. Status and Stakes of Engineering Ethics?

2.1 Professional, applied ethics or something else

In the United States, engineering ethics is often classified among “professional ethics.” The great majority of North American engineering ethics manuals explain why students should rank engineers among the “professionals.” In fact, this insistence on re-demonstration shows the difficulty in defining the status of engineers. In order to understand this discussion, it is necessary to place it in its legal context: the Taft–Hartley law (1947). This law distinguishes, in the United States, the attributes and the prerogatives of the “professions” by opposing them to mere “occupations.” Nevertheless the existence of ethical stakes bound to the practice of the engineering profession has perhaps no link with the fact that engineering is or is not a “profession.” It was already the opinion of Karl Pavlovic (1983), who considered it a “parasitic” question.

In Canada (at least in some regions), Spain, Portugal and Italy, where engineers need to be registered, there is no doubt that engineers are “true professionals.” In France and Germany, the question does not arise because it is not relevant: there is neither a legal status nor a specific social recognition for the so-called “professionals.” The stake of engineers’ deontology differs according to the cultural and legal contexts: in Québec the code of ethics has a legal status, but not in the USA, the Netherlands or France; there is no code of ...