Engineering Ethics: An Industrial Perspective
General Content
This text is divided into three parts. In Part II, thirteen detailed case studies are given of situations in which an engineer (or in the case of Bell Labs, a scientist) warned his superiors of a potentially grave situation but was ignored. Unlike case studies in other engineering ethic texts, these cases are not written in narrative form. Rather, each is presented in the following format: 1) the reported (newspaper) story, 2) the back story, 3) applicable regulations, 4) an engineering perspective (warnings before the event), and 5) questions for discussion.
To complement these case studies, a discussion of personal responsibility and how an engineer sets his or her personal engineering ethics threshold is presented in Part I. In Chapter 1, descriptions of some of the major ethical theories and references to engineering ethics codes are presented. In Chapter 2, options for engineering actions when this personal threshold is reached are detailed. In Part II, which is Chapter 16, actual anonymous industrial cases of engineering ethics are presented that include an abbreviated description of each situation and how each engineer responded.