I don't feel like being an engineer obliges me any more or any less than any other employee regarding the ethical consequences of my work, nor do I have any stronger obligation than any other employee to not do unethical work.
It's only a very small minority of engineers who do. Unless you're a PE and you get to sign off on large development projects, there's no real accountability.
No matter how much teeth a governing body has, it's always going to be gun shy about denying people their livelihood. They're only going to go after the most egregious and flagrant problems. As long as the transgressions are mild, they pose no real danger to those who want to violate whatever ethics code are in place.
I'd disagree with that. Engineers were told what to do or they would lose their jobs by the business people who had their ethical center removed as part of their MBA program.
We don't need a Hippocratic oath for engineers, we need it for management. It shouldn't be up to the individual engineer to guide the organization towards better morals, it should be upper management.
Being expected to behave ethically is part of being an Engineer regardless of what your boss expects. Now we increasingly see real world negative consequences of the work of software engineers I don't see why they should be any different.
Surely the moral responsibility of a manager ordering such work done is just as great as that of an Engineer carrying it out. So why is the debate entirely about the Engineers refusing to do the work, and nobody is talking about managers refusing to give the order?
I'm not saying that anyone should refuse, I think that's a foolish idea and as has been pointed out the Government has many tools and sanctions available it can use to compel compliance. I just find the current debate somewhat blinkered.
I think individual engineers absolutely have a duty to act ethically, and that that duty includes not working on unethical things. However, I don't think that stating that the behaviour is unethical and that people shouldn't do it helps solve the problem, whereas I do think that we could ban bullshit ML woo or reform our institutions so that they don't use it to spy on people
I agree, but I also believe that as an engineer I have an duty to refuse to build something under conditions that, once built, would cause harm to others. Or at least to relay my concerns to management in writing before proceeding.
And sometimes, quitting is the ethical thing to do.
I think the other commenters have raised valid points that you seem to be willfully disregarding. It’s actually similar to when you deny Amazon has a “hire to fire” policy, or a toxic PIP culture.
I guess engineering managers like us are trained to turn a blind eye to bad ethics. We spend most of our work time slavishly rationalizing the power structure so we develop an instinct for bending the knee outside of work.
This argument doesn't hold up if you refer back to all engineering ethics dilemmas of the past. If all these engineers could have easily gotten another job, why did they stay? Why did Boeing engineers not speak up, why did Firestone engineers not speak up, the list continues. Not everyone has the same moral compass and that is the bottom line.
Engineers aren't solely responsible, but... Did you software guys not take engineering ethics classes? You have a responsibility to society to consider health and safety of the public, even if it means losing your job.
"Moral integrity" doesn't really have anything to apply to to the day-to-day work of an engineer. A moral compass can't work without a magnetic field of context.
Considering most engineers' main concern is just to meet a spec and get it shipped, I don't really see how the burden of ethical justification falls to them, when they don't even necessarily know how it'll be used. Can't really see how they could act as moral gatekeepers in a corporate structure.
This is stupid. There is no such thing as working without morals, and you aren't going to have 'sanity' by asking engineers to adopt someone else's (also arbitrary) morals rather than their own.
That is a question for the engineer's own conscience , there's a reason the profession is self-regulated. The only decision that's not acceptable is to ignore ethical dimensions entirely.
Well, that and bringing the profession into public disrepute, because we're still trying to turn a profit here, dagnabbit!
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