Textbook Summary Thomas Druhan

Engineers must operate in accordance with their local legislation. Failure to do so results in
professional negligence.

Commercial liability states the conditions in a signed contract commonly attached to an engineering
project. Breaches of the conditions within this contract will lead to action taken by the client that
could result in engineers being removed from a project or even loss of licence to work in a specific
company.

Engineers may use risk assessment and management frameworks to meet certain workplace WHS
responsibilities or requirements in a project. These are critical because they allow the engineer to
ensure safe and healthy practices within a tightly controlled environment.

It is important to realise that safety standards differ in every country of the world with some being
more relaxed than others. This is important if outsourcing components in an engineering project
simply because these components may be approved with lower standards met. This thereby
registers the components useless if being used in a country with higher regulation because they
simply will not meet the safety requirements. This could result in catastrophic engineering failure.

Although engineering values differ for each engineer, it is crucial to know what we value and why.

Given that codes of ethics vary in emphasis and offer different levels of guidance for each engineer,
it is important to ensure that engineers consider everyone that might be affected by their work, and
not only those who have the power to seek liability.

Micro ethics include problems that range from inaccurate results to overlooked safety. Macro ethics
refers to the broader picture of ethics and how engineers have an impact on society. Macro ethics
can be achieved through social sustainability, corporate social responsibility, and a social impact
assessment.

In some parts of the world, bribery is accepted as a form of how business is done. This is simply a
form of corruption. Corruption like this is unfair to businesses that rely on expertise because instead
the most unethical company that is willing to pay the largest amount of money wins. Bribery
ultimately undermines civic trust and corrupts a social system in relation to engineering. This may
result in unfair competition and an inefficient engineering frontier.

There are several strategies that engineering firms with high ethical standards follow. These
strategies intend to improve business sense by improving the management of reputational, financial
and social risk, along with increasing the decision-making ability of each engineer. Importantly, for
the larger industry, these strategies eliminate the problem of short-term thinking.

It starts with seeing the big picture. Engineers must design infrastructure in a way that maximises its
lifetime of safety. Secondly, there needs to be strong and accurate leadership to ensure that
engineers meet the determined safety targets and regulations. Lastly, it is crucial to have a clear
code of conduct. Ethical problems are usually complex and quite often do not lend themselves to
simple black and white solutions that engineers seek. Often, the process of ethical analysis and
reflection is just as important as the final decision.

Engineers Australia states that “ethical engineering practise requires judgement, interpretation and
balanced decision-making in context”.
Textbook Summary Thomas Druhan