Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Professional Ethics Unitiv
Professional Ethics Unitiv
in Engineering
Unit IV
UNIT IV
Safety, Responsibilities and Rights
Safety and Risk – Assessment of Safety and
Risk – Risk Benefit Analysis and Reducing
Risk – Respect for Authority – Collective
Bargaining – Confidentiality – Conflicts of
Interest – Occupational Crime – Professional
Rights – Employee Rights – Intellectual
Property Rights (IPR) - Discrimination
Safety and Risk
SAFETY
• Safety has different definitions and the perceptions are
different for different persons.
• Example
• Safety means the state of being safe. Safe means protected
from danger and harm.
• Initial version of William W. Lowrence’s definition:
• A thing is safe if its risks are judged to be acceptable.
• Modified Lowrence’s definition of Safety:
• A thing is safe (to a certain degree) with respect to a
given person or group at a given time, if its risks were
fully known, if those risks would be judged acceptable
(to that certain degree), in light of settled value
principles.
Safety and Risk
RISK
• A Risk is the potential that something unwanted and
harmful may occur.
• William W. Lowrence has defined risk as “a compound
measure of the probability and magnitude of adverse
effect”.
Risk = Probability of the harm × Magnitude or consequence of the harm
• A risk is acceptable when those affected are generally no
longer apprehensive about it.
• Doubtfulness depends mainly on how the people take the
risk or how people perceive it.
Safety and Risk
RISK
• Various factors that influence the perception of risk
• Probability of risk (possibility of occurrence of risk);
• Consequence of risk (Physical damage or death, economic
loss, damage to property, loss of money, and degradation
of environment);
• Voluntary risk (Some people may take risk voluntarily for
thrill or fun);
• Magnitude of risk (number of people / area involved in
risk);
• Proximity of risk (Closeness of effects caused by risk);
• Method of information widely spreaded on risk;
• Job related risk (whether the risk is compulsorily /forcibly
taken by persons).
Safety and Risk
Risk
• The knowledge about acceptance level of risk is
useful to engineers.
• Designer can redesign the product/project to
include safety measures so as to
• Allow the product fail safely
• Abandon it safely
• Provide for safe escape/evacuation from the product or
site, and thus eliminate or minimize the human loss.
Safety and Risk
Safety and Risk
• Safety was defined as the risk that is known and judged
as acceptable.
• Risk is a potential that something unwanted and harmful
may occur.
• It is the result of unsafe situation, sometimes
unanticipated, during its uses.
• Probability of safety = 1 – Probability of risk
= Probability of occurrence ×
Consequence in magnitude
Types of Risk
Acceptable Risk
Voluntary risk and control
Job related risks
Personal risks
Public risks
Acceptable Risk
Acceptable risk refers to the level of human and property
injury or loss from an industrial process that is considered to be
tolerable by an individual, household, group, organization,
community, region, state, or nation in view of the social,
political, and economic cost-benefit analysis.
Example: For instance, the risk of flooding can be accepted
once every 500 years but it is not unacceptable in every ten
years.
it is management's responsibility to set their company's level of
risk. As a security professional, it is your responsibility to work
with management and help them understand what it means to
define an acceptable level of risk.
Each company has its own acceptable risk level, which is
derived from its legal and regulatory compliance
responsibilities.
Acceptable Risk Vs Unacceptable Risk
Voluntary Risk
A person is said to take ‘VOLUNTARY RISK’.
When he/she is subjected to risk by either his own actions
or action taken by others, volunteers take that risk without
any apprehension. Ex: over rough ground for amusement
Voluntary risks have to do with lifestyle choices. They are
the risks that people take knowing that they may have
consequences. These risks include smoking tobacco,
driving a car, skydiving, and climbing a ladder.
Involuntary risks are risks that people take either not
knowing that they are at risk, or they are unable to control
the fact that they are at risk, such as secondhand smoke.
These risks often include environmental hazards such as
lightning, tsunamis, and tornadoes.
Voluntary risk Vs Involuntary risk
Job related risks
Many workers are taking risks in their jobs in their stride like
being exposed to asbestos.
Exposure to risks on a job is in one sense of voluntary nature
since one can always refuse to submit to the work or may
have control over how the job is done.
But generally workers have no choice other than what they
are told to do since they want to stick to the only job
available to them.
But they are not generally informed about the exposure to
toxic substances and other dangers which are not readily
seen, smelt, heard or otherwise sensed.
Occupational health and safety regulations and unions can
have a better say in correcting these situations but still things
are far below expected safety standards.
Personal Risk
Assessing the personal risk is a difficult task.
Examples: A person living near a chemical plant
voluntarily or involuntarily; A person working in a
nuclear plant or oil refinery plant.
While assessing the personal risk, one should consider the
following ethical questions.
How to access the money value of an individual’s life?
On what basis, the compensation for a risk can be
decided?
Is the compensation for a risk by an amount based on the
exposure/tolerance of the average person justifiable?
What will be the compensation if the tolerance level of
the person is below or above the average tolerance level?
Personal Risk
Assessing the personal risk is difficult.
Any of the following methodologies may be adopted to
assess quantitatively the personal risk.
Assess the voluntary activities (Life insurance policy taken)
Assess the degree of occupational hazard (e.g. dust, radiation and
asbestosis) and its effect on health.
Loss of sense such as sight (eyes), hearing (ears) and loss of limbs etc.
Loss of earning capability
Get assistance by trained arbiter
Public Risk
Assessing the public risk is relatively easy. To assess the
public risk, the loss of assets and the correction costs are
estimated.
Loss of reduction in future income or earning capacity due to loss of
their capability /physical disability.
Cost associated with an accident, (transportation / treatment etc.)
Cost of welfare (rehabilitation, alternate jobs and other benefits, etc.)
Event Tree Analysis
Assessment of Safety and Risk
Absolute safety is never possible to attain and safety can
be improved in an engineering product only with an
increase in cost.
On the other hand, unsafe products increase secondary
costs to the producer beyond the primary (production)
costs, like warranty costs loss of goodwill, loss of
customers, legal action costs, downtime costs in
manufacturing, etc.
Figure indicates that P- Primary costs are high for a highly
safe (low risk) product and S- Secondary costs are high for
a highly risky (low safe) product.
It should now be clear that ‘safety comes with a price’
only.
Assessment of Safety and Risk
Assessment of Safety and Risk
Assessment of Safety and Risk
activities.
When professional or office workers commit the
occupational crimes, it is referred as ’White Collar
Crime’.
Even crimes that are aimed at promoting the interest of
one’s employer rather than oneself are considered as
occupational crimes.
Occupational crimes impinge on various aspects such as
professionalism, loyalty, conflict of interest, and
confidentiality.
Rights of Engineers
Concept of rights can be categorized into
the following three types:
1. Human Rights
2. Employee Rights
a) Contractual rights
b) Non-contractual rights
3. Professional Rights
Rights of Engineers
EMPLOYEE RIGHTS are the rights that apply or refer to the
status or position of employee.
Employees are entitled for moral or legal rights.
Few important ‘employee rights’ are as follows.
No organization shall discriminate against an employee for
criticizing.
No organization shall discriminate against an employee for
being engaged in outside activities of his/her choice.
No Organization shall deprive an employee of the enjoyment
of reasonable privacy in his/her place of work.
No employees in an organization who find fault that his rights
have been violated, shall be discharged or penalized without a
fair enquiry in the organization.
Rights to free speech and dissent, conscientious refusal right
to obey unethical directives are also the rights of employees.
Rights of Engineers
Contractual Employee Rights
These employee rights are institutional rights that arise only due
to the specific agreements in the employment contract.
Examples: The contractual employee rights include
Right to receive a salary of a certain amount; and
Right to receive other company benefits such as
bonuses, salary increments etc.
Non-contractual Employee Rights
These are rights existing even if not formally recognized in the
specific contracts or company policies.
Examples: The non-contractual employee rights include
Right to choose outside activities;
Right to privacy and employer confidentiality
Right to non-discrimination and absence of sexual
harassment at the workplace.
Rights of Engineers
Engineers have several types of moral rights, apart from human,
employee and professional rights as human beings.
PROFESSIONAL RIGHTS are the rights possessed by virtue
of being professionals having special moral responsibilities.
The professional rights include
Right to exercise one’s professional judgment on the basis of
his/her conscience.
Right to refuse to involve in unethical activities
Right to warn the public about harms and dangers
Right to express one’s professional judgment, including his
right to disagree
Right to fair recognition and remuneration for professional
services
Right to talk publicly about one’s work within bounds.
Rights of Engineers
Various aspects of Professional Rights
Rights of Professional conscience
One of the most fundamental rights of engineers
Moral right to exercise responsible professional judgment in discharging
one’s professional responsibilities
Negative right: it places an obligation on other people not to interfere with its
exercise.
Positive right: it places an obligation on other people to do more than merely
not interfering.
Specific Rights
1. Right of conscientious refusal
• According to these rights, no employer can force or pressure an
employee to do something that the employee considers unethical and
unacceptable.
2. Right to recognition
• Engineer’s right to professional recognition for their work and
accomplishment
• Types of recognition/reward: Extrinsic rewards (monetary
remunerations); Intrinsic rewards ( non-monetary remunerations)
Whistle Blowing
It is the act of reporting on unethical conduct within an
organization to someone outside//inside of the
organization in an effort to discourage the organization
from continuing the activity.
(reporting of wrongdoing within part of an
organization to senior management, often
confidentially.)
Types of whistle blowing:
Internal whistle blowing,
External whistle blowing,
Open whistle blowing,
Anonymous whistle blowing.
Whistle Blowing
When should Whistle blowing be
attempted?
Need
Proximity
Capability
Last Resort
Whistle Blowing
To prevent Whistle Blowing:
Company should create a strong ethics
culture;
encourage free and open communication
system within organization;
can create an ethics review committee;
should have willingness to admit
mistakes.
Intellectual Property Rights (IPR)