As engineers, we have an important role to design and build with ethics in mind.

Moral

principles should be included in everyone's lives, but they may differ from person to person. In

any job or internship, there are codes of ethics to make sure the environment, company,

employees, and customers are not greatly negatively affected by a product. The codes of ethics

hold everyone to the same standard and can be used as a guide when creating new products to

ensure safety and avoid potential problems.

Ethics are moral principles that affect a person's decision-making. Ethics are different for

every person. For me, ethics is the matter of ensuring that whatever decision I make does not

affect other people or the environment negatively. I also think about how an ethical decision can

affect me in that moment as well as in the future. I think that it is really important to not only

think about yourself, when making an ethical decision but to think about all the possible

outcomes. Depending on how major the ethical situation is, I make sure I take my time to make

an ethical decision to make sure I am making the right choice for myself as well as making a

decision with the least negative effect.

In class, we discussed different ethical issues. The issue I read about was the Volkswagen

issue. In the issue I read, Volkswagen got caught creating and implementing software to cheat

emissions tests. The emissions test is done to hold every car to a standard to make sure that the

car doesn’t produce a certain amount of pollution. Their cheat emissions technology allowed

their cars to produce up to 40 times more pollution than allowed. With the investigation, they

estimate as much as 900,000 tonnes of extra NOx emissions a year was being produced by

Volkswagen. Because Volkswagen breached the Clean Air Act, they would be fined $37,500 per

vehicle and could face other repercussions with more investigation.

 Coming into this class, I had a pretty good understanding of ethics. I think that my ethical

values are like what we learned in class. For me, ethics is the matter of ensuring that whatever

decision I make does not affect other people or the environment negatively. I felt that how I feel

about ethics would almost summarize the IEEE Code of Ethics that we learned about in class. I

think that I have a better and clearer understanding of the importance of ethics and how they can

be applied in real-world situations in the workforce. I truly do believe that every ethical decision

is different based on the situation and that there is never one right answer. Because there is no

one right answer, it is really important to make sure that the effect of different outcomes are

thought about.

In this class, we learned about Virtue Ethics. Virtue Ethics consists of integrity, honesty,

fidelity, charity, responsibility, and self-discipline. From the Volkswagen issue, I think that the

most important Virtue Ethics, related to this issue, is integrity, honesty, and responsibility. I chose

those three because they are most relevant to the Volkswagen issue. Integrity is important in this

issue because they were not practicing strong morals or following the ethics codes as well as not

making good ethical judgment. Honesty is important because Volkswagen was not being truthful

about the amount of pollution that was being produced by each car and intentionally bypassing

standards, which is not fair to the customers as well as other company competitors.

Responsibility is important because they cannot be trusted by customers as well as in general to

pass tests honestly. They are also responsible for hurting the environment. The other 3 virtue

ethics were not as visible in this issue as the ones that I chose.

Overall, ethics is a very important topic of conversation. I think that it is important to

have a class like this one, to prepare and better equip future engineers with the knowledge of

ethics. Going forward I will continue to make ethical decisions based on what I have learned in
this class. It is always important to think about the IEEE Codes of Ethics as well as the Virtue

Ethics that we learned about this week.