Engineering professionals are serving the humanity through their knowledge and servitude. Engineers help to create infrastructure that is used by millions of people from all walks of life. Engineers’ knowledge can help poor and needy in ways more than one can imagine. A Bridge designed by architectural engineers serves the poor and rich alike, A public library built by civil engineers helps students of all background to learn, Computer Engineers are helping build systems which is running the world today, Electrical engineers are helping the power to reach to last mile. List can go on forever and we can easily say that engineers and their contribution to the modern society is very crucial but as they say with great power comes the great responsibility, we still see several cases of corrupt engineers getting caught taking bribes, Construction or engineering projects being of low quality, etc. All these incidents put engineering as profession in bad light thus it became imperative for modern engineering education to become more ethics oriented. We will explore the engineering ethics which should be known by each engineering students. Let’s see why one should know engineering ethics.
Ethics defines the quality of work.
Ethics are important because engineers’ decision can be beneficial or disastrous for public. An engineer can help create a bridge which can serve for public good for hundreds of years OR an unethical engineer can compromise on quality and build a bridge which may take lives of hundreds of people. Ethics are important because ethics can be defining factor between a good quality engineer and a bad quality one.
Power to oppose a bad decision.
Ethics are moral ground which can act like power lines for an ethical person, if an ethical engineer witness something wrong and sense that this must opposed than he will have power to speak up against bad decisions. On the other hand, an unethical engineer will ignore as he does not have moral courage to speak up against bad or unethical decision.
New Age Need it more.
We have seen in movies that machines have revolted against humanity, well that fiction will be our reality if upcoming technology of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are not made to understand ethics in broader sense. Guess who is building these technologies, you guessed it right engineers are the one who is working on these future technologies. Thus it becomes more important that engineers should be imbibed with ethics in their daily life.
So now we know why engineers should know about ethics let’s check what are key ethical points which engineers need to follow.
Ethics for Engineers
Respect what’s right: Engineers should respect what’s right and should not allow anyone to disrespect correct thing.
Avoid unnecessary problems to others: Engineers works from position of power, they can influence key decisions of projects. At the same time, they can support people to work or create obstacles, engineers should have a fine judgement and avoid unnecessary problems to others so that they can work smoothly.
Encourage righteous practices: Engineers should promote righteous practices among their area of work and area of influence that way they can create an atmosphere of trust and ethics to be followed by all.
Enable others to work: This ethical trait should be implemented by engineers so that they support others by their knowledge and subject matter expertise.
Honesty over convenience: Engineers should always choose to work honestly. There can be a convenience involved with unethical practices but those will make engineers week at core and they will not be able to perform their duties effectively, thus engineers should always choose honesty over convenience.
Any engineer can build things and solve problems, but an ethical engineer also get respect as he represents model behaviour for society.
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