The Institution of Engineering and Technology.

(IET)

England & Wales

Competence
The importance of competence in engineering.

How do you know whether you, as an engineer, are competent to make a decision
which might have important personal consequences for people?

At first glance, competence may not appear to be an ethical value, but in fact engineers have a number of
important ethical duties with regard to competence.
As a professional engineer, you have a duty to maintain your competence in your particular field. This
means keeping up to date with technological developments and deepening and broadening your
knowledge through continuing professional development. This is an ethical duty because it ensures that
you can be relied upon to deliver work to a high standard, and so preserves public trust in the engineering
profession.
As well as maintaining your competence, you have a duty to recognise the limits of your competence.
This means not taking on work which you are not qualified or able to do well. In a similar way, you must
not delegate work to subordinates who are not properly qualified or competent.

Confidentiality

The importance of confidentiality in engineering, and a case study.

In what situations can a claim of whistle-blowing justify the disclosure of confidential

information?

Confidentiality is the limiting of access to information to those who have either a legal or an ethical right to
that access. Although confidentiality is perhaps more traditionally associated with professionals such as
doctors, lawyers and psychiatrists, engineers too can frequently find themselves in possession of
confidential information. You should try to be aware of any confidentiality requirements attached to any of
the data to which you have access.

Sometimes restrictions on access to data can have a legal or contractual basis. For example, any
contract of employment will almost certainly contain a clause forbidding you to divulge commercially
sensitive information about your employer, even after your term of employment is complete. In other
cases, you may not be subject to legal restrictions, but still have an ethical duty to maintain confidentiality,
for example if a colleague talks to you in confidence about a personal matter.

While it is important to maintain confidentiality in almost all cases, there may be some unusual cases
where confidentiality requirements can be overridden, for example when this is the only way to prevent
unethical behaviour from taking place. Whistle-blowing cases are like this; whistle-blowers may feel that
they have an overriding ethical duty to divulge confidential information, for example to the media.
Furthermore, being a whistle-blower is a legal status which may grant immunity from prosecution for
breaching confidentiality in some cases.

It can also sometimes be difficult to decide precisely what information counts as confidential. This can
depend on various factors such as the situation, and the individuals involved.

Fairness
The importance of fairness in engineering, and two case studies.

What is the fairest way to approach the allocation of a resource?

As an engineer your decisions will have an impact on a variety of different groups of people. These
stakeholders could include your employers, other engineers (including other members of the IET), other
colleagues, customers and the public at large. As a professional you have a duty to treat all of these
people fairly.

It is sometimes difficult to identify exactly who will be affected by a particular decision, and what their
interests are. Taking a wide view of your work and its place in society will allow you to balance your
responsibilities to various groups, and to make optimal decisions based on all of the information
available. Engineers need to consider fairness when:

Distributing resources;
Dealing with employees/subordinates and other colleagues;
Interacting with customers;
Taking decisions with implications for equality and diversity.

Being fair is not simply a matter of treating everybody as having an equal stake. Sometimes decisions will
affect some stakeholders disproportionately, and some groups will have rights which must be protected
even at the expense of others interests. An engineer will sometimes be subjected to conflicting pressures
and will need to exercise professional judgement in balancing the interests of different groups.

Honesty

The importance of honesty in engineering, and a case study.

How do you take advantage of business opportunities whilst making sure you are as
honest as possible with your customers?

As an engineer you are likely to be working for the benefit of a number of different groups of people, and
in many cases you will have a duty to keep these people informed of relevant facts. The public trusts
professionals to provide information that is as complete and accurate as possible.

However, it is not always obvious what information you will need to disclose, and to whom, particularly
when you have conflicting obligations to different groups. You may need to make a judgement about what
you are required to do in order to satisfy the principle of professional honesty.

Honesty is particularly important for engineers when:

Bidding for projects;

Disclosing conflicts of interest;
Deciding whether to draw attention to unethical behaviour;
Answering requests for information under the Freedom of Information Act;
Disclosing sensitive personal issues;
Talking about your qualifications, experience, positions of responsibility, etc.

Honesty is not simply a matter of not lying: you may at times need to disclose information which has not
been requested directly, and which in some cases people may not want to hear.

Integrity

The importance of integrity in engineering, and a case study.

To what extent should your own moral views about war and warfare affect your
professional judgement as an engineer in the defence industry?

Integrity is a difficult concept to define. It has to do with acting ethically, even when there is no personal
advantage to doing so. A person of integrity will resist pressure to compromise their ethical standards and
beliefs, whether that pressure comes from employers, clients, or anywhere else. When you are employed
by an organisation, to an extent you take on that organisations values. But that doesn't mean you should
stop questioning the ethics of your actions. Are there certain things that you would never do, even if
refusing meant losing your job?

Having personal integrity involves being clear about your own values, and having professional integrity
means engaging with the values of your profession. You might also think that having integrity means you
should stand for something, trying to change practices and attitudes that you think are less than ethical.
For some, having integrity involves trying to influence for the better the practices of your employer, your
profession, or even society at large.

Objectivity

The importance of objectivity in engineering, and a case study.

How do you give objective professional advice, whilst making sure that you don't
disclose confidential information?

The public, clients and employers expect that an opinion given by a professional engineer will be as
objective as they are able to make it. This means that it will not be biased or improperly influenced.
In practice, it can be difficult to establish whether a given opinion is truly objective or not. For example,
say you are asked for your opinion on whether your employer should invest in a particular type of
software, from a manufacturer whom you personally dislike. This may be fine if your dislike is based on
previous bad experiences of using their software.

However, if it is based on, say, the fact that a family member used to work for the software manufacturer
and felt that he or she was badly treated by them, you should clearly not allow this to influence your
opinion.

As a general rule, if you are happy to give an honest account of all the factors that influence your opinion,
then that opinion is probably objective.

You may have an ethical duty not to put yourself in certain situations which may threaten your objectivity.
For example, one reason engineers and other professionals are not allowed to take bribes and
inducements is because this is likely to damage their ability to be objective.

Health, safety and risk (Responsibility)

The importance of health, safety and risk in engineering, and a case study.

How do you ensure the safety of a workforce whilst respecting the autonomy of workers
and retaining a comfortable working environment?

Engineers in all fields, but particularly those with management responsibilities and those working with
potentially dangerous equipment, will be subject to various legal requirements with regard to health and
safety. It is expected that, as a minimum, you will familiarise yourself with these and ensure that you
comply with them.

In addition, engineers must, according to the IET Rules of Conduct, at all times take all reasonable care
to limit any danger of death, injury or ill health to any person that may result from their work and the
products of their work. As withenvironmental sustainability this leaves some room for individual judgment
about what is acceptable or reasonable.

In many cases, it may not be in your power as an engineer to make the final decision about a particular
engineering system which you believe may carry certain risks. In these cases, it is essential that you
ensure that your concerns are clearly articulated and communicated. In some cases, if a decision has
been taken against your better judgment and you feel that your concerns have not been properly taken
into account, you may be justified in communicating those concerns more highly within the organisation.

Environmental sustainability.

The importance of environmental sustainability in engineering, and a case study.

How do you handle public and commercial pressures when called upon to provide
expert advice?

Increasingly, all professionals are having to consider the impact their work has on the environment, and
engineers are often in a position to make decisions which will have particularly significant repercussions.
Unfortunately, these decisions are rarely simple, and can often involve weighing up conflicting ethical
claims which can seem incommensurable (i.e. it may not be possible to measure one against the other).

The IET Rules of Conduct state that an engineer should take all reasonable steps to avoid waste of
natural resources, damage to the environment, and damage or destruction of man-made products, but
how can we decide what is reasonable? When does a cost become punitively high for a relatively small
benefit? What if minimising environmental impact leads to other ethical problems (e.g. when goods or
services become too expensive to be accessed by anybody but the rich)? Finally, environmental concerns
can sometimes compete with each other, e.g. when cutting down on carbon emissions means sacrificing
biodiversity.