Lecture 3

By Mehwish Mujahid
UMT,Lahore
Meanings of Responsibility
 1. Obligations. Responsibilities are obligations-types
of actions
 that are morally mandatory. Some obligations are
incumbent on
 each of us, such as to be honest, fair, and decent.
 Other obligations are role responsibilities, acquired when
we take on special roles such as parents, employees, or
professionals.
 Thus, a safety engineer might have responsibilities for
making regular inspections at a building site, or an
operations engineer might have responsibilities for
identifying potential benefits and risks of
 one system as compared with another.
Meanings of Responsibility
 2. Accountable. Being responsible means being
morally accountable.
 This entails having the general capacities for moral
agency, including the capacity to understand and act
on moral reasons.
 It also entails being answerable for meeting particular
obligations, that is, liable to be held to account by
other people in general or by specific individuals in
positions of authority.
Meanings of Responsibility
 3. Conscientious, integrity. Morally admirable
engineers.
 They diligently try to do the right thing, and they
largely succeed in doing so, even under difficult
circumstances.
 In this sense, being responsible is a virtue-an
excellence of character. Of course, no one is perfect,
and we might be conscientious in some areas of life,
such as our work, and less
conscientious in other areas, such as raising a child.
Meanings of Responsibility
 The preceding meanings all concerned moral
responsibility,
in particular as it bears on professional responsibility.
Moral responsibility is distinguishable from causal, job,
and legal Responsibility.
 Causal responsibility consists simply in being a cause of
some event. (A young child playing with matches causes a
house to burn down, but the adult who left the child
withthe matches is morally responsible.)
 Job responsibility consists of one's assigned tasks at the
place of employment.
Meanings of Responsibility
 And legal responsibility is whatever the law requires-
including legal obligations and accountability for
meeting them.
 The causal, job, and legal responsibilities of engineers
overlap with their moral and professional
responsibilities, although not completely. In particular,
professional responsibilities transcend narrow job
assignments.
Dimensions of Engineering