Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO, USA.
Renmin University of China, 1500 Illinois Street, Golden, CO, 80401, USA.
Sci Eng Ethics. 2021 Apr 16;27(3):28. doi: 10.1007/s11948-021-00289-7.
Engineering ethics calls the attention of engineers to professional codes of ethical responsibility and personal values, but the practice of ethics in corporate settings can be more complex than either of these. Corporations too have cultures that often include corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices and policies, but few discussions of engineering ethics make any explicit reference to CSR. This article proposes critical attention to CSR and role ethics as an opportunity to help prepare engineers to think through the ethics of their professional practice. After a brief overview of the evolution of social responsibility within engineering ethics in the United States, this article shares empirical research with practicing engineers in the mining and energy industries to explore how their formal ethics training did and did not prepare them to grapple with the ethical dimensions of their professional practice. It then illustrates the ways in which these dilemmas and the strategies employed for navigating them are framed within CSR policies and practices and resonate more strongly with role ethics rather than ethical theory as currently taught in most US engineering programs. The article concludes that engineering ethics teaching and learning would benefit from explicitly incorporating critical discussions of role ethics and CSR.
工程伦理引起了工程师对职业道德准则和个人价值观的关注，但企业环境中的伦理实践可能比这两者都更为复杂。公司也有文化，其中通常包括企业社会责任（CSR）实践和政策，但很少有关于工程伦理的讨论明确提到 CSR。本文提出，关注企业社会责任和角色伦理是帮助工程师思考其专业实践伦理的机会。本文简要概述了美国工程伦理中社会责任的演变，然后分享了与矿业和能源行业的从业工程师的实证研究，以探讨他们的正式伦理培训在多大程度上以及在哪些方面使他们能够应对专业实践中的伦理问题。接着，本文说明了这些困境以及为解决这些困境而采用的策略是如何在企业社会责任政策和实践中形成的，并且与角色伦理而不是大多数美国工程课程中教授的伦理理论更相关。文章最后得出结论，工程伦理教学可以从明确纳入对角色伦理和企业社会责任的批判性讨论中受益。
