According to a 1990 public perception poll of professions, engineers were viewed to be the most ethical of the major professions, ranking higher than doctors, lawyers, accountants and investment bankers. With that said, it is clear that engineers are held to a higher ethical and moral standard than most other sectors of society. In today’s competitive business environment, however, ethical practice in the profession can be a challenge.

Take the example of an engineer working for a large consulting firm who has just completed a Phase I site assessment for a client:

The property is being assessed because it will be converted from a large shopping mall, built in an area with a past history of heavily industrial use, for residential and commercial uses. Although the site is not being sold, it is being used as collateral for a refinancing loan. In the course of conducting research and preparing the report, the engineer finds out from an older resident of the area that the mall, built 38 years ago, sits on the former site of a creosoting plant. With this information, he prepares a report and recommends that the site be the subject of a Phase II site assessment which requires soil and groundwater samples. When submitted to the client’s law firm, however, indications of possible creosote contamination and the Phase II recommendation are deleted from the report. The reasons for the deletion, says the firm:

• The personal information gathered was hearsay and cannot be relied on.
• The property is not being sold and your client now knows about the alleged contamination.
• The consulting firms has a contractual obligation to meet a deadline on this report.
• The closing for the client’s refinancing is scheduled, and the whole project could fall through if it is delayed or canceled.
• If the engineer performs the final report as requested by the client’s lawyers, he or she could be sued personally for these damages and neither engineer or the firm will ever do work for this client again.

Faced with these decisions, what is an individual engineer to do? More importantly, what could the consequences of the decision be? While the client now knows of the possible contamination, it doesn’t mean that they will act on it. It also doesn’t mean that the lending institution will find out about the contamination in the future and call into question the engineering firm’s final report. In the end, it does not mean that sometime in the future this engineering firm and this individual engineer’s professional liability could be called into question for failure to uncover possible contamination.

Making the "right" decisions and providing ethical service for clients is an important component of effective risk management for engineering, consulting and design businesses. Making inadequate decisions or skimping on professional standards puts companies and individual careers in jeopardy. Unethical practices leave companies vulnerable to severe losses, including the loss of valued clients or damage to a company’s reputation. In many cases, the losses are financial which occur from defending claims filed against a company or individual.

To promote the importance of professional ethics standards in engineering and design industries, the Applied Ethics in Professional Practice Internet Program, established at the University of Washington in Seattle, has established a special Internet program. The program aims to foster discussion of ethical issues in professional practice and to help members of the industry derive practical solutions to ethical problems which they may encounter. The focus of this new internet program is to present real situations taken from professional practice in order to stimulate greater emphasis on ethical issues and to allow Web site visitors an opportunity to avoid similar pitfalls in their own careers.

Each month, the Web site provides visitors with "real life" ethical situations in order to stimulate discussion of ethical issues. The program’s internet address is: http://www.engr.washington.edu/epp/Pepl/Ethics. (Use of the capitalized letters as shown in the address is necessary to properly access the site.) At the site, visitors are given the opportunity to react and comment on the situations and express how they would react under the circumstances. Results and various solutions to each situation are compiled and reported on the site during the following month.

In developing comprehensive risk management procedures within a company, it is important for firms to give employees adequate tools and education to assist in making "good" decisions that can, in turn, be "good" for business. Educating professionals on the importance of ethical decision-making is extremely important in managing a company’s liabilities and potential losses as well as an individual’s professional liability and integrity.

Nine Basic Steps To Personal Ethical Decision Making

While there is a wide spectrum of ethics theories available, most are couched in terms which are difficult for the design professional to understand, let alone apply to the every day, sometimes gut-wrenching, circumstances encountered in professional practices. To help in the day-to-day decisions that face all engineering and design professionals, here are nine simple steps to recall during the decision-making process:

STEP 1: Practice Ethical Behavior Actively: Professionals need to initiate their own personal ethical awareness training program, which includes devising their own definition of their personal world view and review of their own core ethical values.

STEP 2: Beware of "new ethics" programs.-- Very little of true value is "new," all of the necessary tools are already at your fingertips.

STEP 3: Define the ethical problem when it arises --Ignoring the problem doesn’t make it go away.

STEP 4: Formulate Alternatives -- Avoid "first impulse" solutions without having extensive ethical awareness training and experience.

STEP 5: Evaluate the Alternatives -- Are they ethical? Am I the sole beneficiary? How would I feel if the roles or circumstances were reversed?

STEP 6: Seek Additional Assistance -- As appropriate, seek assistance that can be reaped from previous cases, peers or even personal reliance.

STEP 7: Choose the best ethical alternative -- That means choose the one that does the most good for all the right reasons.

STEP 8: Implement the best alternative -- No initiative leads to no results.

STEP 9: Monitor and assess the outcome -- Continuous improvement. Always look at how the process can be improved the next time.