How much responsibility ought a professional engineer to have with regard to supporting basic principles of sustainable development? While within the United States, professional engineering societies, as reflected in their codes of ethics, differ in their responses to this question, none of these professional societies has yet to put the engineer's responsibility toward sustainability on a par with commitments to public safety, health, and welfare. In this paper, we aim to suggest that sustainability should be included in the paramountcy clause because it is a necessary condition to ensure the safety, health, and welfare of the public. Part of our justification rests on the fact that to engineer sustainably means among many things to consider social justice, understood as the fair and equitable distribution of social goods, as a design constraint similar to technical, economic, and environmental constraints. This element of social justice is not explicit in the current paramountcy clause. Our argument rests on demonstrating that social justice in terms of both inter- and intra-generational equity is an important dimension of sustainability (and engineering). We also propose that embracing sustainability in the codes while recognizing the role that social justice plays may elevate the status of the engineer as public intellectual and agent of social good. This shift will then need to be incorporated in how we teach undergraduate engineering students about engineering ethics.
It is the second volume in a series that emanated from a workshop on Philosophy in Engineering that took place at the University of Delft in October 2007 and that began a continuing series of workshops named by the acronym IPET followed by the year of the workshop [1]. Prior to that, there had been three significant publications that had illustrated the value of pursuing the relationship between philosophy and engineering [2], [3] and engineering education [4]. The success of this 2007 University of Delft workshop led to IPET 2008 being held at the Royal Academy of Engineering in London. While the focus of both volumes is on engineering, necessarily many of the papers have implications for engineering education. It is not without significance that at the 2007 Frontiers in Education Conference, some members of the ERM Division of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) launched a special session on the philosophy of engineering education in the hope they could develop an interest in this dimension of engineering education [5]. In subsequent years, philosophy became a regular feature of both the Frontiers in Education and ASEE annual conferences, and many papers were published, including a substantial bibliography and review [6]. As a subject, it is represented in the ASEE by the Technological and Engineering Literacy/Philosophy Division (TELPHE), who have published several handbooks on philosophical topics [7], [8].The editors of Philosophy and Engineering: Reflections on Practice, Principles and Process consider that one of its recurring themes is the role that philosophy plays in engineering education. In this respect has it been more successful than the deliberate attempt to do this at the ASEE and FIE conferences, which raises the question of whether the people who support those conferences can learn from this volume.The volume is divided into three parts: 1) Reflections on Practice; 2) Reflections on Principles; 3) Reflections on Process. They are preceded by a foreword in which there is an exchange between the editors and the distinguished historian and philosopher of technology Carl Mitcham. The editors put a number of questions to Mitcham. Among them was "To what extent do you agree with a remark by Pieter Vermaas [9] to the effect that the philosophy of engineering had successfully emerged as a sub-discipline?" No paper in the present volume seeks to answer this question in the way that it has been answered for engineering education by Froyd and Lohmann [10] or Williams [11] for the practice of engineering. However, these authors sought to show
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