Practical ethical frameworks for civil engineering and environmental systems

ABSTRACT

Ethics is receiving increased emphasis in civil and environmental engineering. However, despite the proliferation of college textbooks and courses encouraging ethical reasoning, engineers in practice often limit their understanding narrowly to their individual actions. Broader issues of global importance are usually addressed in an ad-hoc manner, if at all. Our goal is to present the topic of ethics in a way that appeals to engineers, especially those receptive to ‘systems thinking’. Our broader motivation is to encourage the development of educated, virtuous and caring professionals who engage in contextual ethical reasoning about complex systems. To these ends, we summarise relevant theoretical and applied concepts for ethical analysis, building from a recent chapter that reflects on ethics from an engineering systems perspective (but applied to the healthcare industry). We emphasise virtue ethics and the ethics of care as crucial supplements to duty ethics and utilitarianism. Analytical methods we discuss include Value Sensitive Design, Design for Care, and a multi-level classification of ethical issues into the micro (individual), meso (institutional), and macro (societal) levels. This work collects relevant considerations for designers of civil and environmental engineering systems and researchers interested in developing related design and analysis methods that include practical ethical reasoning. This work is part of a Special Issue on Systems Perspectives: Clarity through Examples (see Dias 2023).

KEYWORDS:

• Care
• virtues
• values
• practical wisdom
• stakeholders
• socio-technical systems

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for the thorough reading of our manuscript and for providing substantive comments that helped us refine our message.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).