What is the main content of engineering ethics?

As a kind of professional ethics or practical ethics, ethical methods are naturally introduced into engineering ethics. Utilitarianism ethics, Kant's ethics of respecting human beings and virtue theory are three commonly used methods. For the same engineering problem, these three methods can be used to analyze it respectively. Sometimes these three methods will lead to the same conclusion, and more often, they will lead to different conclusions. The former scenario will increase the power of moral defense, and the latter scenario will make us more puzzled about the ethical issues in the project.

This state is related to the nature of ethical issues in engineering. Compared with technical problems in engineering, engineering ethics problems often have an uncertainty, that is, we often can't choose between right and wrong, right and wrong. Usually, we can only make different degrees of value judgments such as "should" or "best" from a specific angle.

The common feature of the above three methods is to apply general ethical theories to specific scenes or cases. Harris calls this approach a "top-down" approach. In the early 1990s, scholars realized that these methods were not suitable for engineering students and engineering practitioners, at least not for teaching for engineering students. During the 10 years after the 20th century, the projects funded by the National Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences (NEH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) mainly focused on how or how to introduce engineering ethics into the engineering education system. Case teaching method is one of the widely recognized teaching and research methods funded by the National Science Foundation of the United States. Harris calls this approach a "bottom-up" approach.