ABSTRACT

A code of ethics for the engineering profession would be animated by three special interests or concerns in an ascending scale of importance: the integrity and efficiency of the productive process; technological progress; and the advance of scientific knowledge about reality. With respect to those principles that should govern the ordering of society as a whole, Western thought at present wavers uneasily between two equally dangerous absolutes. One of these is absolute miscalled cultural relativism. This view is miscalled relativism because it converts cultural influences and existing institutional arrangements into an absolute. Though it is no more intelligent to pass a moral judgment in abstraction from existing social institutions than it is to pass a similar judgment about traffic regulations, there attaches to the field of ethics a flavor that makes distasteful any recognition that a thing can be right in part because it exists.