ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how ethics and legal obligations influence decisions that engineers make. Situations during an engineer's career do evolve which are complex and difficult to comprehend and depend on one's integrity, skills and values to enable an ethical course of action. The interpretation of moral values, laws and principles which sway the decisions and behaviour of an individual or a group can be defined as ethics. Ethics is quite commonly termed moral philosophy, which attempts to distinguish between that which is right and that which is wrong, depending on an individual's set of values. Some codes of ethics are entrenched in law by the licensing organisation of a profession with violations of the code subject to a civil or penal penalty, or an organisational penalty such as loss of licence or membership. Criminal law is the body of law which deals with crime and the legal punishment of criminal offences.
