Description
Book SynopsisWhile this book begins with the analysis of engineering as a profession, it concentrates on a question that the last two decades seem to have made critical: Is engineering one global profession (like medicine) or many national or regional professions (like law)? While science and technology studies (STS) have increasingly taken an “empirical turn”, much of STS research is unclear enough about the professional responsibility of engineers that STS still tends to avoid the subject, leaving engineering ethics without the empirical research needed to teach it as a global profession. The philosophy of technology has tended to do the same. This book’s intervention is to improve the way STS, as well as the philosophy of technology, approaches the study of engineering. This is work in the philosophy of engineering and the attempt to understand engineering as a reasonable undertaking.
Table of ContentsPreface
Part I: Distinguishing Engineering from other Professions
- Profession
- Engineering—From Chicago to Shantou
- Why Architects Are Not Engineers
- Distinguishing Chemists from Engineers
- Will Software Engineers ever be Engineers?
- Engineering and Business Management: The Odd Couple
Part II: The Study of Engineering as a Profession
- Methodological Problems in the Study of Engineering
- Profession as a Lens for Studying Technology
Part III: Professional Responsibility of Engineers
- “Ain’t No One Here But Us Social Forces”
- Engineering Ethics, Individuals, and Organizations
- “Social Responsibility” of Engineers
- Macro-, Micro-, and Meso-Ethics
- Doing the Minimum
- Re-inventing the Wheel: “Global Engineering Ethics”
- In Praise of Emotion in Engineering
Part IV: Engineering’s Globalism
- The Whistle Not Blown: WV, Diesels, and Engineers
- Three Nuclear Disasters and a Hurricane: Reflections
- Ethical Issues in the Global Arms Industry
- Temporal Limits on What Engineers Can Do
Epilogue
A Research Agenda
