Ethics for Professional Managers and Engineers

Catalog description

Many professions, including engineering and even individual businesses, have their own code of professional ethics. Such codes, however, are often lacking in important detail or fail to consider issues brought about by emerging technologies. In this course we will attempt to go beyond these ethics codes by critically examining a variety of difficult and controversial ethical questions that arise in both a business and an engineering context. Such questions may include: 1) “When, if ever, are individual employees obligated to make public the unethical conduct of their employer?”; 2) “Do corporations have a responsibility beyond maximizing profits?”; 3) “How ought autonomous vehicles be programmed to respond when the lives of passengers and pedestrians are on the line?”, etc. In addition, we will take a look at influential moral theories and see how they bear on particular ethical questions. This is an introductory philosophy course, and as such presupposes no background knowledge in philosophy. Reading selections may include both historical and contemporary philosophical texts.