Working-life ethical issues faced by engineers

Abstract

<p>In recent years, there have been public discussions about novel ethical issues emerging from new engineering fields, such as the usage of artificial intelligence. While those are important issues to discuss, they do not necessarily reflect the ethical issues engineers face in their work. In this paper, we discuss problems that engineers of different disciplines face in their professional life, based on a survey sent to members of the Association of Academic Engineers and Architects in Finland. From the 433 respondents, we received over 130 descriptions of ethical issues encountered within their professional lives. We divided the encountered issues of the survey into two main categories: ethical issues about general work life and those on more engineering-specific situations. The focus of this paper is on the engineering specific ethical issues and the reactions they encounter. We discuss about who noticed the problems and how the workplaces reacted to the issues. In addition, it is addressed whether companies have policies in place to handle ethical issues. Furthermore, we discuss the types of support the engineers indicated hoping to receive from different stakeholders. On a larger scale, the goal is also to gather knowledge on how to improve engineering education to meet the needs of future engineers on ethical issues.</p>