Engineering Ethics: an Emerging Field in Professional Development

It seems very difficult to talk about the development of "engineering ethics" in France, unlike in other countries, starting with the USA, where this field of applied ethics –, which also includes medical ethics, media ethics and business ethics, to name but the best-known –, has been established since the 1980s. The very expression "engineering ethics" continues to arouse astonishment in the French public, whether made up of non-specialists, engineers or even philosophers. Yet the term has been used for many years in other parts of the French-speaking world, such as Quebec, where it was coined a decade before the United States. As for the existence of codes of ethics, written by engineers for engineers, these have been around since the early 20th century in Great Britain. But it was mainly in the United States that it found a cultural and social context in which to develop, from the twentieth century to the present day.

Yet French engineers are no less concerned than their North American counterparts by the dilemma between their duty of organizational obedience and their social responsibility, which has been widely discussed in engineering circles across the Atlantic through "whistleblowing" cases, some of which, like that of Roger Boisjoly (who worked on the Challenger shuttle), have become textbook cases. The translation in France in the early 2000s by the expressions "alerte éthique" or "alerte professionnelle" did not primarily affect engineering circles. Nor did it involve a willingness to face up to the dilemma mentioned above. Rather, it was in the circles of managers and executives (including engineers) that the expression spread, starting with French companies working with the United States, which were obliged to set up whistle-blowing procedures, in application of the Sarbanne-Oxley law passed after the Enron scandal.

And yet, to take another example, the specific tools for assessing technology that have been incorporated into the ethical thinking of German engineers since the 1980s are certainly just as relevant to French engineers. Furthermore, collaborations between engineers and researchers in the human and social sciences, set up in American and Dutch companies under names as diverse as "Value Sensitive Design", "Constructive Technology Assessment", "Political Technology Assessment", "Socio-Technical Integration, Network" "Approach for Moral Evaluation", may have their equivalent in French companies, but their dissemination remains discreet.

The way in which ethical questions are raised certainly depends on the legal and cultural contexts of each country, as well as the existence of public debate on the subject. The absence of controversy surrounding genetically modified organisms in the United States places engineers working...