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 has been established since the 1980s under the name "engineering ethics". The very expression "engineering ethics" continues to arouse astonishment in a French public made up of non-specialists, engineers and even philosophers. Yet it has been used for many years in other parts of the French-speaking world, such as Quebec. Codes of ethics, written by engineers for engineers, have existed since the early 20th century, with the oldest code published in the UK by the prestigious Association of Civil Engineers in 1910. However, it is above all in the United States that this type of writing has found a particularly favorable cultural and social context in which to flourish from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day.

However, the French are no less concerned than their North American counterparts by the dilemma between their duty of organizational obedience and their social responsibility, a topic that has been widely discussed in engineering circles across the Atlantic through whistleblowing cases since the 1970s. The French translation of this word in the early 2000s as "alerte éthique" or "alerte professionnelle" did not primarily affect engineering circles. Nor did it primarily concern the type of dilemma so often discussed by American engineers. Rather, it was with regard to financial abuses that these notions 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 Act (2002) passed after the Enron and WorldCom financial scandals.

In a different cultural context, since the 1980s in Germany, specific technology assessment tools have been integrated into the thinking of engineers, reflecting a concern for ethical issues. It's likely that these issues concern French engineers just as much as their counterparts on the other side of the Rhine. Elsewhere, new collaborations between R&D engineers and researchers in the humanities and social sciences have developed under such diverse names as Value Sensitive Design, Constructive Technology Assessment, Political Technology Assessment, Socio-Technical Integration Research and Network Approach for Moral Evaluation. Although such tools, which can be found in the USA and the Netherlands, have equivalents in French research centers, their distribution 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...