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13.1: Ethics Is Not an Add-On

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    142481

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    14.1 Ethics Is Not an Add-On to Engineering

    Every chapter in this book has embedded ethical content. The Challenger O-ring data in Chapter 9 was a communication ethics problem. The safety factor in Chapter 7 was an uncertainty and public welfare problem. The resistor over-rating in Chapter 11 was a small-margin problem. The limitation statements in Chapter 13 were a disclosure obligation.

    These were not special ethics topics. They were normal engineering decisions that happened to have ethical content — which is to say, they were representative of what engineering actually involves.

    Engineering ethics is not a philosophical subject studied separately from technical work. It is the discipline of making technical decisions responsibly. An engineer who calculates correctly but omits an unfavorable data point has an ethics problem. An engineer who meets code minimums but leaves a knowingly inadequate margin has an ethics problem. An engineer who approves subordinate work without reviewing it has an ethics problem.


    This page titled 13.1: Ethics Is Not an Add-On was last modified on Thu, 24 Sep 2026 17:38:36 GMT and is shared under a CC BY-NC license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by .

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