Professional Ethics Without a Profession: A French View on Engineering Ethics

Abstract

Bioethics and business ethics have their international conferences, their networks, their international scientific journals, as well as their schools of thought and their internal disagreement. To the contrary, engineering ethics is a little known area of study which gives rise sometimes to scepticism. First developed in the US, this academic field it is now present in many countries. In this article, we intend to make known the progress made and the issues at stake in this area of contextualised ethics: philosophical issues, but also cultural one. We will defend the idea that reflecting upon the ethical issues of engineering is not of interest to engineers alone. However, as it also concern engineers, we will try to describe what could (or should) be the focus of an ethical reflection on engineering for engineers in countries (like France) where the concept of profession does not hold an ethical dimension as it seems to be the case in the US.