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- Step One: Identify the purpose behind your engineering code of ethics. For example, is it to punish wrongful behavior, provide a set of guidelines, educate the community, support ethical behavior, or create an ethics dialogue?
- Step Two: Identify the contributions that engineering makes to society.
- Step Three: Identify the stakeholders of the engineering profession. A stakeholder is any group or individual with a vital or essential interest tied to what engineers do. along with these stakeholders, identify their stakes, that is, the goods, rights, interests or values that are maintained, promoted, or diminished by what engineers do?
- Step Four: Enumerate the obligations or duties that engineers have toward each of these stakeholders. In other words, what can engineers do to maintain, promote, or diminish the stakes of each stakeholder?
- Step Five: Identify the conflicting obligations that arise from the fact that engineers have different stakeholders who hold conflicting stakes? Do any of these stakeholders or stakes have obvious priority over the others?
- Step Six: Step back and reflect on what you have written. For example, look for different kinds of provisions. Does your code use ideals of the profession which set forth the profession's central or cardinal objectives? Does your code contain principles of professional conduct which set forth minimal levels of behavior and prescribe sanctions and punishments for compliance failures? In the CIAPR (Colegio de Ingenieros y Agrimensores de Puerto Rico) code of ethics, the fundamental principles and basic canons set forth the ideals of the profession. The principles of professional conduct fall in the section on practical norms.
- Step Seven: The Final Audit. Submit your code to an overall audit to see if anything has been left out. Have you included all the stakeholders and their stakes? Have you left out any ethical considerations such as rights and duties? Compare your code to the law. Are your code's provisions legal? Do they overlap with existing law? Do they imply criticisms of existing laws? If they imply punishments or sanctions, what measures does your code prescribe to administer justly and properly these sanctions? Finally, be sure to guard against the equal but opposite sins of over-specificity and too much generality. Overly specifc codes try to provide a rule for every possible situation. Because this is impossible, these codes tend toward rigidity, inflexibility, and irrelevance. Codes that are too general fail because they can be interpreted to rationalize any kind of claim and, thus, mask immoral actions and intentions.
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