Attitudes of Engineers Towards Ethics and Prospects for Education

Engineering ethics increasingly attracts the attention of researchers, professionals, practitioners and educationists. This paper presents the analysis of 32 papers on engineering ethics that have been published in peer-reviewed journals and conferences, presenting results from empirical researches that were carried out at universities, high schools and businesses. Each paper was subjected to a qualitative analysis aiming to identify the prevailing topics of engineering ethics and attitudes that relate to them. From the analysis, it came out that the most important topics related to engineering ethics are: sustainability, issues relative to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), privacy, intellectual property and professional ethics, while other topics had also attracted interest, such as bribes, minority rights, conflicts of interest at work, feminine issues, virtue ethics, security and social ethics, whistle-blowing etc. The foremost significant attitudes of engineers were shown to be the need for fostering new values, the sense of responsibility and the intention to help society. The findings of this research lead us to suggest that courses of engineer ethics might better be designed by considering both the general theories of ethics and the particular domain of education that the students have studied.