The Ethical Engineer

“This is a crucial and timely book on ethics in engineering and science by one of the world’s foremost ethicists of technology and society. Every engineering department should read and use this book for planning their curricula.”—Stephen R. Barley, University of California, Santa Barbara“The Ethical Engineer offers a highly original and rich conceptual portrait of the many ethical facets of engineering practice today. Through a sophisticated analysis of issues encountered in a vast array of context-specific domains and engineering fields, this book offers powerful and much-needed tools to equip engineers with an ethical mindset that informs their understanding and guides them in their day-to-day professional conduct.”—Rafael Pardo, director of the BBVA Foundation“Engineering and science are among the strongest of social forces, but with their long latency, the good and bad resulting from these fields can be difficult to foresee. Nuclear weapons, combustion engines, chemistry-based agriculture, the internet, and machine intelligence—all are examples of areas posing ethical challenges for society and the educational institutions tasked with the development of citizenship. Timely and welcome, The Ethical Engineer articulates thoughtful, robust approaches to such complex issues.”—Sandip Tiwari, Cornell University“McGinn has written a highly accessible and very useful guide for courses on engineering ethics. Students will acquire a sense of the issues they should be concerned with as well as a feel for the challenges they will face as engineers. There is no other book quite like this one, and it will be a boon to engineering education everywhere.”—Daniel Doneson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology“This tremendously valuable book does a good job of distilling contemporary issues in engineering ethics and of making the case that ethics must be included in an engineer’s education. The book effectively incorporates theory, examples, and resources and demonstrates that engineering ethics is continuously evolving.”—Raluca Scarlat, University of Wisconsin–Madison“In the past, I have struggled to find a book that contains engineering ethics cases with adequate ethical review and analysis. The Ethical Engineer has them and I would recommend it for classroom use.”—Dianne Quigley, Brown University

Robert McGinn is professor of management science and engineering and of science, technology, and society at Stanford University. He is the author of Science, Technology, and Society (Prentice Hall).