Engineers Shall Hold Paramount the Safety, Health and Welfare of the Public in the Performance of Their Professional Duties
As an engineer, one has to adhere to a plethora of standards that ensure the safety and welfare of the general public. Therefore, complying with the existing set of ethical standards is a critical requirement. When selecting the ethical standards that hold particular importance for an engineer, one will need to pay attention to the statement that claims engineers to be responsible for the “safety, health and welfare of the public in the performance of their professional duties” (“Code of Ethics”). The described code is crucial to compliance with the set ethical standards since it embraces the specifics of an engineer’s tasks and functions, recognizing some of its aspects as potentially dangerous to bystanders (“Code of Ethics”). The lack of awareness among the general public concerning the threat that engineering tools and exposure to key processes may entail makes the specified audience very vulnerable. Therefore, as an engineer, one has to shield people that are not aware of the threats that engineering may pose to them from the described threats.
Engineers Shall Perform Services Only in the Areas of Their Competence
Another essential rule to which engineers have to adhere to comply with their code of ethics concerns the extent of their responsibilities. The decision to “perform services only in the areas of their competence” and work only on the problems that are related directly to one’s fields of competence is mature and crucial to ensuring a proper disaster management strategy and ensuring that none of the stakeholders involved will suffer adverse consequences (“Code of Ethics”).
Moreover, the specified rule was selected as one of three primary ethical standards that an engineer has to meet due to the impact that it has on the long-term outcomes and the safety of an engineer. Without extensive knowledge of the problem that an engineer attempts at resolving, the threat of failing and delivering poor results persists. At best, the quality of performance will be unsatisfactory and will not yield the expected results, thus causing disruptions in the performance of equipment. At worst, the well-being and life of an engineer and people that will use the appliance in question afterward will be in peril.
Furthermore, the failure to meet the described ethical requirement may have a profoundly adverse long-term effect on the performance of the equipment that an engineer endeavors at managing. The expenses that an organization to which an engineer provides their services will suffer are expected to be immense due to the range of processes that will be affected by the poor performance of an engineer.
Engineers Shall Consider Environmental Impact in the Performance of Their Professional Duties
The environmental impact of an engineer’s performance is rarely deemed as worth noticing by general audiences, yet the outcomes of a disaster caused by the mismanagement of the respective issues in engineering may be drastic. Therefore, as an engineer, one has to be aware of likely outcomes that their performance will have on the environment. For instance, the possibility of introducing waste to the global ecosystem has to be evaluated by an engineer as a possible threat that may entail dramatic effects. Due to the detrimental effects that electronic waste has on the environment, compliance with the specified standards has particular weight in addressing the threat of a human-made disaster (“Code of Ethics”). Therefore, while seemingly having a lesser adverse impact on public well-being than mismanagement of the two guidelines mentioned above, the failure to address environmental concerns also has vastly negative effects.