Public Ethics Responsibility In Engineering Practice

Undeniably, there is an extremely important issue in engineering ethics, namely ethical responsibility, in which a variety of complicated ethical issues are involved. This paper pays its main attention to the issue of public ethical responsibility in engineering practices. In terms of this topic, as someone puts it so far, the issue of ethical responsibility in the project is that of engineers or that of the traditional engineering entities. Whereas such definition has disdained or neglected the important role that the public play in projects. What kind of ethical responsibilities should the public, as stakeholders, take in engineering practices? What sort of ethical difficulty would the public come across when they perform their responsibilities? How to guarantee and realize the public’s ethical responsibilities? How to coordinate the dual characters of the implementation of public ethical responsibilities? A certain number of courses are included in engineering practices, such as the identification of decision-making body, the decision behavior of decision-making body, design activity, operation behavior, and process evaluation behavior, etc, which requires the stakeholders of engineering main body to take both their individual benefits and the overall interest of mankind into consideration in each such course. As a matter of fact, this is a conflicting phenomenon. Objectively, the public are driven to show their ethical responsibilities and behaviors in engineering practice from the perspective of stakeholders. Traditional decision-making bodies are required to selectively transfer some of their individual benefit and public ethical responsibility is encouraged to show up and develop to protect natural environment and public interests. As a result, ethical responsibility of the public in engineering practices can be produced and expressed through measures such as public participation.However, the production and expression of ethical responsibility not only brings about issues of ethical responsibility but same issues will also occur in various phases of the engineering practice. It is obvious that the engineering main body undertake dual missions in practice:one is that they take responsibility for their employers, the other is they have to take care of public interests, such as welfare, health, etc, thus causing dilemma for the warranty and implementation of public’s ethical responsibilities, such as the public’s knowledge, supervision, demands, and decision-making participation, etc.As a result, we have to learn about and find out the major content of ethical responsibility and the difficulties in ethical responsibility the public come across when some of them practice such responsibility, posing possible resolutions for the public to break through such difficulties. For this reason, some suggestions are given:strengthening and completing the participation mechanism for ethical responsibility, such as the right of knowledge, supervision, and expression of the public, etc, constructing an integrated framework for engineering decision making, establishing and perfecting the ethical mechanism of engineering decision making, establishing and improving a mechanism of media publicity and supervision by public opinion for the production of public ethical responsibility, and deepening the public’s awareness of engineering ethics via education.