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Section V. The Impact of Chemical Engine... > Chapter 25. Ethics and Professionali...
Chapter 25. Ethics and Professionalism
• There is a subtle difference between morals and ethics.
• One must make one’s own ethical decisions.
• There are legal issues that must be considered.
Engineering has been described as “the strategy for causing the best change in a poorly understood or uncertain situation within the available resources” [1]. The realm of ethics and professionalism entails very real, poorly understood problems that are as challenging as any technical problems an engineer will face. This chapter presents heuristics, objective functions (i.e., ways of defining what is best), and constraint identification strategies that are especially useful in solving such problems.
As described in Chapter 11, all heuristics are, in the final analysis, fallible and incapable of justification. They are merely plausible aids or directions toward the solution of a problem [1]. Especially for the heuristics described in this chapter, the four characteristics of any heuristic need to be kept in mind: