Case study: Engineer discovers problem but supervisor wants to ignore

摘要

When an engineer suspects that there is a public safety hazard in a project he or she is assigned to, what is the engineer's ethical obligation? If the engineer believes that the possible hazard should be investigated, but his/her supervisor does not, how should the engineer proceed? We examine a realistic case of a disagreement between an engineer and his supervisor. We argue that the engineer's obligations in this case are not obvious, and that we need to draw on both the IEEE code of ethics and the underlying philosophical principles of that code to formulate and justify an ethical response to the situation.