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An interest in engineering ethics has generated an enormous amount of scholarship over the past few decades. So anyone who writes on how ethical considerations enter into engineering owes much to many. But though I have learned much from those who have written on the subject, I will cite few because I will be concentrating on a way in which ethics enters engineering practice that has been downplayed, if not downright ignored, in the vast literature we now have.
I will concentrate on how ethical considerations enter into the intellectual core of engineering, the solution to design problems. Engineering begins with a design problem—how to make occupants of vehicles safer, settling on the interface for operating an X-ray machine, designing more legible road signs, and so on. Any design problem leaves much room for creativity and innovation, and so the range of possible solutions to any particular design problem is broad. We can see how broad by looking at the various kinds of cars, or toasters, or coffee makers, or computers: each artifact marks one design choice over another.
In choosing any particular solution, engineers must make value choices, and, obviously, as we again know from looking at engineering artifacts like cars, not all design choices are equal. Each reflects a particular configuration of values with a particular set of effects, the effects ranging from those produced by obtaining the material from which the artifact is to be manufactured, to those produced in the manufacture, to those produced in moving the artifact to market and storing it until it is sold, to those produced by those who use the artifact, and to those produced in disposing of or recycling or remanufacturing the artifact once its useful life is completed.
The easiest way to understand how ethical considerations enter into engineering is to focus on design solutions, which cause problems for those who use the artifact embodying the design, and the clearest examples of those are solutions, which provoke even the most intelligent, well-trained, and most highly motivated into making mistakes and sometimes causing great harm—for example, by designing an X-ray machine that can easily over-radiate patients or a car or truck with a high risk of exploding if hit.
Everyone is subject to the minimal ethical principle: do no unnecessary harm! Engineers have special obligations to take care not to cause unnecessary harms because they can cause a great deal of harm by virtue of being engineers and are best positioned to choose design solutions that minimize harm.
The intellectual core of engineering, the source of the intellectual joy that animates it, is the working through of various possible design solutions and settling on a particular design that solves the original problem and perhaps pushes the envelope of design. At its core this is an ethical enterprise since the particular configuration of effects of each design solution will cause more or less harm and so will be, all else being equal, more or less ethical.
These ethical issues are internal to the discipline of engineering. An internal ethical issue is one that arises within a discipline. No one can be an engineer without solving design problems, and so no one can be an engineer without making the ethical decisions we must make in solving those problems. We should presume that every discipline has its internal ethical problems. A physician, for instance, cannot practice without treating patients in one way or another—with respect as a person, or as a piece of machinery to be fixed, say—and those are radically different ethical views to take of a patient.