Engineering Ethics in 2014

Mechanical Engineers make weapons...Civil Engineers make targets.

Yea, but they wouldn't hit anything without us Electrical Engineers.

_{Jack - An actual military defence contractor (among other things)}

"And in some ways, it's impossible for engineers to behave totally ethically. Patents restrict the flow of information."

Perhaps you didn't phrase this the way you intended to. There is certainly nothing unethical about patents. Nor is there anything about patents that 'restricts the flow of information'. If anything, patents increase the flow of information. I worked for many years at two companies that produced similar products:

The first company spent NO dollars pursuing patents. Every piece of engineering intellectual property was filed with the engineering department and with the company lawyers, and kept as 'company proprietary'. None of our inventions were ever seen by other engineers unless a 'non-disclosure agreement' was signed and notarized. Thus there was also NO flow of information.

The second company actively pursued patents and spent a significant chunk of its engineering budget on patents. Its patents have potentially been seen by thousands of other engineers outside the company. In one case I even collaborated with an outside company to perfect the design for a patent. In the case of this second company, patents encouraged the flow of information.

This doesn't mean there aren't problems with the patent system. I've previously discussed here on CR4 the problem of lawyering firms that take unfair advantage of patent laws to extract royalty fees. The chilling effect of these 'submarine' patent holders does restrict information - but that's due to the lawyers, not the engineers and not the patents.

"...sustainable development..." does not sound like anything from 1914. I looked up the link, and this version of these canons is from 2006. I don't really "have a problem" with anything on the list, but, please, don't make it out to be something it isn't and never was.

Engineers have always been concerned about the possibility of disaster resulting from their work. "Dilbert" mentioned this while making a career-day presentation to a third-grade class, remarking that every engineer fervently hopes that he will make it to retirement without "effing up" in a way that causes mass casualties. William Mulholland's career ended with the failure of the St. Francis Dam mere hours after he and Harvey Van Norman inspected it and pronounced it sound. Six hundred people died, and Mulholland "retired" in disgrace. There are others. Many others. Too many.

Physicians kill people one at a time; engineers generally kill people in large numbers, either intentionally with weapons of war or unintentionally (Oops!). I used to work in "weapons and delivery systems", and, if my work had been employed/deployed, many, many more than six hundred would have died. The philosophy which allowed me to retain what bit of sanity I might have had is that even more would have died without the work I and many others did. Mutually Assured Destruction worked with the Soviets, because they, too, wanted to live.

Today, things are different; I'm glad that I am fixing cars.

GA by USBPort, and I'd like to add my $.02.

Starting at the very beginning, the basis for our U.S. patent system was originally set forth in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution, which states that "Congress shall have the power…To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." Congress has acted accordingly since 1790, passing and revising numerous patent laws.

Stated succinctly, a patent is a property right that is granted by a government authority, such as the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. It can be compared to a real estate deed in that it defines the metes and bounds of an invention. A patent is also considered to be a contract with the government that grants to the inventor a monopoly for a fixed period of time in return for a full disclosure to the public of how to make and use the invention. This monopoly can be quite valuable to the inventor should his/her invention become commercially successful. However, the contract is hardly a one sided deal: our patent system serves the public interest in a substantial way in return for the grant of that time-limited monopoly. When a patent expires, the public is free to use that full disclosure in the patent as a recipe to practice the invention, free of payment of any royalties to the inventor. Our U.S. Patent Office, and other patent offices worldwide, thus serve us as some of the largest repositories of technical knowledge in the world, on every subject that you could possibly imagine.

So as USBPort says, patents increase the flow of information. And while quite rarely but sometimes, "bad" patents get issued, and also sometimes but rarely some patent practitioners and/or patent applicants act unethically, there is nothing unethical about patents. To the contrary, because of the requirement for full disclosure of how to make and use an invention, the patent system, and that of the U.S. in particular, has been a hell of a deal for society. So seeing the blanket statement "Patents restrict the flow of information" in a posting on "Engineering ethics" makes me wonder what is being implied here.

HUSH, you are way out of line making this statement:

"How does a weapons system engineer remain ethical while designing a platform to kill people?"

You have no right to state such a line of BS.

It's just not ethical to say such a thing.