What Sort of Engineering Do We Want? How Far Are We From It? A Manifesto for Socially Situated Professional Ethics

Abstract

This chapter seeks to discuss the directions in which engineering should evolve, with emphasis on the case of South America, in two dimensions. The first, at the national level, refers to the choices made by these countries in terms of developing national engineering capability. We maintain that these choices must prioritize, under all circumstances, the minimization of social and human inequality. And the second, at the individual level, is the training of engineers, who are currently eminently concerned with the technical aspects of design solutions. We believe this training leaves out what, in our view, is perhaps the most important part of the civilizing process today: the human question. For this purpose, the following will be discussed: (1) Engineering challenges in the Global South; (2) an analysis of economic and political aspects of Engineering in Latin America; and (3) Engineering from an epistemological, ethical, social and human perspective. This chapter is an argument to recover what we take as the essence of the engineer’s work: having a broad view of the field of possibilities, in order to make a comprehensive reading of a given situation and, from that, formulate a problem to be solved, through a project solution in which the technical, the human and the social variables can be reconciled. We argue that current engineers’ work in Latin America is far from embodying this essence and thus we discuss how education can play a privileged role in approaching a future generation of engineers to this ideal.