This document discusses professional ethics and the core values that guide appropriate professional conduct. It outlines that ethics are a system of moral values and rules that govern a person or profession. The key professional core values discussed are integrity, honesty, fairness, health and safety, environmental sustainability. It emphasizes that core values, moral standards and culture form the foundation of professional ethics. It also discusses the importance of using technology responsibly and how the misuse of technology is primarily a human issue rather than a technological problem. Solutions rely on cultivating strong ethics, values, culture and education.

1. Professional Ethics

2. Ethics
Ethics:
A system of moral values.
The rules or standards governing the conduct of a
person
or
the members of a profession - Professional ethics.
Often cultivated and not imposed as rules.

3. Values, Morals, Ethics and Culture
Values:
Beliefs of a person or Social group in which they
have an emotional involvement. (either for or against
something);
Example: liberal or conservatives values.
Values are the unwritten rules by which we make
decisions about right and wrong.
Try not to become a man of success. Rather, become a
man of value.

4. Values, Morals, Ethics and Culture
Values:
Making tough decisions, presenting unpopular
solutions, convincing people to believe …
none of it comes easy unless you have values
in you.

5. Values, Morals, Ethics and Culture
Morals:
Motivation based on ideas of right and wrong.
Morals have a greater social element compared to
values and tend to have a very broad acceptance.
Morals are far more about good and bad than other
values.

6. Values, Morals, Ethics and Culture
Culture:
An individual’s approach to fellow human beings, to
his environment and to himself reflects his culture.
Education can only stimulate the cultural values
but not bring in. One has to cultivate them.

7. Professional Ethics
• It is about how you balance the technical /
commercial pressures of the profession or business
with the need to treat people fairly and act with
integrity?
• As a professional, the public trust you to be
competent and to adhere to ethical standards.

8. Professional Ethics
• Organizations and Professional groups have
Conduct Rules setting certain standards of
behaviour expected of its members.
• However, a list of rules will never cover every
situation that may arise, and there will always be a
role for individual judgment in deciding how to apply
these rules.

9. Professional Core Values
• Integrity & Honesty
• Fairness
• Health & wellbeing
• Safety and risk
• Environmental sustainability

10. Professional Core Values
Integrity:-
Integrity is difficult to define.
A person of integrity will resist pressure to
compromise values and ethical standards and
beliefs, whether that pressure comes from
employers, clients, or anywhere else. (IET)
Personal integrity depends on your values and ethics.
Professional integrity means professional values and
ethics.

11. Professional Core Values
Integrity:- Case examples
Decline any professional involvement or
responsibilities in which you are not competent.
Accept personal responsibility for all work done by
you or under your supervision.
If your professional advice is not accepted make
sure to record its consequences at the appropriate
level, if you still feel strongly about it.

12. Professional Core Values
Integrity
Never make derogatory statement about the
organization, individuals or on the dignity of the
profession.
Do not injure or attempt to injure, either directly or
indirectly, the professional reputation, prospects or
business of any of your colleague or other person.
Avoid potential conflict that may exist or arise between
personal interests and the interests of the organization.
If there is any conflict of interest, inform the concerned.

13. Professional Core Values
Integrity
Never disclose, without proper authority, any
confidential information concerning organizations
with which you have collaborated or worked.
Shall not offer improper inducement to secure
business or receive any unauthorized inducements
in professional work.

14. Professional Core Values
Integrity
Disagree and commit - Agree to disagree but finally
support the decision taken, whole heartedly.
If two people in an organization always agree on
every thing, then one of them is not needed.
If two people in an organization always disagree on
every thing, both are not needed.

15. Integrity
Build the platform of integrity through:-
Honesty - Stating the truth.
Integrity - Keeping your word.
Fairness - Respecting the rights of others.
Health & Safety - Not harming the
environment or life
Rules of the land - Not braking the law.

16. Professional Core Values
Honesty
Honesty is particularly important for engineers when:
Public funding is involved.
Tendering for projects;
Situations of conflicts of interest;
Reporting unethical behaviour;
Answering under Right to Information Act;
Disclosing sensitive personal issues,
- qualifications, experience, etc.

17. Professional Core Values
Fairness
Should be fair in professional dealings and in the
relationships with the subordinates.
In professional activities your decisions will have an
impact on a variety of different groups of people.
These could include your employers, other colleagues,
customers and the public at large. As a professional
you have a duty to treat all of these people fairly.
Examples: recruitment, resource allocation, critical
decision making having societal impact.

18. Professional Core Values
Fairness
Convince your colleagues and never thrust your views
on them.
• The blind see the world as they want and not as it is.
• In a way we are all blind as we see only our point of
view.

19. Professional Core Values
Fairness
In a lighter vein, it is the art of cutting a cake in such
a way that every one believes he got the best piece.

20. Professional Core Values
Health Concern
Take utmost care to limit any danger of death, injury or
ill health to any person due to your work or from the
products you produce.
Those working with potentially dangerous equipment,
will be subject to various legal requirements with
regard to health and safety. It is mandatory to
familiarise yourself with these and ensure that you
comply with them.

21. Professional Core Values
• Environmental sustainability
Avoid waste of natural resources, damage to the
environment, and destruction of life and properties.

22. Professional Ethics
Core values, moral standing, and culture are
the corner stones of Professional Ethics.

23. Use and Misuse of Technology

24. Use and Misuse of Technology
• Huge advances in technology in recent years have been
so successful that people take them for granted.
• In fact technology is noticed only when it goes wrong. In
engineering and Technology success often means
anonymity.
• As Engineers and Scientists, only our failures bring us to
the public’s attention!

25. Use and Misuse of Technology
Tools, devices and products of technology are meant for
useful applications.
They are developed by persons with good intentions.
When they are in the user’s hand, they obey only the user.
Here lies the difficulty.

26. Use and Misuse of Technology
Whether Hi-tech, Low Tech or mundane, results could be
devastating if the user wants it to be so.
A Hi-Tech computer can create useful data or destroy it, or
develop a useful software or a destructive malware.
Even a mundane tool like a rope can save a life or hang
one.

27. Use and Misuse of Technology
It is foolish to think that intelligent systems can prevent the
misuse of Science and Technology.
( Except that it could be an intelligent business proposition)
It is a human issue and not a technology impediment.

28. Use and Misuse of Technology
Even over use of technology is a misuse.
To state that Internet is important in today’s world is a bit
like suggesting that air is useful for breathing.
It is prudent to make this analogy workable only within a
balanced social environment.

29. Use and Misuse of Technology
Ethics, Values, Culture and Education do play an
important role in matters related to use and misuse of
technology.
While there is good awareness on the issue of misuse of
technology, the solutions are not scientific or
technological.
They are wholly humanistic.
If we fail on this, there could soon be
an Invention to end all Inventions.
Thank you
Partial Reference: IET Website