The question that the present work addresses is how might we move the engineering profession towards a more encompassing engineering ethic and do it in a way which the practitioners might be receptive to such new ideas? Put another way, how might we develop a new engineering ethic, which focuses more upon the results as evidence by its adoption across the myriad of disciplines rather than the purity or elegance of the argument? The present work seeks to offer one approach that might work borrowing from our developing view of complex systems theory. One important characteristic of a complex system — and we shall consider others — is that a system is composed of interconnected parts that as a whole exhibit one or more properties. Stated another way, the behavior among the possible properties may not be obvious from the properties of the individual parts. The proposed new ethic also integrates new ideas from quantum mechanics as well as eco-philosophy.
['George D. Catalano']
Tragedy in the gulf: A call for a new engineering ethic