Being the Voice of Accountability, Responsibility & Engineering Ethics

Description

This session is presented by the ASME Management Division and organized in collaboration with the National Institute for Engineering Ethics (NIEE). Speaker: Carlos Bertha, NIEE Board Member This presentation argues that the long term health of the engineering profession—and the organizations that depend on it—rests on engineering managers' ability to cultivate cultures of accountability, transparency, and ethical leadership. It begins by clarifying the language of morals and ethics and situates engineering practice within major normative traditions, including virtue ethics, deontology, utilitarianism, and religiously grounded frameworks. These theories provide managers with practical tools for understanding how teams make decisions, how trust is built or eroded, and how responsibility for consequences is distributed across an organization. The talk contrasts the ideals of a profession—autonomy, discretion, intrinsic motivation, and a commitment to public welfare—with the tendencies of a bureaucracy, where efficiency metrics, proceduralism, and short term pressures dominate. For managers, this distinction is not abstract: it shapes how they set expectations, evaluate performance, and respond to ethical concerns raised by their teams. The central claim is that society grants engineers autonomy because it trusts their expertise, and that trust can only be sustained when leaders make ethical values visible, actionable, and enforceable. The presentation then examines accountability mechanisms relevant to engineering managers, including self policing, internal oversight structures, and corporate ethics programs. It highlights anti corruption strategies and early warning indicators of fraud, waste, and abuse—issues that managers are uniquely positioned to detect and prevent. The session concludes with practical recommendations for engineering managers: fostering psychological safety for reporting concerns and building systems that reward ethical behavior rather than merely efficient outcomes. Participants are invited to reflect on whether their organizations are truly living up to their ethical responsibilities—or unintentionally creating environments where ethical lapses become predictable.