Nonetheless the study

Nonetheless the study has made a start in dealing with an issue that is central to a profession’s ethical development. Professions such as engineering that deal in a relatively impersonal way with risks that are often borne by a non-voluntary population need to deal both with the objective qualities of those risks and with the subjective. They need to define their responsibilities by drawing on both their own moral precepts, and the morality that outsiders expect them to exhibit. Taking ascribed ethics seriously is a way of keeping in touch with a changing society – a society that is perhaps becoming increasingly averse to risks arising from technology that is increasingly taken for granted.

Acknowledgements: Many thanks are due to all with whom we have had discussions during the course of this work. Thanks are also due to the anonymous referees for their constructive criticisms. The study was partly funded by the UK EPSRC under grant GR/R12503.

J. S. Busby and M. Coeckelbergh

376 Science and Engineering Ethics, Volume 9, Issue 3, 2003

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