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Proceedings of the 18
th
International Conference on Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering, Paris 2013
disciplines, like geotechnical engineering, exists. The only
exceptions apply to even more specific activities within a
specialist discipline; for example the AGS Code of Conduct for
Site Investigation (Association of Geotechnical Specialists
2007).
2.2 Trustworthy corporation
One of the functions of ethical behaviour is to protect the
reputation of civil engineering professionals and corporations.
This aspect is powerfully captured in the “Little Yellow Book”
by Jim Howland (1982), whose
test to determine if a
contemplated action is ethical is to ask: “Would I want to see it
in the headlines tomorrow morning?”
. Although such an
approach to ethics emphasises appearance over substance, the
importance of corporate reputation and trustworthiness in the
relationship with clients, contractors, third parties and society as
a whole should not be underestimated. It is, in fact a key
ingredient in developing successful projects which are capable
of bringing benefits to the full range of stakeholders, as further
discussed in Section 3.2.
2.3 Full meaning of civil engineering ethics
The full and deepest meaning of civil engineering ethics goes
well beyond the straightforward application of the rules of
behaviour contained in a code of conduct and the attempt to
build and preserve corporate reputation.
Ethics involves the systematic study of moral norms and
standards of behaviour, together with their underlying values
and justifications (Armstrong
et al.
1999). Applied ethics deals
with the formulation of morally good decisions which can be
made in a particular area of interest, for instance various
professions (e.g. medical ethics, legal ethics, etc.) or particular
issues of private and public interest (e.g. environmental ethics,
bioethics, etc.). Part of the complexity of civil engineering
ethics – which is one of the many branches of professional
ethics – derives from the involvement of several ethical subjects
and many different competing views of what is morally right or
wrong. Those affected by the ethical decision-making of a
geotechnical engineer for good or bad may include, for
example:
i the geotechnical engineer (and, where appropriate, their
family and associates);
ii the engineer’s colleagues (from the same discipline or from
other disciplines);
iii the engineer’s employer (in the present case a large
engineering company);
iv the engineer’s professional community (at national or
international level);
v the client;
vi the society at large (ranging from a local community
affected by a particular project, to larger groups of
stakeholders at national and international level);
vii the environment (the biosphere and its interaction with
lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere).
An extensive discussion of the philosophical theories of
ethics is beyond the scope of this paper. The author agrees with
Armstrong, Dixon and Robinson when they suggest that
practical, real-life decision making requires a combination of
the three main ethical theories: (a) deontological - to do with
duty, (b) consequentialist - concerned with outcomes, (c) virtue
ethics - concerned with moral excellence.
3 CIVIL ENGINEERING IN CONTEXT
3.1 The intrinsic conflict between performance and profit
Industrial enterprises aim at committing the lowest amount of
resources and time to deliver a satisfactory product to their
clients. In the civil engineering industry failure to deliver a
satisfactory product, in the form of a structure or infrastructure
which meets the required performance, may result in huge costs
and even loss of life.
In practice there is the need to strike the correct balance
between a quick, cheap, approximate design of uncertain
performance - on the one extreme - and slow, expensive,
accurate design with much reduced uncertainty on the
performance - on the other extreme. In a consulting company
the “right” balance has to be satisfactory from both a
commercial and an ethical point of view. Uncertainty in
performance may result in either safer-than-required design (not
dangerous but wasteful) or less-safe-than-required design,
which is observed more rarely but may have extremely severe
consequences.
In civil engineering, and particularly in geotechnics, a great
deal of uncertainty in the final performance is associated with
the human factor. Assigning tasks (including checking,
reviewing and approving the design) to individuals with the
appropriate level of competence and experience is of paramount
importance. From a purely economic point of view a project
manager or a project director wishes to see each task completed
as quickly as possible by the available team member with the
lowest hourly cost rate and therefore, most likely, level of
experience. However, pushing tasks too far down the chain of
competence/cost, has unacceptable implications on the quality
of the design process and on the resulting uncertainty in the
performance of the finished product.
There are no easy recipes to resolve this tension between
cost control and profit, on one side, and quality in the form of
performance of limited uncertainty (which avoids waste or lack
of safety) on the other side. A useful strategy, however, consists
of resisting short term pressures and “narrow framing” to
embrace a long term view. Considering an oversimplified
example, there is little use in containing the cost of project
delivery if the final product is non-satisfactory and the client
will therefore not be inclined to assign future commissions to
the company. This elementary consideration can easily be
suffocated by the pressure of working against tight programmes
and budgets. More generally, whenever it is possible to avoid
narrow framing and short term planning, commercial needs and
quality assurance tend to become more compatible in an
ethically satisfactory way.
3.2 The problem of fragmentation
A similar, often deleterious, tension between commercial and
technical needs is connected to the problem of fragmentation,
which affects the design process at many levels. From a purely
technical point of view there is an obvious benefit in achieving
continuity through the many phases of design and construction
and in ensuring the same subject – same company and, ideally,
same personnel – develops a project from inception to
completion. This approach limits the need for knowledge
transfer between different teams and individuals, thus
minimising repetition and possible misunderstandings or loss of
information. However, in some situations and in some forms of
contract the continuity is discouraged or even prohibited. Such a
choice is based on the principle of efficiency through
competition and specialisation, which, in theory, should result
in optimised cost and outcome. In practice there are other
considerations which should complement, and in some cases
overrule, these aspects. In a nutshell, commercial competition
and specialisation push toward ever further fragmentation, while
technical efficiency would require unity of vision and continuity
of knowledge.
The author argues that, currently, the way major civil
engineering projects are delivered is grossly unbalanced toward
an excessive fragmentation which arises from the prevalence of
commercially inspired principles over technical criteria. Often
clients, and society at large, pay additional costs at the end of a
