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Specially in the field of engineering ethics, a major concern of the field was to identify the ethical issues, problem, and dilemmas that engineers commonly face in their careers. In large part because the traditional subjects of moral theory and moral analysis are institutional arrangements and social relationships, scholars looked to the organizational context of engineering and the social relationship that constitute engineering practice. Through this lens, the importance of the business context in which engineering is practiced was most salient. Scholars in the field typically portrayed the engineer as an ethical actor who had to make complicate decisions within the institutional arrangements of a corporation. The business environment was most commonly illustrated with case studies that focused on the description and analysis of disasters such as the Ford Pinto fuel tank explosions, the crashes (and near crashes) of DC-10 passenger jets, and the Bhopal chemical leak.

These case studies emphasized that individual engineers had to medicate their technical knowledge with institutional pressures, the demands of their employers, their professional codes of ethics, and the expectation that they protect the public. If an engineer mismanaged these demands, the results could be disastrous. Indeed, much of the literate of the 1980s and early 1990s can be seen as digesting the implications of engineering being practiced in the context of business interests. This emphasis can be seen in Kline's summary of the major issues that form the core of engineering ethics texts in the United States, which largely focuses on business-related interests including conflicts of interest, whistle-blowing, trade secrets, and accepting gifts (Kline, 2001-2: 16).

Numerous case studies were developed that asked engineers to consider how they would act when confronted by a dilemma wherein a business interest came into conflict with the public good or some sort of professional norm. “To be sure, the filed of engineering ethics was not and never has been monolithic but has been largely concerned with the social circumstances of engineers and field have appropriately focused on disaster, unsafe products, and dangers to human health and well-being.

Global Ethic Foundation for Intercultural and Interreligious Research, Education and Encounter
( www.weltethos.org )