Toward an engineering ethics for the global information era

Because they fall prey to increasing relativism as the diversity of interpretive schemata proliferate in a global context, neither traditional Conceptual Ethics nor Virtue Ethics can provide a workable framework for evaluating the ethical significance of the variety of technological systems and structures being set loose upon the planet by contemporary engineering practice. Grounded in the notion of "objective caring", and tempered by the philosophies of Levinas and Heidegger, Material Ethics is proposed as a discourse appropriate for the global Information Era. Development of a heuristic cost/value metric, in terms of which the ethics of engineered products may be assessed, is suggested.