Careers: A skeptic views ethics in engineering: Competing with recession and unemployment for people's concern, ethics still manages to arouse lively debates

Knowing how fickle human beings are and how short their attention span can be, one would have thought that by now concern with engineering ethics would be on the wane. After all, a decade has passed since Watergate, the Vietnam War, and the onset of the environmental crisis — and also since several prominent civil engineers confessed to bribing the vice president of the United States. And it is 10 years since the scandal at the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District, in which three engineers were discharged for publicizing inadequacies in the trains' control system, thereby adding “whistle blowing” to the vocabulary of professional engineering.