Global networking and universal ethics

Abstract

The Congress on Information and Communication during the 2000 World Engineers’ Convention in Hannover, Germany, passed a document on trends, challenges, and tasks of information and communication technologies as a set of proposals and guidelines for engineers and society which assumes validity worldwide. In 2002, the Executive Board of the Association of Engineers VDI (Germany) passed the new document Fundamentals of Engineering Ethics, which also claims universal validity, on how to deal with conflicting professional responsibilities. Thus the global validity of ethics, under the impact of new technologies, has become visible as an issue widely discussed within engineering, philosophy, and society. It increasingly requires the awareness of our own responsibility towards all humans, as well as towards the natural environment and future generations. Thus the questions of how to decide and how to act challenge the interdisciplinary research field of ethics more than ever. In this paper, these elements of decisions and ethics are discussed in some detail. Subsequently they are illustrated by selected examples of ethical rules.