PERSONAL VS. PROFESSIONAL ETHICS
In discussing engineering ethics, it is important to make a distinction between per- sonal ethics and professional, or business, ethics, although there isn’t always a clear boundary between the two. Personal ethics deals with how we treat others in our day-to-day lives. Many of these principles are applicable to ethical situations that occur in business and engineering. However, professional ethics often involves choices on an organizational level rather than a personal level. Many of the prob- lems will seem different because they involve relationships between two corpora- tions, between a corporation and the government, or between corporations and groups of individuals. Frequently, these types of relationships pose problems that are not encountered in personal ethics.