Concept of “Care” in Engineering

If the performance of a constructed facility fails to conform with what is intended or anticipated, the engineer-of-record for the facility can be charged with negligence and may bear the liability for damages arising from that failure. An engineer’s negligence is assessed by measuring the engineer’s actions relative to the “standard of care” of the profession. This paper briefly describes the meaning and application of the standard of care, and addresses the question, “What is ‘care’ with regard to engineering?” To examine that question, the paper introduces the five elements of the ethic of care as defined by Joan Tronto: attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness, and integrity, and builds on work by Marina Pantazidou and Indira Nair that identified care as an ethical framework suitable to provide guidance for engineering activities. The paper explores the applicability of the ethic of care to engineering practice by examining how the elements relate to the performance of engineers described in published case studies of engineering failures. The standard of care question raised in each case study is evaluated within the ethic of care framework, and an assessment is made of the engineer’s exercise of the elements of the ethic of care.