Engineering Ethics Essay

Today, companies using environmentally dangerous practices are exposed to the threat of legal sanctions and customers’ protests, which can result in fines and total neglect of services and products of companies ignoring environmental issues. In this respect, the policy of the Z Corporation is absolutely unacceptable. The Z Corporation violates both ethical and legal norms. Hence, this corporation should stop the emission of dangerous elements and restructure and redesign its production process in order to minimize its negative impact on the environment and decrease the amount of heavy metals’ emission into the sewers, while the intention of David Jackson to reveal the violation of environmental regulations by the company is ethically justified.

The Z Corporation has started its functioning in the city on the basis of the local legal norms and regulations, which, in actuality, proved to be stricter than federal regulations concerning environmental concerns. At first glance, the position of the corporation can be justified by the fact that it was the city who deceived the corporation first because, initially, the city introduced policies aiming at the attraction of investors into the city. In terms of these policies, companies launching their business in the city were promised to have favorable conditions to operate effectively in the city.

However, as the Z Corporation has entered the local market, the city has changed consistently local environmental legislation and changed the existing norms concerning emissions. As a result, the company was actually deceived because, in spite of the fact that the city pretended to create favorable conditions for investors, it posed practically unsurpassable barriers on the way of the development of business by the Z Corporation. Consequently, from ethical point of view the policy of the city were quite arguable because it would be more logical to avoid changing of the local legislation which can affect the performance of companies investing substantial amount of money into the development of the city.

On the other hand, the Z Corporation could not admit the emission of heavy metals which exceeds norms established by the local authorities. As the matter of fact, the ignorance of interests of the local population as well as the attempt to surmount the local legislation indicates to the absolutely immoral and unethical policies conducted by the Z Corporation. The company is aware of the violation of the local legislation. Consequently, it should introduce changes into the production process to meet the requirements of the local environment legislation. However, the Z Corporation, in contrast, did not only ignored the local legislation, but also used its technological advantage and backwardness of the existing standards and tests to increase the production and, therefore, the company intends to increase the pollution of the environment with heavy metals.

In such a situation, the intention of David Jackson to reveal the illegal actions of the company is absolutely justified. Even though he is an employee of the Z Corporation, he cannot ignore the harmful effect of heavy metals emissions on the environment and local population.

Even though he did not make many efforts to investigate reasons for the pollution, he still should inform the local authorities about heavy metal emissions, since company was aware of the higher level of dangerous emissions compared to norms established by local authorities.

Thus, policies of the company are absolutely unacceptable because the company uses the local community, its natural resources and population in its own interests, while people face a serious risk of catching various diseases because of the excessive emission of heavy metals by the Z Corporation. Thus, the policy of the Z Corporation is unethical and the company should be punished for the violation of the existing legislative norms.