Professional ethics in engineering requires managing safety and risk. Engineers have a responsibility to consider how their designs may impact people and to make products as safe as reasonably possible. However, absolute safety is impossible to achieve. Risk is the potential for something harmful to occur, and risk acceptance varies between individuals based on factors like age, experience, and physical condition. Engineers use various methods like testing and simulation to identify risks, analyze them, and find ways to reduce risks to acceptable levels given technical limitations and costs.

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2. Professional Ethics
• Professional Ethics is the study of decisions, policies and values that are morally
desirable in engineering practice and research.
• Ethics are the principles accepted by the society, which also equate to the moral
standards of human beings. An engineer with ethics, can help the society in a
better way.
• The word “Ethics” originates from the Greek word “ethos” meaning “character”.
Ethics are a set of rules or principles that are generally considered as standards or
good and bad or right and wrong, which are usually imposed by an external
group or a society or a profession or so.
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3. Safety and Risk in Professional Ethics
• Managing risk and promoting safety is paramount in engineering practice.
• One of the main duties of an engineer is to ensure the safety of the people who will be affected by
the products that he designs
• The engineering codes of ethics show that engineers have a responsibility to society to produce
products that are safe.
• Nothing can be 100% safe, but engineers are required to make products as safe as reasonably
possible.
• Thus safety should be an integral part of any engineering design.
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4. Safety and Risk
• The terms of safety and risk are inter-related.
• It is amazing to know that what may be safe enough for one person
may not be for someone else. It is because of either different
perceptions about what is safe.
• A risk is the potential that something unwanted and harmful may occur
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5. Concept of Risk
• It is very important for the manufacturer and the user to have some
understanding to know about the risk connected with any product and
know how much it will cost to reduce the risk.
• Risk is the potential that something unwanted and harmful may occur.
• We take a risk when we undertake something or use a product that is
not safe.
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6. Concept of Safety
• Safe operation of system and the prevention of natural or human caused disaster.
• A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for
• A thing is safe if its risks are judged to be acceptable.
• A thing is NOT SAFE if it exposes us to unacceptable danger or hazard
• Ex 1 : We judge fluoride in water can kill lots of people -> Overestimating risk.
• Ex2: We hire a taxi, without thinking about its safety -> Not estimating risk
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7. Risk Acceptance
• The Knowledge of risk acceptance is useful to the engineers.
• The designer can redesign the project to include safety measure, so as to allow the product fail
safely, abandon it safely and provide for safe escape from the product or site, and thus eliminate
or minimize the human loss.
• For Example, An aged person is likely to suffer from dust.
• A scissor with the child may be unsafe, but with an adult it can be safe.
• The perception varies from person to person, based on one’s physical condition, age , experience.
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8. Risk Identification
• Different methods are available to determine the risk
• Destructive testing: In this approach, testing is done till the component fails. It
is too expensive, but very realistic and useful.
• Prototype testing: In this approach, the testing is done on a proportional scale
model with all vital components fixed in the system.
• Simulation testing: With the help of computer, the simulations are done. The
safe boundary may be obtained. The effects of some controlled input variable on
the outcomes can be predicted in a bettery way.
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9. Risk analysis
• Risk analysis is used for the assessment of the hazards associated with
an industrial or commercial activity and can be summarized by 3
questions given below:
• What can go wrong? Hazard Identification
• What are the effects and consequences? Consequence Analysis
• How often it will happen? Probability estimation
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10. Risk benefit analysis
• Risk- benefit analysis is a method that helps the engineers to
analyze the risk in a project and to determine whether a project
should be implemented or not.
• It is very much closer to cost-benefit analysis.
• Risk – benefit analysis is being conducted for finding out
answers for the following questions:
• Is the product worth applying the risk-benefit analysis?
• What are the benefits?
• Do they over weigh the risks?
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11. Risk benefit analysis
• The risk to be occurred in future is completely known after it gets fully
developed. It is called as Real future risk.
• If the idea of risk is developed using current data, such one is called
as Statistical risk.
• The risk which is analytically based on system models structured from
historical studies is called as Projected risk.
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12. Risk Reduction
• The risks we generally face can be reduced to a great extent by proper
analysis with steps. as mentioned below
• Define the Problem.
• Generate Several Solutions.
• Analyze each solution to determine the pros and cons of each.
• Test the solutions.
• Select the best solution.
• Implement the chosen solution.
• Analyze the risk in the chosen solution.
• Try to solve or move to next solution.
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13. Types of Risk
Acceptable Risk
Voluntary risk and Control
JOB RELATED RISKS
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14. Acceptable Risk
• Acceptable risk refers to the level of human and property injury or loss
from an industrial process that is considered to be tolerable by an
individual, household, group, organization, community, region, state,
or nation in view of the social, political, and economic cost-benefit
analysis.
• Example: For instance, the risk of flooding can be accepted once
every 500 years but it is not unacceptable in every ten years.
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15. Acceptable Risk
• It is management's responsibility to set their company's level of risk.
As a security professional, it is your responsibility to work with
management and help them understand what it means to define an
acceptable level of risk.
• Each company has its own acceptable risk level, which is derived
from its legal and regulatory compliance responsibilities.
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16. Voluntary risk
• A person is said to take ‘VOLUNTARY RISK’ . when he is subjected
to risk by either his own actions or action taken by others . volunteers
to take that risk without any apprehension.
• Involuntary risks are risks that people take either not knowing that
they are at risk, or they are unable to control the fact that they are at
risk.These risks often include environmental hazards such as
lightning, tsunamis, and tornadoes.
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17. Job Related Risk
• Exposure to risks on a job is in one sense of voluntary nature since
one can always refuse to submit to the work or may have control over
how the job is done.
• But generally workers have no choice other than what they are told to
do since they want to stick to the only job available to them.
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18. ASSESSMENT OF SAFETY AND RISK
• Absolute safety is never possible to attain and safety can be improved
in an engineering product only with an increase in cost.
• On the other hand, unsafe products increase secondary costs to the
producer beyond the primary (production) costs, like warranty costs
loss of goodwill, loss of customers, legal action costs, downtime costs
in manufacturing, etc.
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19. Conclusion
• The risk management process involves a series of steps and procedures
ranging from identification of the probable hazard to establishing control
measures particularly on the impending impact of the possible danger.
• However, within the continuum of procedures are the assessments,
prioritisation, coordination, evaluation and application of resources to
reduce the possibility of risk.
• Modern organisations establish procedural measures that ensure reduction
of the possibility of risk occurrences.
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