WHY OBEY ONES PROFESSIONAL CODE?
The question now is why, all things considered, an engineer should obey her profession’s code. We should begin by dismissing two alternatives some people find plausible. One is that Lund should do as his profession requires because he “promised,” for example, by joining an engineering society having a code of ethics. We must dismiss this answer because it is at least possible that Lund never did anything we could plausibly characterize as promising to follow a formal code. Lund could, for example, have refused to join any professional society having a code (as perhaps half of all U.S. engineers do). Yet, it seems such a refusal would not excuse him from conducting himself as an engineer should. The obligations of an engineer do not seem to rest on anything so contingent as a promise, oath, or vow. So, the “convention between professionals” (as I called it) is not a contract. It is more like what lawyers call a “quasi-contract” or a “contract implied in law”; that is, an obligation rest
