Abstract :
[en] The identity of engineers can be defined in historical, sociological, epistemological or deontological terms. Depending on the countries, it appears that the ethos of professional engineers stems from either a tradition of ‘state engineers’ educated in state engineering schools, or from the free association of practitioners trained by their peers and creating professional orders regulating their profession. Whatever the pathway for making engineers, they appear to adhere to ethical values typical of industrial modernity, pursuing the public interest by relying on scientific and technical progress, considering the techniques as instrumental, artefacts having functions and values limited to their utilities; in this perspective the moral world is anthropocentric, the natural environment providing the resources needed for human health and welfare, within the capacities of ecosystems. In some countries, the term “bioengineer” has been coined to refer to curriculums in the field of agricultural or biological engineering. In order to facilitate the ecological transition, should the ethics of bioengineering be different from that of ‘traditional’ engineering, as outlined above? The following changes, promoting an ‘ethical turning point’, are proposed for discussion: (1) regarding living beings – from organisms to ecosystems- as autonomous and complex systems, substituting the aim of ‘controlling nature’ by the aim of dealing with the intrinsic, dynamic processes of nature (i.e. as in agroecology and ‘regenerative’ agriculture); (2) seeing the components of the natural environment as partners and not as resources; (3) thinking over the temporality of human development by considering the temporality of biodiversity and its preservation, and not only in terms of intergenerational solidarity between human beings; (4) substituting the anthropocentric outlook by bio- and ecocentric ones; (5) embedding technical objects, devices and algorithms into a new ‘techno- eco-humanism’, making artefacts relational objects with some degree of ‘agency’. Although bioengineers should to be prone to adopt such a new ethical stance, we propose that they pave the way to a change in the culture of engineering as a whole, capable of meeting the challenges of global change, as well as the expectations of new generations of engineers.
