2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Major reform in engineering education needs to be driven from top-down influences such as the professional societies through ABET accreditation, and with all the planetary crises occurring, we need another push from the top. We propose this begins with a restatement of our values as explicitly expressed in codes of ethics. In many codes of ethics, the profession states that it values human life and safety. As the planet is threatened by disastrous climate changes, loss of biodiversity, ocean acidification, etc., the focus must shift from this primary value concern for human lives to valuing life more broadly. Valuing all life, not just human lives, means valuing the ‘infinite’ propagation of life on the planet, whereas lives represent ‘finite’ concerns. We are not suggesting that individual human lives are not valuable but that they are one kind of life among many on this planet. Redefining collectivism beyond human beings is required. Typically, the idea of collectivism refers to a single species, ‘it is not the individual that matters but the population.’ The concept of collectivism now needs to value all life forms as a collective, ‘it is not a single species that matters but all life forms.’ The goal is to protect life on the planet into the future. This will lead to very different actions, often associated with the concept of sustainability but not always explicitly codified or put into action. In this paper, we survey several professional societies’ codes of ethics for references to public health, safety and welfare. Obviously, we cannot simply replace the word “public” with some other more encompassing life description. We recommend taking a paradigmatic change in the world view of engineering concerning the valuing of all life on the planet and codify this into engineering codes of ethics, engineering education, and engineering practice.