What Does it Mean to "Hold Paramount the Safety, Health, and Welfare of the Public”?

To hold paramount simply means to set as more important. In this canon, the recipient is the public, and the objects are safety, health, and welfare. This seems like a difficult responsibility that could involve thousands of moving parts, any one of which could escape a careful engineer’s attention at any moment. The intention here is not a perfect knowledge of the needs of the public, but a careful assessment of how judgment needs to be applied for any given situation.

If we were to use the broadest terms, the public would include all persons. We are all part of the public. This means the safety, health, and welfare of employers, clients, colleagues, family, friends, strangers, and all others should be held as the most important goal. Such a broad characterization, however, makes it more difficult to understand how this provision applies to engineering practice. Specific instructions are provided by engineering ethical code documents to clarify the practical intent of this fundamental provision, including the following:

 A. Only approve documents that are in conformance with applicable codes and standards.

B. Draw attention to hazards, including when your sound judgment on a safety matter is overruled.

C. Do not aid or abet the practice of engineering by someone who is not duly licensed.

D. Expose unethical or illegal activity through appropriate channels.

E. Avoid conflicts of interest.

F. Identify, evaluate, quantify, mitigate, and manage risks.

It is easy to see how the safety and welfare of the public is captured within this sample list of practical duties. Safety includes adherence to minimum standards of construction and attention to hazards that may cause harm to another, such as during a site investigation or in reviewing a set of design documents that include gross errors of judgment. Welfare includes an expectation that only qualified individuals will make engineering judgments that affect society, and licensed professional engineers need to be aware of these types of violations or when circumstances arise that will bring sound, reasoned judgment into conflict. The Architecture Practice Act of Illinois[i] defines public safety (with relation to architecture) as “the state of being reasonably free from risk of danger, damage, or injury” and it defines public welfare as “the well-being of the building user resulting from the state of a physical environment that accommodates human activity”.

The health of the public is more difficult to identify from an engineering perspective (as something that would be distinct from safety). It is something separate from welfare, but can include elements of well-being, such as having the freedom and opportunity to participate in activities that increase happiness, advance the potential to achieve goals, and broaden the range of available choices for a variety of lifestyle conditions (career, family, living space, recreation, etc.). Health is also key to choices that affect the environment, such as the emission of pollutants and disposal or reuse of waste products. The Architecture Practice Act of Illinois defines public health as “the state of well-being of the body or mind of the building user”.

An example of how the health of the public has been addressed as paramount is in the selection and use of fly ash in concrete mixtures and examination of potential hazards. Fly ash is a pozzolanic by-product of the combustion of pulverized coal in electric power generating plants and can be used as a substitute for cement in a concrete mix design, typically in the range of 15 - 30%, but it can also be used to replace more than 50% of the cement[ii]. It is known to reduce the impact that concrete has on the environment (a health benefit to the public), but it also contains trace amounts of arsenic and some heavy metals (dangerous to the health of the public). Several studies were conducted at universities in Germany and Canada to assess the risk to public health, and it was determined that leached amounts of these products were very low and there is very little risk of contamination to humans or the environment when fly ash is used in a good quality concrete mixture.[iii]

There is a real danger in oversimplifying the application of this precept -- it is not intended to categorically demand that an engineer’s duties and responsibilities are to be focused in a single direction without consideration of other factors. Professionals have legal obligations to contracts, privacy, employers, and clients that cannot be taken lightly or carelessly pushed to the side. In cases where there is conflict, you must honestly and objectively evaluate the situation and truthfully consider the conflicting elements. Sometimes a neutral third-party can be helpful in assessing whether there is, in fact, conflict and can offer solutions that may not be immediately apparent. Where real conflicts are apparent, these should be brought to the attention of other parties who will be affected by your decision.

[i] Illinois Architecture Practice Act of 1989, 2020 Illinois Compiled Statutes, chapter 225, section 305/4.

[ii] Dale P. Bentz et al., Best Practices Guide for High-Volume Fly Ash Concretes: Assuring Properties and Performance [NIST Technical Note 1812] (Gaithersburg, MD: National Institute of Standards and Technology, 2013).

[iii] Dirk M. Kestner et al., Sustainability Guidelines for the Structural Engineer (Reston, VA: American Society of Civil Engineers, 2010).