Sustainable Communities and the Challenge of Caring for Future Generations

Starting in 2006, the ethics code of the US National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE) states that engineers have professional obligations to encourage sustainable development. The organization continues to emphasize that sustainability is important for ensuring a community’s public health, safety, and welfare. Emphasizing sustainability requires considering impacts to both this generation and future generations. Investigations into the latter need more attention since there are many more studies focusing on the former. In this paper, we show how an ethic of care, particularly as it has been developed by Joan Tronto, can offer support for the engineering profession to practice an intergenerational ethic. At first glance, Tronto’s framing of care ethics might appear to be an unlikely candidate to meet obligations for future generations as this model involves “responsiveness” on the part of the caregiver to feedback offered by the one receiving care. In this paper, we demonstrate an alternative picture, where feedback is provided by proxies for future generations.