1. Conceptual clarifications needed

Over the last ten years or so in France, the terms "engineering ethics", "engineering ethics" and "ethics of the engineering profession" have appeared in specialist literature, conference titles and course titles. Outside the circles that produce them, these expressions arouse curiosity, astonishment and sometimes suspicion. The English equivalent, Engineering Ethics, is not difficult to understand in academic circles, nor in engineering circles. It refers to a genre that has developed over the last century through codes that are now familiar to all graduates. For the past thirty years, the expression has appeared in dictionaries of philosophy and applied ethics, and on the covers of dozens of textbooks for engineering students. The most reputed of these are now in their fourth reissue