Contracts
Contracts are legally enforceable agreements between persons that specify transactions or define relations between them. Either informal or written, they may concern any lawful human transaction, from purchases and loans to hiring and marriage. In engineering and science, contracts play important roles because, in both domains, practitioners do a great deal of work under some form of contract. Defining what the parties are obligated or permitted to do, contracts establish an ethical framework for engineering and scientific work, and they present ethical problems. The ethical framework has at its core one or more promises. Because the promises are legally enforceable, they involve a third actor in addition to the promisor and the promisee, government.
Contracts in Engineering
For most engineers and many scientists, the employment contract frames their professional activities. American courts apply the common law doctrine of "employment at will" when interpreting employment contracts for engineers and scientists. Under this doctrine, the employer is free to hire and fire at will, and the employee is free to take up employment and resign at will. This means that an employer may dismiss an "at will" employee, in the words of the court in an often cited case, "for good cause, no cause, or even cause morally wrong, without thereby being guilty of moral wrong" (Payne v.
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