Draft version 1.2 beta — Revised March 12, 2026
A Geoethics Primer for Geoscientists
Part 5. Other Issues
Incomplete Draft — Subject to Revision
5.1 Professional Perspective as an Employee
We work within an economic system in which many, if not all, of our essential material needs are met by purchasing goods and services from someone else. You need food, water, shelter, electrical and other forms of energy, transportation, clothing, healthcare, and so on. Without sufficient income from clients if you are self-employed, or a steady job supplied by an employer, you must rely on your personal wealth, private charity, or government subsidy to survive. If you have responsibility for dependents, the need to provide for your family makes it essential to get and keep a job that is sufficient to cover your basic needs.
As you move through your career from one geoscience job to another, remember that you are an autonomous moral agent with integrity, in command of valuable knowledge and skills. You are not merely an employee — you are a positive asset. You come to the new job with knowledge, skills, and ethical commitments that already have value. At every stage of your career, you carry a strong commitment to personal and scientific integrity, common morality, science ethics, and the geoethics standards of your professional societies. You are a valuable asset whose value will increase with time and experience.
Remaining an asset and not a liability (that is, remaining employed and not unemployed for cause) depends on your integrity, the habit of seeking new knowledge and skills — learning best practices — and the quality of your work. Maintaining active membership in local, regional, and national professional organizations helps you retain access to their networks, meetings, publications, and other assets throughout your career. By participating in the meetings of your professional societies, you can meet new friends, colleagues, clients, employers, and employees while remaining current with technical and scientific advances in your field.
5.2 Incompetence, Negligence, and Standards of Care and Practice
We looked at a table of ethical issues in Section 4.6. Many of them involved violations of rules of common morality against deception, promise-keeping, cheating, law-breaking, and doing your duty that we encountered in Section 2.2. Here, I want to highlight and expand upon two of the twenty-four types of ethical breach in Section 4.6.
Incompetent practice occurs when a professional geoscientist accepts paid employment to do a task that they do not know how to do. They are not competent to do the task. Perhaps they have justified the deception of letting the client or their boss think that they are capable of completing the task by meditating on the quip, "fake it till you make it." If a failure occurs that causes tangible harm because of incompetent practice, the unethical geoscientist will be responsible — morally and legally/financially liable — for the damages.
Negligent practice occurs when a professional geoscientist agrees to do a task that they know how to do, doing the task poorly and causing harm. Negligence is more than a moral or ethical breach; it can also be grounds for legal action. Black's Law Dictionary1 devotes five columns to negligence and negligent acts, with side references to practice, malpractice, tort law (e.g., involving civil lawsuits), and criminal law. Here is the core of Black's definition of negligence:
negligence, noun, (14c) 1. The failure to exercise the standard of care that a reasonably prudent person would have exercised in a similar situation; conduct that falls below the legal standard established to protect others against unreasonable risk of harm, except for conduct that is intentionally, wantonly, or willfully disregardful of others' rights; the doing of what a reasonable and prudent person would not do under the particular circumstances, or the failure to do what such a person would do under the circumstances... 2. A tort grounded in this failure, usu[ally] expressed in terms of the following elements: duty, breach of duty, causation, and damages.2
Standard of care. Geoscientists are legally obligated to, at a minimum, meet the standard of care in their professional work. Several legal terms inform our understanding of "standard of care" as we use the term in professional geoscience and related law.
- Care is the conduct required of a person in a given situation, and implies that serious attention to the matter is warranted.3
- Duty is defined as "1. A legal obligation that is owed or due to another and that needs to be satisfied; that which one is bound to do, and for which somebody else has a corresponding right... 2. Any action, performance, task, or observance owed by a person in an official or fiduciary capacity."4
- Duty of care for a professional geoscientist is "the duty to act with the diligence and the prevailing standards for the locality for the kind of work performed and to use any special skills the actor has to perform the work."5
- Breach of duty of care is an element in proving negligence in a court of law, and is defined as "negligence that results in a foreseeable injury that would not have occurred but for the negligent person's actions."6
- Standard of care, as reflected in the law of negligence, is "the degree of care that a reasonable person should exercise."7 The standard of care expected of a professional in the course of providing their services is related to the expectations and obligations of that profession under the particular situation in question.
Dr. James E. Slosson, who was the State Geologist of California in the mid-1970s, and engineer Gerard Shuirman shared their understanding of standards of practice and care in their book, Forensic Engineering — Environmental Case Histories for Civil Engineers and Geologists (1992)8. The standard of practice is the typical level of professional work done in a given situation, area (jurisdiction), and time period. If the relevant codes are weak, outdated, or unenforced, the standard of practice in one place can be significantly lower than it is in other places, and lower even than the relevant code requires. Slosson's Law states, "The quality of professional work will sink to the lowest level that government will accept."9 Jim Slosson would be quick to add that one antidote to this situation is for every geoscience professional to fully commit to ethical practice and the pursuit of excellence in their work. Professionals should be motivated by the question "What is the highest quality of work I can achieve?" rather than "What is the least work I can get away with?"
Shuirman and Slosson wrote10 of their understanding of standards of practice and care, ...
Civil engineers and geologists must realize that they have an assigned responsibility to function with competence and integrity as well as assuming the attendant legal liability for their work. Code requirements and enforcement may differ from one jurisdiction to another, but in recognizing that natural hazards are not constrained by political boundaries, courts are now tending to hold professionals accountable to a higher standard of care than the "standard practice" or "we met the code" concepts.
In many jurisdictions, codes and especially code enforcement may not meet current responsible professional standards; thus, the civil, geologic, and geotechnical professionals cannot rely on code standards to immunize them or their clients from liability...
There is a clear ethical and professional responsibility to maintain a high professional standard of care without regard to whether the codes within a particular jurisdiction are law or are adequately enforced. Further, one should not rely on codes as a standard inasmuch as upgrading of codes usually follows professional knowledge by about 10 [years].
My understanding is that standard of care is a legal doctrine established in case law, describing the level of skill and diligence that a reasonably prudent professional would exercise in similar circumstances.11 Standard of practice is a professional term that is not legally defined. It refers to customary or accepted methods within a discipline at a given time and location. Evidence of local custom may be introduced to help a court determine the standard of care, but custom is not necessary or sufficient to determine the standard of care by itself.12
5.3 Employer's Perspective
Companies, universities, and government agencies are complex structures that, like you and me, exist within an economic system fueled by revenue. An employee must contribute enough value to the revenue stream to justify their continued employment. Employer financial stability is not solely dependent on employee productivity, but also on external conditions that can cause revenue to increase or decrease. Sales, costs, liabilities, depreciation, cost of borrowing, inflation, legal challenges, marketing, healthcare, salaries, retirement contributions, accounting costs, and so on — the economics of successful businesses involves many variables. Employers demand the flexibility to deal with these challenges as they deem necessary, within legal bounds.
In many states within the US, employee-protection laws are weak and "right-to-work" laws prevail. These laws allow employers to fire their employees for any reason or for no reason whatsoever, with few exceptions. Company policies are promulgated from the top down, often without input from the employees affected. Employers expect their employees to work with integrity; however, it can be difficult for a professional geoscientist employed by a company (or university or governmental agency) to exercise autonomous moral agency in full accord with their moral and ethical obligations. Those obligations tend to be invisible to an employer, and have no legal power to constrain an employer's decisions. An individual geoscientist who asserts an ethical obligation that is contrary to the mandate of their supervisor is just a replaceable part of the organization.
In his inaugural address as U.S. President on January 20, 1989, George H.W. Bush offered a prayer in which he said, "we are given power not to advance our own purposes, nor to make a great show in the world, nor a name. There is but one just use of power, and it is to serve people."13 In most, if not all, companies, power is used to advance the financial interests of the company and its owners and investors. On the business side of universities, power is used to balance budgets, build endowments, maintain and improve facilities, and enhance prestige (that is, to improve rankings). Most of the employees are vulnerable to replacement.
We do not have much power as individuals within a large organization. Some ethicists might say that we experience bounded ethicality14 that constrains our autonomous moral agency. Others might call this common situation a structural ethical constraint that can limit our options and ability to fulfill our ethical duties.
5.4 Conflicting Obligations
5.5 X
5.6 Notes and References
1 Garner, B.A. [editor], 2024, Black's Law Dictionary [12th edition]: St. Paul, MN, Thompson Reuters, ISBN 979-8-350-29089-9, 2071 p.
2 Negligence, Ibid., p. 1241.
3 Care, Ibid., p. 262.
4 Duty, Ibid., p. 636.
5 Duty of care, Ibid., p. 636.
6 Breach of duty of care, Ibid., p. 233.
7 Standard of care, Ibid., p. 1699.
8 Shuirman, G., and Slosson, J.E., 1992, Forensic Engineering — Environmental Case Histories for Civil Engineers and Geologists: San Diego, California, Academic Press, ISBN 0-12-640740-1, 296 p.
9 Ibid., p. 5.
10 Ibid., p. 269.
11 Prosser, W.L., Keeton, W.P., Dobbs, D.B., Keeton, R.E., and Owen, D.G., (editors), 1984, The Reasonable Person, in Prosser and Keeton on the Law of Torts [5th ed.]: West Publishing Co., section 32, p. 173-193, ISBN-10: 0314748806; ISBN-13: 978-0314748805.
12 TJ Hooper case, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit - 60 F.2d 737 (2d Cir. 1932), accessed 20251203 via https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/60/737/1542549
13 Bush, George H.W., 1989, Presidential Inaugural Address, accessible via https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/january-20-1989-inaugural-address.
14 Bounded ethicality: Ethics Unwrapped, McCombs School of Business, University of Texas–Austin, accessed 20251203 via ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/glossary/bounded-ethicality