Observations on authority

-    An employer who has institutional authority may direct engineers to do something that is not morally justified.

- Engineers may feel that they have an institutional duty to obey a directive that is morally unjustified, but their moral duty, all things considered, is not to obey.

-    To decide whether a specific act of exercising institutional authority is morally justified, we need to know  whether the institutional goals are themselves morally permissible or desirable and whether that act violates basic moral duties.