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THE ETHICALLY RESPONSIBLE ENGINEER

Concepts and Cases for Students and Professionals

Robert McGinn

Stanford University

Copyright © 2015 by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey. All rights reserved
Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN: 978-1-119-06019-2

For Carol and Dick, Jan and Howard, Kris and Steve, and Wanda and Joe;
in appreciation of abiding friendship.

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: The Ethics Gap in Contemporary Engineering

1.1 Two Vignettes

1.2 The Gap Between Education and Experience

1.3 Evidence

1.4 Importance

1.5 Unfruitful Approaches to Bridging the Gap

1.6 Preferred Approach

Notes

Chapter 2: Sociological and Ethical Preliminaries

2.1 Sociology of Engineering

2.2 Engineering Society Codes of Ethics

Notes

Chapter 3: The Fundamental Ethical Responsibilities of Engineers

3.1 An Ethical Responsibilities Approach

3.2 Ethical Issues and harm

3.3 The Fundamental Ethical Responsibilities of Engineers

Notes

Chapter 4: Sixteen Case Studies of Ethical Issues in Engineering

4.1 Introduction

4.2 Case Studies

Notes

Chapter 5: Ethical Issues and Situational Factors Conducive to Misconduct

5.1 Specific Ethical Issues Raised in the Case Studies

5.2 General Engineering-Related Ethical Issues

5.3 Specific Situational Factors Involved in Misconduct in the Cases

5.4 General Situational Factors Conducive to Engineering Misconduct

Notes

Chapter 6: Key Ideas and Lessons of the Cases

6.1 The Leading Precept of Most Current Codes of Engineering Ethics

6.2 The FEREs

6.3 Ethics and the Sociology of Contemporary Engineering

6.4 An Ethically Problematic Pattern of Engineering Practice

6.5 Conditions for Whistle-Blowing to be an Engineer's Ethical Responsibility

6.6 Risk and the Idealization of Technology in Society

6.7 Ethical Responsibility and the Culture of the Engineering Workplace

6.8 Codes and Regulations: Letter, Spirit, and Ethics

6.9 An Overlooked Ethical Responsibility of Engineers

6.10 An Engineering Professional

6.11 Radical Engineering Design and the Ethics of Precaution

6.12 Normalizing Risk and Routinizing the Experimental

6.13 Technology Transfer and Ethical Responsibility

6.14 “Two Cultures” and Ethical Responsibility

6.15 Decontextualization

6.16 The Politicization and Economization of Engineering Decision-Making

6.17 Negligence

6.18 Workplace Culture and the Ethically Responsible Engineer

Notes

Chapter 7: Resources and Options For Ethically Responsible Engineers

7.1 Organizational Resources

7.2 Legal Resources and Options

7.3 Employment-Related Options

Notes

Chapter 8: Conclusion

8.1 Bucciarelli'S Critique of US Engineering-Ethics Education

8.2 A Foundational-Contextual Ethical Responsibilities Approach

8.3 Two Quotes

Notes

Bibliography

Index

EULA

List of Illustrations

Chapter 4

Figure 4.1 David Parnas.

Figure 4.2 DILBERT.

Figure 4.3 Citicorp Center.

Figure 4.4 “Never, ever, think outside the box.”

Figure 4.5 The “cultural system” of a social unit.

Figure 4.6 Crew members of NASA Space Shuttle orbiter Challenger, Mission STS-51-L.

Figure 4.7 Roger Boisjoly, before the Presidential Commission investigating the Challenger accident, February 25, 1986.

Figure 4.8 Topf & Sons cremation ovens, at the Nazi concentration camp at Weimar (Buchenwald), Germany, April 14, 1945.

Figure 4.9 The lobby and atrium of the Hyatt Regency Kansas City Hotel after the skywalk collapse on July 17, 1981.

Figure 4.10 Original single-rod (R) and revised double-rod (L) box-beam connections, pedestrian skywalks, Hyatt Regency Kansas City Hotel.

Figure 4.11 Martin Fisher.

Figure 4.12 KickStart irrigation pump in use.

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Preface

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Preface

It is time for the study of ethical issues in engineering to become an integral part of engineering education.

Reflecting that conviction, the main goal of this book is to help engineering students and practicing engineers enhance their understanding of ethical issues that arise in engineering practice. Through reading it, they will hopefully become better able to recognize a wide range of ethical issues in engineering work and to think about them in a critical, context-sensitive way. A secondary goal of this book is to raise awareness of technical, social, and personal characteristics of engineering situations that can induce or press engineers to engage in misconduct.

Some books on engineering ethics devote considerable space to classical ethical theories. The real-life case studies they contain are often described and discussed in cursory fashion. Other books on engineering ethics are anthologies of actual cases, each analyzed by a different author with her/his own approach. Still others are multi-author hybrids, combining case studies of real-life episodes with philosophical essays on concepts or principles relevant to engineering ethics. Few show a practical, foundational approach to exploring ethical issues in engineering being brought to bear on a wide range of real-life cases. The bulk of this book is devoted to case studies of ethical issues in engineering work. Fundamental ethical responsibilities of engineers are applied to real-life engineering situations to shed light on engineers' context-specific ethical responsibilities.

Engineering students and practicing engineers who read this book with care will acquire intellectual resources useful for coming to grips with ethical issues in real-life engineering situations. These resources should also prove useful to engineering students and practicing engineers for grappling with whatever ethical issues confront them in the future.

Robert McGinn
Stanford University

Acknowledgments

Many individuals have supported my work on engineering ethics over the past two decades. Colleagues in the Stanford School of Engineering who helped me in various ways include Brad Osgood, Steve Barley, Sheri Sheppard, Eric Roberts, Walter Vincenti, James Adams, and David Freyberg. Engineering students in E131 (“Ethical Issues in Engineering”) offered valuable feedback on several cases explored in this book.

In 2003, James Plummer, then Dean of the Stanford School of Engineering, put me in touch with staff engineers and scientists at the Stanford Nanofabrication Facility (SNF). The studies that resulted altered my approach to engineering ethics. Sandip Tiwari of Cornell University, former Director of the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network (NNIN), Yoshio Nishi, former SNF Faculty Director, and Roger Howe, SNF Faculty Director and Director of the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network (NNIN), supported my research on nanotechnology-related ethical issues. Mary Tang, SNF Lab Manager, improved and facilitated my surveys of nanotechnology researchers' views about ethical issues related to their work.

Stephen Unger of Columbia University kindly read a draft version of the text and offered helpful feedback. He also generously shared an explanation, a suggestion, and an example that have been incorporated into the text. My longtime research collaborator and virtual colleague Rafael Pardo Avellaneda of the Spanish National Research Council (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, CSIC) in Madrid made many helpful suggestions on survey design and data analysis. Howard and Janice Oringer, Mathieu Desbrun, Richard Herman, Alan Petersen, and Roya Maboudian afforded me opportunities to present early versions of parts of this work before audiences at Cal Tech, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Spectra-Physics, and the University of California, Berkeley. Finally, I am indebted to five anonymous reviewers for constructive criticisms and suggestions.

Palo Alto, California

1
The Ethics Gap in Contemporary Engineering

1.1 Two Vignettes

During the night of December 2–3, 1984, the worst industrial disaster in history occurred at Union Carbide's plant in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India. Methyl isocyanate (MIC) liquid, an intermediate used in making “Sevin,” Union Carbide's name for the pesticide carbaryl, came into contact with water, boiled violently, and turned into MIC gas. Unchecked by various safety systems, tons of highly toxic MIC gas escaped from storage tank E610.¹ A cloud of MIC gas descended upon shantytowns just outside the plant, as well as on Bhopal city. Estimates of the death toll from exposure to the gas, immediately or in the first 2 weeks, range from 2000 to 8000 or more. If those who died months or years later from MIC exposure are counted, the death toll rises to between 20,000 and 30,000.² More than 500,000 people suffered injuries from exposure to the gas and its effects on the environment.³

In February 1992, I attended a conference on professional ethics at the University of Florida, Gainesville. On the shuttle bus to the conference hotel, the only other passenger turned out to be a chemical engineer. I asked him whether there was any consensus in the chemical engineering community about what had caused the Bhopal disaster. His response was immediate and succinct: “sabotage.” Union Carbide has given the same explanation for almost three decades and continues to do so on its website.⁴

About 14 months after the Bhopal disaster, on January 28, 1986, the US space shuttle Challenger exploded and disintegrated 73 seconds after launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The entire crew perished: six astronauts and Christa McAuliffe, the first “Teacher in Space.”⁵

President Ronald Reagan appointed the late Arthur Walker Jr., at the time a faculty member at Stanford University, to serve on the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident. Reagan charged the Commission with determining the cause of the accident. In late 1986, after it had submitted its final report, I ran into Professor Walker on the Stanford campus and invited him to give a talk about his Commission experience to a faculty seminar on technology in society. After his talk, I asked Walker what was the single most important lesson to be learned from the Challenger disaster. He responded instantly: “Hire smarter engineers!”

1.2 The Gap Between Education and Experience

The responses quoted in these vignettes are simplistic. The tragic engineering outcomes involved cannot be explained as simply as those succinct replies suggest. The explanations probably reflect the educational backgrounds of those who offered them. Few intending engineers (or scientists) ever take ethics or social science classes that focus on engineering (or science) projects or practices. They are therefore predisposed to attribute the outcomes of destructive engineering episodes to technical failures or to clear-cut, non-technical factors. The latter include individual cognitive shortcomings, such as “mediocre intellectual capability on the part of project engineers,” and individual political motives, such as “vengeful sabotage by a disgruntled employee.”

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!