Steps toward a Philosophy of Engineering

Historico-Philosophical and Critical Essays

Carl Mitcham

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786611284
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

The rise of classic Euro-American philosophy of technology in the 1950s originally emphasized the importance of technologies as material entities and their mediating influence within human experience. Recent decades, however, have witnessed a subtle shift toward reflection on the activity from which these distinctly modern artifacts emerge and through which they are engaged and managed, that is, on engineering. What is engineering? What is the meaning of engineering? How is engineering related to other aspects of human existence? Such basic questions readily engage all major branches of philosophy --- ontology, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics --- although not always to the same degree. The historico-philosophical and critical reflections collected here record a series of halting steps to think through engineering and the engineered way of life that we all increasingly live in what has been called the Anthropocene. The aim is not to promote an ideology for engineering but to stimulate deeper reflection among engineers and non-engineers alike about some basic challenges of our engineered and engineering lifeworld.

Part One

Definition

(after Lydia Davis)

By engineered I just mean a construct that’s a little different from reality but real and really hard to understand.

Essay 1
Science, Technology, Engineering, and the Military

Philosophical and ethical issues associated with relationships among science, technology, engineering, and the military have been largely ignored in the contemporary professional philosophical community. The same is true in the engineering community. The philosophical community seems oblivious, perhaps reflecting a general tendency to shy away from practical engagements. The engineering community looks the other way, perhaps because so much of engineering employment is in one form or another related to the military.

1. Observations from History

Unlike philosophers, historians and social scientists have paid considerable attention to relationships between technology and warfare. These relationships make history. Any review of significant post–World War II work would have to include the following:

• William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 (1982);
• Merritt Roe Smith, ed., Military Enterprise and Technological Change: Perspectives on the American Experience (1985);
• Everett Mendelsohn, Merritt Roe Smith, and Peter Weingart, eds., Science, Technology, and the Military (1988);
• Martin van Creveld, Technology and War: From 2000 BC to the Present (1989); and
• Max Boot, War Made New: Weapons, Warriors, and the Making of the Modern World (2006).

Philosophical reflection can almost always benefit, at least at the beginning, by learning from what historians and social scientists have to say about a topic.

Something immediately obvious is that the term “engineering” is not in the title of any of these studies, nor is it common in their indices. Nevertheless, the activity is clearly assumed by the analyses. Why it should not be named as such is not clear and a point that invites linguistic philosophical consideration. Does absence of “engineering” simply reflect a general public failure to recognize the reality of our constructed world? Could it be an unconscious effort not to contaminate engineering, which since the 1700s has sought to separate from its military origins?

In this selective set of references, more attention is paid to the history and sociology of American military technology and engineering than of military engineering tout court. This is to be expected, given the post–World War II military dominance of the United States. However, as McNeill, Van Creveld, and Boot also illustrate, there do exist a number of general histories of technology and war, even though within them the United States plays the prominent role.

In all general histories, warfare is divided into different periods on the basis of contributions from engineering and technology; however, there are overlapping differences in the periods and technologies to which specific authors appeal. McNeill cites gunpowder and the engineered industrialization of warfare as turning points. Van Creveld distinguishes four basic ages of warfare: those of tools (from earliest times to 1500); of machines and therefore of mechanical engineering (1500–1830); of technological or engineered systems (1830–1945); and of engineering automation (1945 to the present). Boot distinguishes four revolutions in warfare: the gunpowder revolution, a first Industrial Revolution (powered by coal and steam and intimately involved with the development of engineering in the distinctly modern sense), a second Industrial Revolution (of oil and electricity and obviously dependent on the emergence of new forms of engineering), and an information revolution (again involved with the new engineering of computers). Although there are debates about the degree of technological determinism in military affairs, there is general consensus that engineered weapons are major influences on the character of warfare and that the influence is increasing as a result of advances in post–World War II engineering and technology (see Roland, 2009). Techno-engineered warfare is now an important determinant on the outcome of military conflicts, whether those conflicts are between states or state and non-state actors.

A preliminary effort to reengage philosophy in relevant critical reflection on engineering and technology in relation to military affairs would do well to proceed modestly. Philosophy may, for instance, contribute to existing discussions through conceptual clarification relevant to empirical questions. To a degree it may also provide frameworks for interdisciplinary reflection, promote the relating of relevant information and arguments, and offer criticism of selective theoretical assumptions. At some point, philosophy may even be able to advance substantive criticisms of its own—but it should do so with caution and only after due consideration. Philosophy seldom makes history.

What follows is no more than preparation for substantive philosophical engagement. It proceeds by sketching a general historico-philosophical background, then turns to a quick review of more immediate post–World War II discussions in the United States. Along the way it indicates some philosophical, often ethical, questions that deserve attention. Finally, it summarizes issues and questions that would be important especially to philosophical reflection on engineering.

2. Historico-Philosophical Background

As noted, warfare is commonly divided into historical periods on the basis of its distinctive technologies. One of the most well-identified periods in ancient military history is defined by use of the chariot (see Drews, 1993). Modern military history is often thought to have been ushered in with the use of gunpowder and the printing press (to disseminate nationalist propaganda); contemporary military history with the introduction of engineered weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), especially the atomic bomb, and the engineering of jet aircraft and rockets. Indicative of the importance of engineering in military affairs is the way WMDs undermined one of the supreme ethical-political achievements of the early modern period in Europe: the separation of military from civilian targets. WMDs turn nonmilitary populations into military targets in the manner of premodern military campaigns in which victors would slaughter or enslave whole populations of the vanquished. That civilian deaths are termed “collateral” damage or unintended is at best a weak qualification.

The engineering of the WMD known as a “neutron bomb” was designed to undermine the military/civilian distinction in an even more radical manner, by replacing the military/civilian distinction with one between living entities and physical infrastructure. The neutron bomb was designed to kill all persons (and many other living things) but leave infrastructure intact. The inventor, Samuel Cohen, argued this to be morally superior to killing people and destroying infrastructure, as survivors or victors could utilize the remaining material structures (see McFadden, 2010).

But the tables can be turned. The history of science (commonly periodized by the prominence of distinctive theories) and the history of technology (easily periodized by its materials and power resources) can also be distinguished into different eras on the basis of differential engagements with warfare. This is especially true in engineering or technology. Leo Strauss, for instance, divides modernity into three waves, initiated by three major political philosophers: Niccolò Machiavelli, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Friedrich Nietzsche (Strauss 1975). Although Strauss does not make the connection, each exhibits a distinctive philosophical attitude toward warfare.

In the first wave of modernity, modern science and modern engineering technology (as distinguished from premodern science and traditional technics) came to be regularly imagined in terms of violence and war. Machiavelli (the father of modern social science) defended his positivism with the metaphor of fortune as a woman who if unable to be seduced can nevertheless be ravished. According to Francis Bacon (one of the founders of modern technoscience), nature reveals her secrets more readily on the rack of experimentation than when left free and at peace and is subject to scientific conquest. According to René Descartes, human domination is to be asserted over nature through the new way of (technoscientific) thinking that he wishes to introduce. Descartes’s contemporary, Thomas Hobbes, argued that the state of nature in human affairs is one of a “war of all against all.” For more on this kind of imagery as a stimulus to technoscience, see Carolyn Merchant’s feminist study The Death of Nature (1980).

Such images remain alive in contemporary references to scientific “wars” on polio, small pox, cancer, hunger, or HIV. This is true especially in the techno-engineering community most closely associated with the military, as has been analyzed by Carol Cohn (1990). Indeed, some scientists and science policy advisors have suggested that only fear of war can galvanize the public to contribute to science and engineering with sufficient generosity to create a world-class technoscientific establishment. Strong prima facie evidence exists that the most outstanding science is in fact associated with world-class military power and that attempts to fund science and technology through nonmilitary projects result in smaller percentages of the gross domestic product being devoted to research and development. As has been observed by Charles Boyle (1984), an engineering physicist at Trent Polytechnic in Nottingham,

The military applications of science and technology form no mere fringe activity indulged in by a few atypical tinkerers and experimentalists. In financial and manpower terms, they are central to modern research and development.

Not just nuclear power but also drugs, pesticides, aircraft, radar, processed food, satellites, computers, transistors, lasers, and many other technologies have all been funded and developed initially by the military for military purposes—although often with collateral justifications that emphasize civilian spin-offs or applications.

Such arguments, however, call for conceptual clarifications and distinctions between research and development; between pure and applied or mission-oriented science; between science, engineering, and technology; and between military and civilian technoscience, in order to interpret and assess accurately a wealth of conflicting claims that can be marshaled from the available evidence. Such newly constructed terms as “technoscience” and “techno-engineering” deserve clarification as well. Could a better term be coined that more properly reflected the prominence of engineering over technology in “technoscience”? The epistemology and philosophy of science and technology might address the issue of the adequacy and accuracy of the science-as-war metaphor as well as possibilities for alternative forms of technoscience. The ethical legitimacy of using the threat or fear of war and the war metaphor to promote and fund technoscience, even for civilian peacetime benefit, is a further issue.

In the second wave of modernity, the Enlightenment elaboration of the science-as-war metaphor was restated as the theory that the warfare of human beings against each other could be replaced by a war of all (everyone) against nature. The basic social problem for Rousseau is how to bring peace out of the social situation that arises when individualistic humans gather in cities, where self-interested struggle and decadence predominate. Eschewing Rousseau’s synthesizing general will, contemporary David Hume argued that human warfare is caused by material scarcity and a competition for resources. The best approach is for humans to unite through industry, using technoscience to remove scarcity and thus the cause of internecine conflict. Appeals to the need to discover “the moral equivalent of war” (from American pragmatist William James to U.S. president Jimmy Carter) are contemporary reformulations of such a theory.

By contrast, Plato’s Republic and Lewis Mumford’s The Myth of the Machine have advanced the thesis that warfare arose in association with the technical creation of “unnatural” or exceptional wealth and a resultant need to defend wealth against those who “naturally” desire to steal it. The first standing armies are associated with the transformation from hunting and gathering societies to domestic agriculture and emerging surpluses. Do such surpluses merely make possible a division of labor between agricultural workers and soldiers in a society already primed for war, or do they actually provoke the rise of warfare and the military class? What is the relationship between the ritualized fighting of preliterate tribes and so-called civilized warfare? Such questions point again toward philosophical issues, this time about human nature.

The third wave of modernity introduced another dimension to this discussion. Nietzsche criticizes the bourgeois domestication and commercialization of warfare, arguing there is something profound at work in struggle and conflict. This idea is further developed by Sigmund Freud, who postulated that human Eros or the drive for self-preservation is complemented by Thanatos or a death wish. Despair at the manifest aggressive utilizations of technology can occasionally be found in the reactions of scientists and engineers to the destructive applications of their research and development work. Rudolf Diesel, inventor of the diesel engine, committed suicide in 1913 in despair over the inability of his mechanical engineering to promote true human solidarity; his son, Eugene Diesel, under the experience of World War I, turned away from engineering and spent his life pointing out the social and cultural violence associated with technology.

A counter argument of Alfred Nobel, another engineer-inventor, and of military theorist Jan Block, is that increasingly advanced weapons make war so horrible it will become unthinkable and that modern weapons thus promote solidarity by a kind of technologically necessitated backlash against, or repression of, aggressive instincts. Although this theory was in some measure confirmed by the post–World War II nuclear peace, it could also be argued that a “return of the repressed” has been manifest in numerous proxy wars between smaller states and terrorism by nonstate actors—and perhaps even in the worldwide assault on the environment that has created acid rain, oceanic pollution, biodiversity loss, and climate change. Today disenchantment with the “side effects” or “unintended consequences” of the scientific and technological conquest of nature may be doing more to unite humanity than any positive vision of possibilities put forth by Enlightenment ideals.

Once again, philosophical examinations of relationships between human nature, aggression, and the motivations or intentions at the base of engineering and technology could add new depth to critical reflection on such phenomena. Some work in applied philosophy dealing with the conceptual and ethical dilemmas of nuclear weapons policies, in environmental ethics and philosophy and in emerging efforts in the philosophy of science policy, might make useful contributions as well.

3. After World War II in the United States

Against such a general background, consider more immediate post–World War II science and technology policy debates in the United States. Before World War II, despite the existence of national arsenals and military research facilities, science and engineering were primarily funded by private enterprise (the DuPont chemical company and the work of Thomas Edison, for example), private foundations (mostly of a medical sort), or civilian agencies of the federal government (e.g., what are now the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Commerce, and the National Institutes of Health). As a result of World War II mobilization of science and technology, the War Department—subsequently the Department of Defense—became a primary source of funding for technoscientific research.

To redress the balance, immediately after the war scientists and engineers themselves (especially in the person of Vannevar Bush, 1945) lobbied for the establishment of a federally funded, civilian-controlled foundation through which technoscientists, independent of the distortions introduced by military interests, might determine scientific funding priorities. The founding legislation for the National Science Foundation (NSF) nevertheless proclaims in its preface that it exists to promote not only “scientific progress” but also “national defense.” To what extent has NSF been able to subordinate mili...