Safety Ethics

Cases from Aviation, Healthcare and Occupational and Environmental Health

Manoj S. Patankar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000083002
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Industrial Engineering
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Much of the previous literature in the field of safety focuses on either the technical equipment issues or the human performance factors that contribute to the active failures in safety-critical systems. However, this book provides guidance in the moral or ethical aspects of decision-making that perpetuate many of the latent failures in safety-critical systems. The book provides a concise introduction to the ethical foundations and follows up with case studies from aviation, healthcare, and environmental and occupational health.

Chapter 1

Introduction to Ethical Decision-Making

Manoj S. Patankar

Instructional Objectives

Upon completing this chapter, you should be able to accomplish the following:

1. Define the term ethics.

2. Classify a given ethical decision based on Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Development into either a Level-1, Level-2, or Level-3 decision.

3. Apply Beabout and Wennemann’s model—based on the intent, motive, circumstances, and action—to make ethical decisions.

4. Explain the use of a structured communication process to make decisions under varying levels of uncertainty.

Introduction

My primary research field is aviation safety. In the course of my research, I spend numerous hours with Aircraft Maintenance Technicians (AMTs), pilots, and managers trying to understand the extant safety-related challenges. In one such visit, under the aegis of ‘Assessment of Safety Culture in Aviation Organizations’, I was interviewing some AMTs regarding their safety challenges and their company’s response to those challenges. This was a one-hour interview that turned into a serendipitous discussion of ethics and moral decision-making that lasted for several hours that night and continued on for several subsequent months by telephone! In effect, there were enough personal accounts from frontline practitioners to establish the need for a book on ethics in safety. Furthermore, there was limited formal coursework in applied ethics among the collegiate aviation programs.

Upon discussing the idea for this book with my colleagues, Jeffrey Brown and Melinda Treadwell, we discovered that much of the basic challenges were not limited to aviation. Hence, the idea for an interdisciplinary book on safety ethics focusing on practical ethical dilemmas faced by professionals in three different industries, yet distilling the commonalities from the perspective of moral decision-making, was born. As Beabout and Wennemann (1994) rightfully point out, there is no separate set of ethics for the safety professionals. However, we are trying to present ethical challenges with respect to safety decisions, as encountered by professionals in aviation, healthcare, and occupational and environmental health.

In this chapter, I present the following interconnected concepts: (a) Kohlberg’s three levels of moral maturity; (b) Beabout and Wennemann’s moral decision-making framework; (c) the Concept Alignment Process; and (d) Keys’ two levels or types of risk-taking behaviors. These four concepts will be used throughout this book to explore the relationships between them as well as across aviation, healthcare, and occupational and environmental health.

Next, I would like to present my approach for the subsequent chapters by using the analogy of an object on a three-legged stool, as illustrated in Figure 1.1. This object represents the individual who has to resolve the ethical conflict; the flat top of the stool represents the environment within whose context the ethical issues emerge; and the three legs of the stool represent the roles of educators, regulators, and professional organizations. I am attempting to present to you a look at the aviation maintenance profession from the perspective of ethical challenges faced by certain individuals, the circumstances surrounding those individuals, and the roles that certain support groups might play in assisting the individual professionals.

Figure 1.1 Individual, environment and external entities from the perspective of a three-legged stool

In Chapter 2, I present an in-depth look at one maintenance inspector’s experiences in the aviation industry. The emphasis is placed on the individual (represented by the object on the stool in Figure 1.1) and his/her character to explore his/her personal motivation(s) to challenge ethical violations at the risk of losing his/her job. In Chapter 3, I present a look at the aviation maintenance environment (represented by the flat top of the stool in Figure 1.1) through the eyes of some mechanics and inspectors so that you get a glimpse of the professional work environment of a typical aircraft mechanic or inspector. Then, in Chapter 4, I discuss the role of the three primary support groups—educators, regulators, and professional organizations (the three legs represented by the stool in Figure 1.1)—in fostering ethical decision-making among aviation professionals.

A similar format will be used by my colleagues, Jeffrey Brown and Melinda Treadwell, to discuss issues in healthcare and occupational and environmental health, respectively.

Finally, we will collectively provide concluding remarks that distill the commonalities in the three domains from the perspective of ethical decision-making.

Fundamentals of Ethics

The field of Ethics or Morality of Actions has been studied, debated, and professed by several key ethicists and philosophers over centuries. Specialists in moral philosophy frequently draw a distinction between approaches that emphasize agents—the habits and character of people—and approaches that emphasize actions—especially the analysis of the decision-making process. Historically, Aristotle, stressing virtue as central to a good life, focused on agents while thinkers such as Kant and Mill focused on the analysis of actions. Frequently, moral debates center on whether the action should be analyzed in terms of rights (as suggested by Kant) or consequences (as suggested by Mill). In recent times, we notice that there is a revival of virtue ethics, a renewed interest in agents and character building. In this book, we explore both the agent perspective as well as the action perspective as we navigate through the variety of ethical challenges across our three disciplines.

As professionals in our respective fields, we are deeply concerned with the application of ethical principles in decision-making. In our quest for a simple practical guide to the application of ethical principles in professional decision-making, we discovered the book, Applied Professional Ethics by Beabout and Wennemann (1994). In that book, the authors discuss the basics of some of the key perspectives in ethics and use Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Development to setup a framework for the analysis of ethically challenging situations.

In this book, we build upon Beabout and Wennemann’s work by applying their analytical technique to cases in aviation, healthcare, and occupational and environmental health.

Ethics and Moral Principles

In its simplest terms, Ethics is the study of ‘how to live life well’ (Beabout & Wennemann, 1994, p.1). As such, it includes the understanding of six moral principles upon which decisions or actions of an individual or a group are based. A summary of six moral principles and their corresponding duties (Humphreys, 1999) is presented in Table 1.1 below.

Table 1.1 Six moral orincinles and the corresuondine duties

Principle	Corresponding Duty
The principle of autonomy	Respect the autonomy of others
The principle of non-maleficence	Do not inflict harm on others
The principle of beneficence	Promote the good of others
The principle of justice	Give others what is owed or due to them; give others what they deserve
The principle of truth-telling	Disclose all relevant information honestly and intelligibly; do not intentionally deceive
The principle of promise-keeping	Be faithful to just agreements; honor contracts

In order to provide practical guidance in utilizing the above principles in making moral decisions, Beabout and Wennemann (1994) present the classic ethical principles in a hierarchical order, placing the Principle of Respect at the top and the rest of the principles as its subordinates. Their order from highest to lowest is as follows:

1. The Principle of Respect: In every action and every intention, in every goal and every means, treat every human being, yourself and others, with the respect befitting the dignity and worth of a person (p.50). While the principle of respect involves honoring autonomy, each person’s freedom or right to self-determination, it is also bounded by the need to consider the overall moral goodness of the action. For example, it may be within one’s autonomy to engage in drug abuse; however, such an act would undermine one’s personhood and result in an undue burden on society and is therefore not respectful.

2. The Principle of Non-malevolence (non-maleficence): In all of your actions, avoid harming people (p.51).

3. The Principle of Benevolence (beneficence): Promote the well-being of others (p.52).

4. The Principle of Integrity (truth-telling): Maintain personal standards of conduct befitting a professional; respect yourself in all of your decisions so as to be worthy of living a fulfilling professional life (p.53).

5. The Principle of Justice: Treat others in a manner that is appropriate to them as human beings; be fair, treating people equally, i.e. in similar ways in similar circumstances (p.54).

6. The Principle of Utility: Given that the intention and the goal of your action is to treat people with respect, choose the course of action that produces the greatest benefit for the greatest number of people (p.56).

7. The Principle of Double Effect: Given that the intention and the goal of your action is to treat people with respect, make sure that there are no foreseeable bad side effects that are disproportionate with the good of the main effect (p.58). There are four elements of this principle: (a) The action should be morally permissible, (b) The good of the intended effect must be weighed against the bad of the unintended (but foreseen) effect, (c) The bad side effect may be foreseen, but not intended, and (d) The good of the intended effect must be significantly or proportionately more beneficial than the bad of the unintended effect. In other words, if an action is morally permissible, the foreseeable intended good of that action must be proportionately greater than the foreseeable unintended harm from that action (principle of double effect) and it is the moral obligation of the decision-makers to exercise due diligence in foreseeing the harmful side effects of a morally permissible action.

Beabout and Wennemann (1994) discuss five prominent theories of ethics and present the corresponding strengths and weaknesses. These theories and their arguments are summarized as follows:

1. Egoism: Egoism is selfishness or pursuit of self-interest. From this perspective, actions are judged based on their effect on the individual performing the actions. In some cases, the application could be elevated to organizational levels because the actions of an individual, say the Chief Executive Officer, may always be in the self-interest of his/her organization. The classic challenge to this perspective is that of ‘conflict of interest’ wherein two self-interests are presented and one has to be chosen. Since the egoistic approach would consider both options acceptable, a satisfactory decision cannot be made.

2. Conventional Morality: Morality based on the conventions of one’s society or social circles would be considered as conventional morality. In this sense, conventional morality is at least a few steps toward communal interests and away from personal or individual interests. Nonetheless, actions based on conventional morality may not work in cross-cultural applications; moreover, morality of one social group may not be compatible with that of another social group.

3. Utilitarianism: The basic utilitarianism principle involves judging actions by their ability to produce the greatest benefit for the greatest number of people. Some ethicists argue in favor of Act Utilitarianism wherein every action is evaluated based on its ability to produce the greatest benefit for the greatest number of people. On the other hand, ethicists in support of Rule Utilitarianism argue that it is almost impossible to f...