Ethics for Engineers

A Brief Introduction

Anthony F. Bainbridge

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781032077086
  9781032076904
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000466249
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy
• Index: Technology & Engineering

This book is a key introduction to ethics in engineering, providing professionals at all stages of their career with guidance on navigating the increasingly complex world of practising engineering ethically on an international scale.

Engineering professionals face a duty to uphold reliable and trustworthy behaviour when working across all disciplines and industries. Accuracy and rigour are essential parts of the modern workplace, and are increasingly of concern to practising engineers. Using case studies to highlight examples of issues within the workplace and how these can be appropriately handled, this book is an accessible tool through which engineers can gain confidence in dealing with ethical dilemmas in the workplace. Touching upon safety, risk, artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, and intellectual property, alongside sustainability and environmental matters, the book focuses on hot topics which are fast becoming day-to-day issues dealt with by engineers.

The book will be suitable for engineers of all disciplines, alongside students looking to become professional chartered engineers.

1 Ethics in the Professional Context

DOI: 10.1201/9781003208433-1

Two immediate questions raised by any discussion of engineering as a profession, and by the need to consider ethical attitudes in the practice of that profession, must be: ‘What does “professional” mean?’ and ‘What are “ethics”?’

It has not always been obvious that the two are closely linked. We assume that engineers, like professionals in other walks of life, have always behaved professionally, in accordance with their own understanding of the meaning of the word, but we know of many histories which reveal personal failings. It is now acknowledged that professionalism and ethical behaviour go hand in hand – see Davis (1991) for a wise overview on this issue. Many engineering courses refer to ethical standards; many employers require their employees to conform to corporate ethical charters; the approach to professionalism through registration to the United Kingdom Standard for Professional Engineering Competence (UKSPEC) explicitly requires candidates to have thought about ethics and to be aware of published standards.

We will briefly review ethical theory and our responses to it in Sections 2.1 and 2.2; here we must consider the meaning of professionalism and its bearing upon the work and attitudes of engineers. What is implied when we call ourselves ‘professional’ engineers? How are the commercial pressures of the business environment to be weighed against the need to treat all people fairly and act with integrity? What are the achievable limits on action in specific contexts?

The word ‘professional’ implies at least (a) formal acceptance by a peer group, and (b) conformance with published codes of practice. All professional engineers are aware of the many influences – practical, social, legal – which impact upon their work and are relevant to the design task. Against this backdrop engineers know how to convert a customer requirement into a design specification and produce a design to meet this specification. We now realise that ethical considerations and legislation also impose their disciplines, and these must be woven into the design process from its inception.

The values by which we direct our professional behaviour matter to the public, to our employers, and to government; but why do they matter? There is, to be sure, a broad debate over personal and moral values in general; the perception is often expressed that that moral standards throughout Western culture are eroding. Whether or not this is true, the debate continues and becomes ever more pressing. Engineers must display the responsibility to scrutinise the ways in which their moral values impact on their professional work. The education and training of engineers in the 1960s did not emphasise ethical issues; it was not suggested at that time that the career of a professional engineer and manager might uncover ethical problems and dilemmas; if they did the engineer no doubt had to resolve them alone.

Now we know better. Many employers, perhaps the majority, publish codes of practice to be followed by employees individually and collectively and declare in so doing their commitment at the corporate level. Furthermore, professional institutions in the engineering field expect their members to conform to published codes of practice (see Annex 1 for the IET Rules of Conduct as typical examples). Two specific sections in the Bye-laws of IET – which are typical of many similar published guidelines – state:

29. Persons in any category of membership shall at all times uphold the dignity and reputation of their profession, act with fairness and integrity towards everyone with whom their work is connected, and towards other members and safeguard the public interest in matters of health, safety, the environment and otherwise.

30. Persons in any category of membership shall, in addition, exercise their professional skill and judgement to the best of their ability and discharge their professional responsibilities with integrity. They shall encourage the vocational progress of those in their professional charge.

Furthermore, many engineers wish to become registered as Chartered, Incorporated, or Technician Engineers in due course through many of the UK’s professional engineering institutions. The relevant standards are set out in the Engineering Council’s publication ‘United Kingdom Standard for Professional Engineering Competence’ (UKSPEC – see Annex 2) requiring candidates to be able to show evidence of the application of a whole spectrum of competences, including an awareness of ethical thinking and practice.

There is perhaps one further criterion to distinguish a profession from other groupings: we expect professionals to serve the public good. The American sociologist Talcott Parsons suggested many years ago that ‘the professions have become the most important single component in the structure of modern societies’ – a challenging comment even if you regard it as somewhat overstated. In an increasingly complex society do we need the professions more than ever in helping us to negotiate the world and to serve ‘the public good’? Or conversely, at a time of much emphasis on empowered investors, stakeholders, and citizens, is the need for professions diminishing?

Traditionally there has been asymmetry of information between the knowledge which specialists have and that accessible to and understood by the public, but as the general public becomes more knowledgeable this gap is palpably narrowing. If nowhere else, we can see this in the medical profession where greater access to information has made patients more aware. The professions are being challenged to modernise themselves to adapt to these new realities; in this changing perspective how do we understand what the public good might be and how it can be served?

The Royal Society of Arts in the UK organised in 2002 a project ‘Can the Professions Survive? Exploring professional values for the 21st century’ which sought to establish a new model of a ‘profession’ combining the rigour of the traditional professions with the vigour of a new ‘professionalism’, encouraging professionals in the UK to become a more significant, trusted, and creative force for economic and social good. The project asked what society now requires from professionals and from professional practice; the intention was to revitalise attitudes and practice and to encourage rigour and excellence in the professions. It is not clear whether the RSA project achieved its full aims, but it must be said that the objectives were sound: Traditional professional bodies, and their membership in responsible roles, must be prepared to question their own rationale and to innovate as they seek solutions to the problems and challenges societies face anew with each new generation.

The word ‘responsible’ carries much weight. Responsibilities may be passive or active. They may be incurred through one’s defined role, through the personal morality we bring to it, and through one’s sense of professionalism applied in the work. Michael Davis (Davis 2012) identifies nine related senses of ‘responsibility’ – indeed, the anecdote which gives his paper its title models a pointless attempt to avoid responsibility.

How far does one’s responsibility reach? It might be claimed that responsibility was restricted because of ignorance – the engineer did not know (perhaps had not been told) what he was responsible for; or he was not free to do what was required of him; or he did not have time to satisfy himself as to the right course of action, so could not approve it. Each of these may give rise to uncertainty as to how to behave; and if so, the professional engineer will seek advice – just as we would in cases where we became aware of gaps in our technical knowledge.

Responsibilities may, and often do, conflict. In the Challenger disaster (Figure 1.1) of 1986 (see, for example, the report of the Committee on Science & Technology of the US Congress (Committee on Science and Technology, 1986)), we can observe a very clear conflict between the responsibilities of the Morton Thiokol engineers to report their deep concerns over safe launch, and those of NASA senior management for whom political and public pressures dominated. Annex 3.8 expands on the Challenger case.

Figure 1.1 The Challenger Disaster 1986 – see Annex 6.

The engineer might also wish to claim that he could not be held responsible for decisions made or actions taken by an organisation to which he belonged. In the context of the present discussion, this organisation might be the employer or the professional institution. When the individual agrees to behave (always ‘to the best of his ability’) in ways mandated by such organisations, what corresponding duties are incumbent upon the organisation in return for his membership fee? He has no means of imposing reciprocal duties on the larger group; even in extremis withholding dues achieves nothing. W. H. Walsh asks in ‘Pride, Shame and Responsibility’ (Walsh, 1970): ‘In virtue of my membership in some larger whole or wholes, how can I reasonably be expected to take responsibility for what these bodies do in circumstances where I could have no conceivable influence on their actions?’

We should consider also the balance of responsibilities between the employer and the employee. Those of the employer may be expressed in terms of the idea of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). In the conduct of business, should organisations think about their responsibilities to employees, the wider society, and the environment? Notions like these are widely propagated, and their underlying principles are hard to evade. A business does not exist in isolation, nor is it simply a way of making money – although that is ultimately what it is for. How should the engineer act so as to ensure that outputs conform to, and extend, the corporate responsibilities of the organisation?

Employees, customers, suppliers, and the local community are affected by business activities. Products, and the way they are made, have an impact on the environment. The processes used by businesses may also have adverse impacts. Many statutory requirements impose duties on businesses; a sense of the social responsibilities of the business implies understanding the business’ impact on the wider world and considering how this impact might be used positively. CSR implies taking a socially responsible attitude, going beyond the minimum legal requirements, following straightforward principles that can be applied to all businesses, whatever their size or sector. And in terms of the chief ‘purpose’ of any business, CSR may also be good for the ‘bottom line.’ A concern for CSR may lead an organisation to have regard to, for example, product design for reduced energy consumption, building construction for the same, sensitivity to the needs of the local community, renewed focus on training and education of employees, awareness of waste and scrap materials, healthcare for employees, and perhaps other issues. Corporate ethical charters frequently address these and other matters, and employees are expected to accept and practise the implications in all their work (Schwab, 1996).

There is another and seemingly contrary view. Milton Friedman (1970) suggests that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits, and that all the other things it may wish to do are secondary, and are only possible to the extent that they are able to satisfy that first responsibility. Friedman was attempting to debunk the notion that corporations (meaning the executives and managers who work for them) have a responsibility to act to increase social welfare, regardless of the law on the issue at hand (whether that issue be discrimination, pollution, or something else). In his view, executives have a moral responsibility to act always in the long-run best interest of the shareholders. He is not arguing that businesses should never engage in activities that increase social welfare; in fact, he argues that free-market capitalism itself increases social welfare. He also notes that businesses certainly will engage in activities that result in increased social welfare. However, in Friedman’s view the executive’s sole motivation for such engagement must always remain long-term increase in shareholder wealth.

Elaine Sternberg (2000) supports Friedman and asserts that the specific and sole business objective is to maximise owner value over the long term by selling goods or services; she observes that while actual commercial enterprises often do much else, all other aims are subsidiary. On this view the principles of business ethics are those presupposed by the essential activity of maximising long-term owner value; such views call for confidence in a future, and hence for trust. Business must therefore be conducted with honesty, fairness, the absence of physical violence and coercion, and a presumption in favour of legality; but business is ethical only if it supports causes which maximise long-term owner value. This does not mean that a business cannot or should not behave in ways that are ordinarily considered to be socially responsible, such as hiring physically-impaired employees and supporting local schools; to the extent that such actions help maximise long-term owner value, they are wholly compatible with business.

For Sternberg, therefore, the whole theory of the Firm must have at its root an ethical basis. She offers an ‘ethical decision model’ to provide clarity in addressing ethical quandaries faced by the business. Certainly, in all such discussions, the engineer will recall that design and all other engineering activities take place within the business and must therefore be shaped by its ethical policies. It is, however, debatable to what extent the types of ethical problems faced by engineers are amenable to the decision model suggested by Sternberg, which concludes always by proposing a single ‘right course of action.’ Many recent substantial ethical conflicts, on the other hand – for example, those outlined in the case studies of Annex 3 – have been exacerbated by the sheer complexity of inter-company contractual relationships, conflicts of interest during the design process, multiple and complex causes, international influences, and so on. Such complexity prohibits the search for simple, single responses.

The perspective that a business’s primary responsibility is to its owners rather than to society has generated, and will no doubt continue to generate, much controversy and debate (see especially Klein, 2006; Dunn 2006). It might be said that our attitude to ethical issues in business and in engineering may be determined in part by the line we take on Friedman. It is essential that sooner or later every engineer decide whether Friedman’s perspective is appropriate or even useful, and think about its bearing on the individual’s personal ethical code. At the very least this implies that engineers should seek to understand the business aims of the employer in framing their personal code in response. It is, after all, easier to promulgate a corporate system of applied ethics than to ensure that in each and every case its principles are followed. See Klein (2006) and Sternberg (1999, 2000) for excellent discussions of the purpose of business and the contrasting perspectives of stakeholders and stockholders.

However, a study by List and co-worker (List and Momeni, 2017), based upon a survey of 3000 employees in a number of firms, produced clear evidence, supported by other complementary treatments, to suggest that ‘moral licensing’ may be at work and that the ‘doing good’ nature of CSR induces workers to misbehave on other dimensions that hurt the firm. Some employees may act detrimentally towards the firm by shirking on their primary job duty when CSR was introduced. This survey serves to warn that business practices such as CSR should not be applied without careful monitoring of their impact.

Nissenbaum (1996) draws on philosophical analyses of moral blame and responsibility to identify four barriers to the proper identification of accountability in an ever more computer-dependent society.

2 The Ethical Basis for Engineering Activities

DOI: 10.1201/9781003208433-2

2.1 Introduction to Ethical Theory

We shall be concerned in this book with ethical principles and with the relevant statutory requirements in the context of professional engineering practice.

There is widespread agreement that engineers should be introduced at an early stage in their careers to the need for ethical thinking in preparation for their professional lives, both to encourage clarity about ethical issues and the practices within which they arise, and to develop skills in communication, reasoning, and reflection. Engineers will thereby better understand the nature of professional responsibility, be able to identify th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Author biography
• 1 Ethics in the Professional Context
• 2 The Ethical Basis for Engineering Activities
• 3 Ethical Responsibilities to Consumers and Customers
• 4 Safety and Risk
• 5 The Debate on AI and Autonomous Systems
• 6 Ethics in the Management of Intellectual Property
• 7 Environmental Matters and Sustainability
• 8 Being Professional
• 9 Finale
• 10 Bibliography
• Annex 1 – The IET Rules of Conduct
• Annex 2 – UK-SPEC
• Annex 3 – Some Case Studies
• Annex 4 – Intellectual Property
• Index