ENGG 434

Engineering
Ethics

Engineering as Social Experimentation

Safety Issues-Commitment to safety
Workplace responsibilities and rights
Engineering as Social
Experimentation
Informed Consent
Viewing engineering as an experiment on a societal scale places the focus where it
should be: on the human beings affected by technology, for the experiment is
performed on persons, not on inanimate objects.
Society has recently come to recognize the primacy of the subject’s safety and
freedom of choice as to whether to participate in medical experiments. Ever since
the revelations of prison and concentration camp horrors in the name of medice,
an increasing number of moral and legal safeguards have arisen to ensure that
subjects in experiments participate on the basis of informed consent.
Engineering as Social
Experimentation
– While current medical practice has increasingly tended to accept as
fundamental the subject’s moral and legal rights to give informed consent
before participating in an experiment, contemporary engineering practice is
only beginning to recognize those rights.
– We believe that the problem of informed consent, which is so vital to the
concept of a properly conducted experiment involving human subjects, should
be the keystone in the integration between engineers and the public.
– Informed consent is understood as including two main elements: knowledge
and voluntariness.
Engineering as Social
Experimentation
– First, subjects should be given not only the information they request, but all the
information needed to make a reasonable decision. Second, subjects must
enter into the experiment without being subjected to force, fraud or deception.
Respect for the fundamental right of dissenting minorities and compensation
for harmful effects are taken for granted here.
– The public and clients must be given information about the practical risks abd
benefits of the process or product in terms they can understand.
Engineering as Social
Experimentation
– We endorse a broad notion of informed consent, or what some would call valid
consent defined by the following conditions:
1- The consent was given voluntarily
2- The consent was based on the information that a rational person would want,
together with any other information requested, presented to them in
understandable form.
3-The consenter was competent (not too young or mentally ill) to process the
information and make rational decisions.
Engineering as Social
Experimentation
– Scientific experiments are conducted to gain new knowledge, while «engineering
projects are experiments that are not necessarily designed to produce very much
knowledge».
– When we carry out an engineering activity as if it were an experiment, we are
primarily preparing ourselves for unexpected outcomes.
– What are the responsibilities of engineers to society? Viewing engineering as
social experimentation doe not by itself answer this question. While engineers
are the main technical enablers or facilitators, they are far from being the sole
experimenters. Their responsibility is shared with management, the public, and
others.
Engineering as Social
Experimentation
– Their expertise places them in a unique position to monitor projects, to identify
risks, and to provide clients and the public with the information needed to
make reasonable decisions.
– Applied to engineering projects conceived as social experiments:
1. A primary obligation to protect the safety of human subjects and respect their
right of consent.
2. A constant awareness of the experimental nature of any project, imaginative
forecasting of its possible side effects, and a reasonable effort to monitor them.
Engineering as Social
Experimentation
3. Personal involvement in all steps of a project.
4. Accepting accountability for the results of a project
Conceiving engineering as social experimentation restores the vision of
engineers as guardians of the public interest, whose professional duty it is to hold
paramount the safety, health, and welfare of those affected by engineering
projects.
Engineering as Social
Experimentation
Industrial Standards
Product standards faciliate the interchange of components, they serve as ready-
make substitutes for lengthy design specifications, and they decrease product
costs.
Standards consist of explicit specifications that, when followed with care, ensure
that stated criteria for interchangeability and quality will be attained. Examples
range from automobile tire sizes and load ratings to computer protocols.
Standards not only help the manufacturers, they also benefit the client and the
public.
Engineering as Social Experimentation
Industrial Standards

– They ensure a measure of quality and thus facilitate more realistic trade off
decisions. International standards are becoming a necessity in European and
world trade. An interesting approach has been adopted by the International
Standards Organization (ISO) that replaces the detailed national specifications
for plethora of products with statements of procedures that a manufacturer
guarantees to carry out to assure quality products.
COMMITMENT TO SAFETY

– We demand safe products and services because we do not wish to be

threatened by potential harm, but we also realize that we may have to pay for
this safety.
– To complicate matters, what may be safe enough for one person may not be for
someone else-either because of different perceptions about what is safe or
because of different predispositions to harm.
– W. Lowrance: «A thing is safe if its risks are judged to be acceptable»
COMMITMENT TO SAFETY

– Modified version of Lowrance definition:

“A thing is safe if, were its risks fully known, those risks would be judged
acceptable by a reasonable person in light of their settled value principles.
 Safety is a matter of how people would find risks acceptable or unacceptable if
they knew the risks and were basing their judgements on their most settled
value perspectives.
 Safety is often thought of in terms of degrees and comparisons. We speak of
something as “fairly safe” or “relatively safe” (compared with similar things).
Risks

– We say a thing is not safe if it exposes us to unacceptable risk, but what is

meant by “risk”? A risk is the potential that something unwanted and harmful
may occur.
– William D. Rowe refers to the “potential for the realization of unwanted
consequences from impeding events”. Thus a future, possible occurence of
harm is postulated.
– Risks, like harm, is a broad concept covering many different types of unwanted
occurences. In regard to technology, it can equally well include dangers of
bodily harm, of economic loss, or of environmental degradation.
Risks

– These in turn can be caused by delayed job completion, faulty products or

systems or economically or environmentally injurious solutions to technological
problems.
– Good engineering practice has always been concerned with safety. But as
technology’s influence on society has grown, so has public concern about
technological risks increased. Inaddition to measurable and identificable
hazards arising from the use of consumer products and from production
processes in factories, some of the less obvious effects of technology are now
also making their way to public consciousness.
Risks

– Meanwhile, natural hazards continue to threaten human populations.

Technology has greatly reduced the scope of some of these, such as floods, but
at the same time it has increased our vulnerability to other natural hazards,
such as earthquakes, as they affect our ever-greater concentrations of
population and cause greater damage to our finely tuned technological
networks of long lifelines for water, energy and food.
– Of equal concern are our disposal services (sewers, landfills, recovery and
neutralizing of toxic wastes) and public notification of potential hazards they
present.
Acceptability of Risk

– William D. Rowe says that “a risk is acceptable when those affected are
generally no longer (or not) apprehensive about it.
– Apprehensiveness depends to a large extent on how the risk is perceived. This
influenced by such factors as 1) whether the risk is accepted voluntarily;
2) The effects of knowledge on how the probabilities of harm (or benefit) are
known or preceived; 3) if the risks are job-related or other pressures exist that
cause people to be aware of or to overlook risks, 4) whether the effects of a
risky activity or situation are immediately noticeable or are close at hand 5) and
whether the potential victims are identifiable beforehand.
Voluntarism and control

– John and Ann Smith and their children enjoy riding motorcyles over rough
terrain for amusement. They take voluntary risks, part of being engaged in sucn
a potentially sport.
– John and Ann live near a chemical plant. It is the only area in which they can
afford to live, and it is near the shipyard where yjey both work. At home they
suffer from some air polution, and there are some toxic wastes in the ground.
They have no relationship with chemical plant except on an involuntary basis.
Any beneficial link to the plant through consumer products or other possible
connections is very remote and moreover subject to choice.
Voluntarism and control

– John and Ann behave as most of us would under the circumstances. We are
much less apprehensive about the the risks to which we expose ourselves
voluntarily than about those to which we are exposed involuntarily.
– Voluntarism is the matter of control. The Smiths choose where and when they
will ride their bikes.
Effect of information on risk
assessments
– The manner in which information necessary for decision making is oresented
can greatly influence how risks are percieved. The Smiths are careless about
using seat belts in their car. They know that the probability of their having an
accident on any one trip is infinitesimally small.
– Studies have verified that a change in the manner in which information about a
danger is presented can lead to a strikking reversal of preferences about how to
deal with that danger.
– See example (will be distributed during lecture hour)
Job related risks

– John Smith’s work in the shipyard has in the past exposed him to asbestos. He
is aware now of the high percentage of asbestos cases among his coworkers.
Even, Ann, who works in a clerical position at the shipyard, has shown
symptoms of asbestos as a result of handling her husband’s clothes.
– Of course, exposure to risks on a job is in a sense voluntary since one can
always refuse to submit oneself to them, and workers perhaps even have some
control over how their work is carried out.
Job related risks

– Unions and occupational health and safety regulations (such as right to know
rules regarding toxics) can correct the worst situations, but standards
regulating conditions in the workplace (its air quality) are generally still far
below those that regulate conditions in our public environment.
– Engineers who design and equip workstations must take into account the
cavalier attitude toward safety shown by many wokers, especially when their
pay is on a piecework basis. And when one worker complains about unsafe
conditions but other do not, the complaint should not be dismissed as coming
from a crackpot.
Job related risks

Lacking sufficient political support, the Occupational Health and Safety

Administration (OSHA) has still not drafted adequate ergonomic rules.
All reports from the workplace regarding unsafe or health impairing conditions of
any kind merit serious attention by engineers, whether specific rules are in
place or not.
Magnitude and proximity

– Engineers face two problems with public conceptions of safety. On the one
hand, there is the overly optimistic attitute that things that are familiar, that
have not hurt us before, and over which we have some control, present no real
risks. On the other hand, there is the dread people feel when an accident kills
or harms those we know.
Assessing and reducing risk

– Any improvement in safety as it relates to an engineered product is often

accompanied by an increase in the cost of that product. On the other hand,
products that are not safe incur secondary costs to the manufacturer beyond
the production costs that must also be taken into account-costs associated with
warranty expenses, loss of customer goodwill and even loss of customers
because of injuries sustained from the use of the product, possible downtime in
the manufacturing process and so forth.
– It is therefore important for manufacturers and users alike to reach some
understanding of the risks connected with any given product and know what it
might cost to reduce those risks.
Uncertainties in Design

– One would think that experience and historical data would provide good
information about the safety of standard products. Much has been collected
and published. Gaps remain, however because 1) there are some industries
where information is not freely shared-for instance, when the cost of the failure
is less than the cost of fixing the problem. 2) problems and their causes are
often not revealed after a legal settlement has been reached with a condition of
nondisclosure, 3) there are always new applications of old technology or
substitutions of materials and components, that render the available
information less usefull.
Uncertainties in Design

– Risk is seldom intentionally designed into a product. It arises beause of the

many uncertainties faced by the design engineer, the manufacturing engineer,
and even the sales and application engineer.
– Apart from uncertainties about the applications of a product, there are
uncertainties regarding the materials of which it is made and the level of skill
that goes into designing and manufacturing it.
– Caution is required even with standard materials specified for normal use.
Risk benefit analyses

– Many large projects, especially public works, are justified on the basis of a risk
benefit analysis.
– We are willing to take on certain levels of risk as long as the project (the
product, the system, or the activity that is risky) promises sufficient benefit or
gain.
– If risk and benefit can both be readily expressed in a common set of units (say,
lives or dollars), it is relatively easy to carry out a risk-benefit analysis and to
determine whether we can expect to come out on the benefit side.
Personal Risk

– Given sufficient information, an individual can decide whether to participate in

(or consent to exposure to) a risky activity (an experiment).
– Difficulties in assessing personal risk is that analysts employ whatever
quantitative measures are ready at hand.
– It is much easier to use statistical averages without giving offense to anyone in
particular.
Public risk and public acceptance

– Risks and benefits to the public at large are more easily determined because
individual differences tend to even out as larger numbers of people are
considered.
– National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has proposed a value
for human life based on loss of future income and other costs asscociated with
an accident.
Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and
Safe Exits
– As our engineered systems grow more complex, it becomes more difficult to
operate them.
– Designers hope to ensure greater safety during emergencies by taking human
operators out of the loop and mechanizing their functions. The control policy
would be based on predetermined rules.
– Operator errors were the main cause of the nuclear reactor accidents at Three
Mile Island and Chernobyl. Beyond these errors a major deficiency surfaced at
both installations: inadequate provisions for evacuation of nearby populations.
This lack of safe exit is found in too many of our amazingly complex systems.
Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and
Safe Exits
– It is almost impossible to build a completely safe product or one that will never
fail. The best one can do is to assure that when a product fails, 1) it will fail
safely, 2) the product can be abondoned safely, or at least 3) the user can safely
escape the product.
– Ships need lifeboats with enough spaces for all passangers and crew members.
Buildings need usable fire escapes. The operation of nuclear power plants calls
for realistic ways to evacuate nearby communities.
Workplace Responsibilities and Rights

– The kind of commitment shown by the engineers understandably ranks high on

the list of expectations that employers have of the engineers they employ or of
the engineers they engage as consultants.
An Ethical Corporate Climate

– An ethical climate is a working environment that is conductive to morally

responsible conduct. Within corporations it is produced by a combination of
formal organization and policies, informal traditions and practices, and
personak attitudes and commitments.
– Professioanlism in engineering would be tratened at every turn in a corporation
devoted primarily to powerful egos.
– The ethics program developed was not merely a reaction designed to avoid
legal penalties, but also a concerted effort to institutionalize ethical
commitments throughout the newly merged corporation.
An Ethical Corporate Climate

– Specifically, the ethics team drafted a code of conduct, conducted ethics

workshops for managers, and created effective procedures for employees to
express their ethical concerns.
– The National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE) code, for example, states
that “Engineers shall not attempt ro injure, maliciously or falsely, directly or
indirectly, the professional reputation, prospects, practice or employment of
other engineers. Engineers who believe others are guilty of unethical or illegal
practice shall present such information to the proper authority for action”.
Managers and Engineers

– Respect for authority is important in meeting organizational goals. Decisions

must be made in situations where allowing everyone to exercise unrestained
individual discretion would create chaos.
– Moreover, clear lines of authority provide a means for identifying area od
personal responsibility and accountability.
– The relevant kind of authority has been called executive authority: the
corporate or institutional right given to a person to exercise power based on
the resources of an organization. It is distinguishable from power in getting the
job done.
Managers and Engineers

– It is distinguishable, too, from expert authority: the possession of special

knowledge, skill, or competence to perform some task or to give sound advice.
– Engineer-oriented companies focus primarily on the quality of products.
Engineers’ judgements about safety and quality were given grat weight, and
they were overridden rarely, when considerations such as cost and scheduling
became especially important.
Managers and Engineers

– Customer-oriented companies make their priority the satisfaction of customers.

In these companies safety considerations were also given high priority, but
engineers were expected to be more assertive in speaking as advocates for
safetyi so that it recieved a fair hearing amidst managers’ preoccupation with
satisfying the needs of customers.