User:Mostafa hisham/Skills in Ethics for Engineers

Every profession has a code of ethics. The reason for these may vary, but why do we have them? Are they that useful and important? "A professional - engineer, doctor, lawyer, or teacher - should have a well-rounded education, which teaches the technical expertise of the field, but also instructs the whole human being about the pleasures and responsibilities of being a contributing member of society."

The most important part of any career is training. If you want to become anything from a cook to an astronaut, it is important that you know how to do your job. Education is key to be able to do a job. But, for certain professionals, such as engineers, doctors, doing the job right may include a lot more than what they were taught, or could be taught, in any school. These professions must also learn how to be responsible to the public. People in such jobs must be instructed on the responsibilities of being a contributing member of society.

Most professionals feel their duty is to serve their client, or to do their job to the best of their ability. Unfortunately, this is not good enough. When a person's profession or the product of their work will involve the public, that person should also be responsible to the public. The only concern of an engineer cannot be to make a bridge as sound as possible in a certain budget. If the people are to be crossing over this bridge, an engineer must also consider if it is possible to truly make this bridge safe within the allotted budget. He must not think purely of the technical aspects of the bridge making, but of the human side. Statements like "Is it safe?" should be replaced by "Is the bridge safe enough?" Whenever one's work involves the public, one must be concerned for the public's health and safety.

Professionals today must make judgment calls that were never required of them before. They must decide whether what is good for science and technology is good for humanity. There must be a certain responsibility to an expert for what they have created. As an example, look at Albert Einstein's research in nuclear physics. After realizing that a nuclear weapon was possible, he was going to stop research. The engineer has a number of levels of responsibility and may have to balance those based on which are more important. His or her primary responsibility is to the professional code of ethics, which in turn is based on the view that the profession owes a responsibility to society and must place this responsibility first. In the case of a project being paid for by the taxpayer, the engineer owes it to society to assure that the costs are not excessive and that the project that is being done has a good chance of success at the price being paid. There are a number of different rationales offered for why engineers have particular obligations to serve the interests of the public and to especially work to maintain safety as part of their public trust. I read that there were three young engineering graduates working for a building services consultancy. They enjoyed designing things but hated meetings with architects. They felt ill-prepared for discussions with other professionals and couldn’t see why they often failed to get their point across. The trouble was the two groups of professionals evaluated things in different ways. What they thought of as good or bad outcomes were different and they rationalized their judgments differently. The point is good is “indefinable” though sometimes, because of connections between things, I might conclude something is good or bad by aggregating lots of constituent indefinable goods and bads, but there is no universal way of doing this. For an example I read a question in a blog which was “Is the iPod Good Design?” a blog reports was: “It's gorgeous and tactile, the software interface is excellent … but …, the batteries are … beyond terrible.” Or another blogger frames judgment of the iPod by asking “What are you willing to cough up for cool?” Such expressions seem too trivial to deserve the label ethical yet they're connected to bigger concerns. For example a negative review might result in lower sales and affect livelihoods. Or the comment about poor batteries might imply that more batteries are thrown away with consequent environmental damage. “In a good design the shock wave trajectory is defined and no metallic parts are obstructing the plasma expansion” Both outcomes and the means to achieve them have good and bad aspects and neither should be ignored; both the product and the process matter and since engineers are a part of the process, their conduct matters too. Students alerted to this are likely to ask, “What do I need to know?”, “What is the formula?”

Now codes of conduct are couched in general terms and are a guide but it is easy to come up with situations where obeying one rule causes you to break another. Such codes too, are often drawn up while sitting in cozy armchairs, a product of idealism and a gift to the dramatist. In Shakespeare's Measure for measure8 the descent into pragmatism from idealism transforms tragedy into comedy whereas in Ibsen's Wild Duck9, the adherence to a rigid code results in tragedy and both plays offer reminders of what may be at stake for engineers confronted by an unyielding code and righteous administration. Mission statements are also guides to what is to be done. A current example, is offered by Google, who, idealistically, announced their mission is    “To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful” There are some snags to doing this. First this is in conflict with the privacy and property rights of others; Google doesn’t have rights to the entire world’s information. But perhaps the written code is not important, but what matters is the conduct and its context, but Google failed on this count too when faced by social, political and commercial realities, it assisted the censorship of data in China. Circumstances can matter. That is why, in professions that deal with breaches of a code severely, they have tribunals which consider the code and the circumstances of the breach. One view is “the only way to perfect a code of engineering ethics”, is to decide “upon specific questions as they arise” then, “the body of decisions thus furnishing a code. Another writer thought differently and presumed “A good engineer is one who lives up to the obligations of her employment contract, conforms to the etiquette of the job situation, and whose individual engineering practice at least equals the performance standards of the profession.” Individuals, though, are not just employees and two authors remind us that engineers may suffer personal conflicts which involve loyalty to the family, neighbors or colleagues. Often codes can be politically inspired and represent the biased interests of a narrowly defined group. And yet another writer highlights “the myriad of codes of conduct” that the engineer may face.” There is no shortage of advice. How to deal with the variety and extent, inconsistencies and ambiguities of codes of conduct looks like a topic for students to explore.

Emotion However, paper and pencil exercises in applying a logic of ethics, like a code of conduct, are not the same as being confronted with a shortage of time, bullying, reticence, deviousness, ignorance, muddle, misunderstanding, anger or tears which all raise the emotional temperature and affect judgments. Sometimes this helps by stoking up passion for expressing a valuable opinion, and sometimes it hinders by encouraging rash and coercive reactions or even withdrawal. Experiencing the emotion is the only way to discover its effects, students (and maybe the teacher) may never have encountered relevant situations in an engineering context — being asked for a bribe, for example. This raises questions about the need for a kind of emotional education. And how can it be provided. Drama provides a context in which an audience empathizes with the actor and experiences the wrench of feelings which can overwhelm logic and ethical codes. A prime example occurs in Arthur Miller’s tragedy, All My Sons, which has an engineer’s dilemma at its heart. Or perhaps it is more practical to set up role playing exercises where the students act out scenarios. There is, however, a technique for this. For example, since such role plays may deliberately provoke conflict, some care is needed both to formalize the time and place of engagement and promote calm and respect outside of the arena. Headline grabbing Many scenarios for debating ethics present agonizing choices or apocalyptic events. The Challenger disaster for example. They grab attention and encourage debate but can prevent students from identifying themselves with the characters in such dramatic circumstances. Perhaps there has to be a mixture of headline grabbing events together with down to earth examples, like accepting an expensive lunch from a contractor or failing to get someone else to check a calculation. Paradoxically major events are often subject to public enquiries that bring minute details to the surface which inform teachers and students. There are, however, examples with moderately serious consequences but seemingly minor engineering infractions that offer scope for talking about ethics and engineering design. In one example, a reporter wrote “A … pensioner in Plymouth… came back from … the cinema to find investigators … outside her door, "holding a massive antenna." After picking up the 'distress' signal from Mrs. Donaldson's free view box, two lifeboats and a police launch spent … three hours …looking for … a mystery vessel in trouble. Two weeks previously, a faulty TV digital box in Portsmouth resulted in … search of the harbor area How could a faulty set-top box cause such events? Did the engineers think about possible fault conditions? Such examples provide a context for looking at engineering responsibilities. Though we always seem to be searching for examples where things have gone wrong and that might give the wrong impression of the outcome of engineering projects. Perhaps the emphasis should be shifted, as Foucault put it, it is “not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous” therefore “we always have something to do”20. For the engineer this implies it is not just enough to see that something is designed, made or installed. There is always working to be done in ameliorating the dangers. Communication Engineers commonly play a small but significant part in an enterprise and must convey their judgments and uncover other people’s concerns. For example, engineers may not be users of what they're helping to create, a hospital perhaps. Often the users or potential users are unavailable or unknown. How then are the users' interests to be communicated? The engineer will often be commissioned by investors who are not immediately affected by the project. There interest may be primarily on the investment returns. How should those directly affected be consulted? Consultation guides decisions but it is not enough to work out the right action. Engineers must also convince others, probably using non-technical terms, and the engineer may be required to digest objections however they are expressed. The required skills of persuasion and interpretation can be taught in part but they also benefit from opportunities for rehearsal and criticism. The development of fluency in the vocabulary of evaluation and judgment needs practice.