Introduction

One of the main differences between science and engineering is that engineering is not just about better understanding the world but also about changing it. Many engineers believe that such change improves, or at least should improve, the world. In this sense engineering is an inherently morally motivated activity. Changing the world for the better is, however, no easy task and also not one that can be achieved on the basis of engineering knowledge alone. It also requires, among other things, ethical reflection and knowledge. This book aims at contributing to such reflection and knowledge, not just in a theoretical sense but also more practically.

This book takes an innovative approach to engineering ethics in several respects. It provides a rather unique approach to ethical decision-making: the ethical cycle. This approach is illustrated by an abundance of cases studies and examples, not only from the US but also from Europe and the rest of the world. The book is also innovative in paying more attention than most traditional introductions in engineering ethics to such topics as ethics in engineering design, the organizational context of engineering, the distribution of responsibility, sustainability, and new technologies such as nanotechnology.

There is an increasing attention to ethics in the engineering curricula. Engineers are supposed not only to carry out their work competently and skillfully but also to be aware of the broader ethical and social implications of engineering and to be able to reflect on these. According to the Engineering Criteria 2000 of the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) in the US, engineering graduates must have “an understanding of professional and ethical responsibility” and “the broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global and societal context” (Herkert, 1999).

This book provides an undergraduate introduction to ethics in engineering and technology. It helps students to acquire the competences mentioned in the ABET criteria or comparable criteria formulated in other countries. More specifically, this book helps students to acquire the following moral competencies:1

• Moral sensibility: the ability to recognize social and ethical issues in engineering;
• Moral analysis skills: the ability to analyze moral problems in terms of facts, values, stakeholders, and their interests;
• Moral creativity: the ability to think out different options for action in the light of (conflicting) moral values and the relevant facts;
• Moral judgment skills: the ability to give a moral judgment on the basis of different ethical theories or frameworks including professional ethics and common sense morality;
• Moral decision-making skills: the ability to reflect on different ethical theories and frameworks and to make a decision based on that reflection;
• Moral argumentation skills: the ability to morally justify one’s actions and to discuss and evaluate them together with other engineers and non-engineers;
• Moral design skills: the ability to consider how values, as well as modes of use and interaction, can be inscribed into engineering artefacts at the design stages;
• Moral agency and action skills: the ability to respond wisely and responsibly to situations in a way that satisfies as many potential competing constraints as possible;
• Moral situatedness skills: the ability to acknowledge the social dimension of engineering practice and to understand the social relations of expertise in connection with technology management and decision-making.

With respect to these competencies, our focus is on the concrete moral problems that students will encounter in their future professional practice. With the help of concrete cases we show how the decision to develop a technology, as well as the process of design and production, is inherently moral. The attention of students is drawn toward the specific moral choices that engineers face. In relation to these concrete choices students will encounter different reasons for and against certain actions, and they will discover that these reasons can be discussed. In this way, students become aware of the moral dimensions of technology and acquire the argumentative capacities that are needed in moral debates.

In addition to an emphasis on cases – which is common to most other introductory textbooks in engineering ethics as well – we would like to mention three further characteristics of the approach to engineering ethics we have chosen in this textbook. The first two characteristics focus on the last three competencies.

First, we take a broad approach to ethical issues in engineering and technology and the engineer’s responsibility for these. Some of the issues we discuss in this book extend beyond the issues traditionally dealt with in engineering ethics like safety, honesty, and conflicts of interest. We also include, for example, ethical issues in engineering design (Chapter 5) and sustainability (Chapter 8). We also pay attention to such technologies as the atomic bomb and nanotechnology. While we address such “macro-ethical” issues (Herkert, 2001) in engineering and technology, our approach to these issues may be characterized as inside-out, that is to say: we start with ethical issues that emerge in the practice of engineers and we show how they arise or are entangled with broader issues.

The second characteristic of our approach is that we pay attention to the broader contexts in which individual engineers do their work, such as the project team, the company, the engineering profession and, ultimately, society. We have devoted a chapter to the issues this raises with respect to organizing responsibility in engineering (Chapter 7). Where appropriate we also pay attention to other actors and stakeholders in these broader contexts. Again our approach is mainly inside-out, starting from concrete examples and the day-to-day work of engineers. It is sometimes thought that paying attention to such broader contexts diminishes the responsibility of engineers, because it shows that engineers lack the control needed to be responsible.2 Although there is some truth in this, we argue that the broader contexts also change the content of the responsibility of engineers and in some respects increase their responsibility. Engineers, for example, need to take into account the viewpoints, values, and interests of relevant stakeholders (Chapter 1). This also implies including such stakeholders, and their viewpoints, in relevant discussion and decision-making, for example in design (Chapter 5), and responsible innovation (Chapter 9). Engineers also need to inform managers, politicians, and the public not only of technological risks but also of uncertainties and potential ignorance (Chapter 6).

The third characteristic of our approach is our attention to ethical theories and focuses on the first six competences. We consider the ethical theories important because they introduce a richness of moral perspectives, which forces students to look beyond what seems obvious or beyond debate. Although we consider it important that students get some feeling for the diversity and backgrounds of ethical views and theories, our approach is very much practice-oriented. The main didactical tool here is what we call the “ethical cycle” (Van de Poel and Royakkers, 2007). This is an approach for dealing with ethical problems that systematically encourages students to consider a diversity of ethical points of view and helps them to come to a reasoned and justified judgment on ethical issues that they can discuss with others. The ethical cycle is explained in Chapter 4, but Chapters 2 and 3 introduce important elements of it.

The development of the ethical cycle was largely inspired by the ten years of experiences we both have in teaching engineering ethics to large groups of students in the Netherlands, and the didactical problems we and our colleagues encountered in doing so (Van de Poel, Zandvoort, and Brumsen, 2001; Van der Burg and Van de Poel, 2005). We noticed that students often work in an unstructured way when they analyze moral cases, and they tend to jump to conclusions. Relevant facts or moral considerations were overlooked, or the argumentation was lacking. Ethical theories were often used in an instrumental way by applying them to cases in an unreflective way. Some students considered a judgment about a moral case as an opinion about which no (rational) discussion is possible.

The ethical cycle is intended as a didactical tool to deal with these problems. It provides students with a guide for dealing with ethical issues that is systematic without assuming an instrumental notion of ethics. After all, what is sometimes called applied ethics is not a straightforward application of general ethical theories or principles to a practical problem in an area. Rather, it is a working back and forth between a concrete moral problem, intuitions about this problem, more general moral principles, and a diversity of ethical theories and viewpoints. This is perhaps best captured in John Rawls’ notion of wide reflective equilibrium (Rawls, 1971). (For a more detailed discussion, the reader is referred to Chapter 4.)

The ethical cycle provides a tool that does justice to this complexity of ethical judgment but at the same time is practical so that students do not get overwhelmed by the complexity and diversity of ethical theories. By applying the ethical cycle students will acquire the first...