Engineering as a Global Profession by Michael Davis

Author:Michael Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781538155059
Publisher: Michael Davis

Chapter 10

Engineering Ethics, Individuals, and Organizations

This chapter evaluates a family of criticism of how engineering ethics is now generally taught. The short version of the criticism might be put this way: Teachers of engineering ethics devote too much time to individual decisions and not enough time to social context. There are at least six versions of this criticism, each corresponding to a specific subject omitted. Teachers of engineering ethics do not (it is said) teach enough about: (1) the culture of organizations; (2) the organization of organizations; (3) the legal environment of organizations; (4) the role of professions in organizations; (5) the role of organizations in professions; or 6) the political environment of organizations. (By “organization,” I mean any employer of many people, whether government, business, or non-profit.)1

My conclusion is that, while all six criticisms recommend worthy subjects, there is neither much reason to believe that any of those subjects are now absent from courses in engineering ethics nor an obvious way to decide whether they (individually or in combination) should (or should not) have their share of the course augmented. What we have here is not some well-defined either-or but a dispute about how much is enough. How-much disputes are not to be settled without agreement concerning the method by which we are to tell whether we have enough of this or that.2 Right now we seem to lack such a method—and not to have much reason to expect one any time soon.3

1. Culture, Organization, and Law

By “culture,” I again mean a distinctive way of doing certain things (including standards for evaluating success and failure).4 Lynch and Kline (2000), two historians of technology we have met before, have offered the following argument for including more about organizational culture in courses in engineering ethics: “Most engineers operate in an environment where their capacity to make decisions is constrained by the corporate or organizational culture in which they work.” Engineers, “even public-spirited, highly ethical engineers,” do not “spontaneously and infallibly know what the public interest demands [or how to achieve it].” To know what the public interest is and how to achieve it requires detailed knowledge of circumstances, including the culture of the organization (and the larger society). A course in engineering ethics should alert students to the need for such knowledge.

Lynch and Kline use what has come to be known as “the Challenger case” to illustrate this point, contrasting the “typical” approach that emphasizes the heroic (but ineffective) dissent of Roger Boisjoly (and a few others) with Vaughan’s book-length reconstruction that makes the decision to launch on January 28, 1986, seem inevitable well before Boisjoly’s heroic dissent, a product of the culture that NASA developed over many years. To stop the launch, Boisjoly would have had to have begun to change that working environment months or even years before. The night of January 27–28 was too late. Certain ways of working had left too few options. There was too little information available to make the case that the engineers would have had to make that night to get the decision they believed right.

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