Introduction

The Politics and Ethics of Engineering

The ethical codes of most engineering societies still emphasize basic principles of public service and emphasize the concept of personal responsibility in the professions. And many engineering schools include a course of ethics (sometimes required) which passes on these same traditions to the next generation of engineers. The difficulties lie not in the absence of an ethical sensitivity. in the professions so much as in the void between the ideals set forth in the codes and the everyday practice of scientific and technical work.1

"Engineers solve complex problems." It would be hard to find anyone who thinks about engineering who would disagree with that description. Engineers wrestle with the limitations and potentials of the materials to which they have access; they choose from the tools and the theories that are available; they listen to their clients who come to them with a set of desired outcomes and a matching set of cost and time requirements. Engineers work toward the best possible design solution for the problem that these factors define. At its best, this kind of integration of real-world constraints characterizes one type of genius that makes the modern world go round.

As far as it goes, that is a fine summary of what people mean when they praise engineers as major benefactors of contemporary society. Take their pragmatic genius out of the picture and the world as we know it, structured as it is by thousands of very complex systems, simply would not work. Some of the ethical challenges that engineers face stem from their responsibilities to their clients, whether. those clients are customers or the government agencies and companies in which they work. This course is not unique in calling attention to them. But there is more to engineering ethics.

What complicates engineering morality is what Rosemary Chalk calls "the void between the ideals set forth in the [ethical] codes and the everyday practice of scientific and technical work." Being good at the art of problem solving. does not necessarily mean that an engineer is also good at interpreting the cultural and political complexities of the world of "everyday practice." Most ethical challenges are so subtle that it is easy to miss them, at least until they grow into enormous ethical dilemmas that can no longer be ignored and can be very painful to resolve. "Interpreting cultural and political complexities" calls for an intellectual balance that blends precise analysis with perceptive intuition. A whole range of questions come into play for an engineer who sees ethical responsibility in this broader frame of reference. How do I understand my own personality patterns (and those of the people with whom I work)? When should I follow my hunches even if they seem to contradict what the theory predicts as expected outcomes? And when are my hunches unreliable? How do I integrate into project design work an awareness of the mix of winners and losers that every technological design creates as a natural by-product? How do I understand the cultural enthusiasms (some positive and some negative) that make some technologies profitable and others hard to sell? Why do some projects result in expensive botch jobs when others, technically no more complicated, work out beautifully? And how, in the swirl of daily work, with its risks and boredom, successes and failures, do I sustain a sense of my self as a moral agent who consistently takes responsibility for her/his expertise? How maintain my moral balance in a work-culture that sometimes seems to reward nothing so much as aggressive ladder-climbing?

These are samples of ethical questions facing engineers. Their most bedeviling quality? Much of the time they do not seem to have easily definable right and wrong answers. At this level, living ethically calls for what this course will eventually refer to as "the educable engineer." It should be clear by the time you encounter the term in Theme Nine, that an educable engineer combines the ability both to work theory and to learn from and negotiate with people who think differently than s/he does. Having the capacity for your own thinking, even your most technically sophisticated thinking, to be influenced by the surprises and aggravations of the larger world turns out to close to the heart of engineering ethics. It is as important as thinking through your own personal moral code and deciding what you stand for, which commitments you will hold on to even at the risk of serious reprisals. Leave either dimension out of your ethics and you are in trouble. "Educability" without a firm moral code turns an engineer into pliable mush. A firm moral code without the capacity to learn from people unlike oneself degrades into arrogant rigidity. Moral engineering requires a supple integration of a professional code of conduct with the ability to change one's mind.

This course is based on eleven themes and a set of related readings which are briefly described just below. They are designed to tease out the moral dimensions that often lie beneath the surface of ordinary engineering practice. For that reason, most of the readings come from the history of technology. They were chosen, in almost every case, because their ethical issues are no more obvious in the reading than they usually are in real life. The cases range through U.S. history, in part to help potential engineers to understand that when they meet ethical challenges in their later practice, the do not have to face them as naked individuals but as members of a profession with its own traditions of excellence. The themes are designed to provide concepts that make sense of ordinary practice in a way that can help an engineer see everyday problem solving in all its moral subtlety.

To sum up, this approach argues that an ethical engineer must be creative along. two related fronts: technical problem solving and cultural interpretation. Ethical challenges have to be recognized before one's moral code can be brought to bear on resolving them and it is usually impossible to see the ethics in a technological context unless you can understand both how the technology works and how it operates within the messy complexities of its real world environment. The moral engineer not only solves problems defined according to someone else's goals but participates in the difficult conversations that define the goals in the first place. Seen in this light, engineering looks as noble and exciting as its best practitioners have always shown it to be.

Course Modules: A Short Sketch

Module One: Introduction: every technology has its own history

Theme one provides a model for thinking about technologies in terms of a set of technology-society relationships. No technology drops out of the sky; the model pays attention to the people who spend the money and have the expertise needed to research and design a successful technology, as well as the people who come to depend on it once it becomes successful. Finally, the model reminds us that no technology is free from negative consequences. Tradeoffs are part of the process. There is no free technological lunch.

Because the theme is longer and more complex than most of those that follow, no readings are assigned to this module.

Module Two: Creating a Livable Place in the Wilderness

Reading: The Works of John B. Jervis. John Jervis represents best-practice engineering in the early 19th century. He designed and built canals, aqueducts, and railroad system components, all critically important for what was still a backwoods country.

Module Three: Where Do Very Complex Systems Come From?

Reading: The Direction of Technology. This story is about nuts and bolts, actually about the shape of the threads that hold nuts and bolts together. In this story William Sellers fought for and eventually won the right to set the standard for thread design. Did he win because his design was better or because he waged a better political campaign and defeated other competing designs? Or both?

Module Four: New Technologies Need Three Kinds of Expertise to Get Going

Module Five: Are Engineers Leaders or Followers?

Module Five has two closely related themes. Theme Five places a question that has been asked over and over during the twentieth century about the tension between an engineer's responsibility to her/his profession and to her/his employer. Theme Six describes one response to that question, sometimes called "Technocracy," the belief that engineers should organize and run society and replace both politicians and corporate management with their pragmatic brand of scientific efficiency.

Readings: The Evolution of the Engineering Profession [1 page outline]; Measuring the Unmeasurable;. How Engineers Lose Touch. "Measuring the Unmeasurable" describes the most famous attempt to create a working model of the technocratic ideal. It is sometimes called "scientific management" and sometimes, after its founder Frederick Winslow Taylor, "Taylorism." In "How Engineers Lose Touch," Eugene Ferguson, an engineer and teacher of engineers,. criticizes the way engineers are being educated today. The Evolution of the Engineering Profession maps the birthdates of many of today's more important engineering societies and points to the question of how they defined who could be a member. All three readings imply that engineers need to respect their own professional expertise and at the same time share responsibility with other stake holders if they are going to successfully balance their professional and employee identities.

Module Six: Innovation in Large Corporations

Reading: Kettering and the Copper-Cooled Engine. Boss Kettering founded and ran Delco Labs and GM's air-cooled engine was a pet project for him. General Motors learned some hard lessons about its own corporate culture before it finally scrapped what had looked like a promising new design just two years after it had been approved for development.

Module Seven: When is Formal Theory Helpful and When isn't it?

Reading: Scientific Mystique: Highway Research at the Bureau of Public Roads, 1918-1940. The Bureau of Public Roads came out of World War One committed to a scientific model for research into road design. That, as this case study demonstrates, turned out to be a major waste of time and money. Why?

Module Eight: Successful Technologies Don't Always Travel Well

Reading: The American Tractor Comes to Soviet Agriculture. Part of Joseph Stalin's modernization program involved a surprisingly cordial relationship between Russia's Communist dictator and American engineers. How simple was it to take a tractor designed in Dearborn Michigan at the Ford Motor Company and transplant it in the Soviet Union? Not very simple at all.

Module Nine: Engineers as Accomplices

Reading: National Socialist Ideology and German Engineers. Thomas Hughes (same as in the Hughes Model in Theme Four) contrasts Gottfried Feder, who led Germany's main engineering society as an avowed Nazi until Hitler's rise to power in 1933, with Fritz Todt who replaced him. Feder preached a brand of technocracy (see theme six), something the Nazi Party rejected after they came to power in favor of what some people today call a "Faustian Bargain," where engineers ask no questions as long as they get sweet engineering projects and the resources to design them.

Module Ten: Making Moral Decisions in Difficult Engineering Circumstances

Readings: The Fifty-Nine-Story Crisis;. How See-No-Evil Doomed Challenger;. One Year Later, Two Engineers Cope with Challenger Horror;. Engineering Under Pressure;. Survey of Whistle Blowers Finds Retaliation but Few Regrets;. The Miners' Canary. Most of these readings are quite short. They contrast two recent ethical cases. In the first (Fifty-Nine Story Crisis) the project engineer faces a moral crisis and works with other professionals to avert a potential disaster. In the Challenger readings,. the disaster happened and the articles try to make sense of what went wrong. Finally, in "The Miners' Canary," Rosemary Chalk discusses recent thinking about the moral pressures that face engineers. She includes some suggestions about how to face them.

Module Eleven: Course Overview