As in the previous chapter, I offer here philosophical reflections on roughly twenty-five years of work on engineering ethics in the USA.  (For other countries, see Lenk and Ropohl, 1987, and Mitcham, 1992.)  My comments fall into three parts.  In the first I discuss efforts of philosophers to contribute to the field.  In the second, I focus on the contributions of engineers.  And in the third, where I focus on the social responsibility aspect, I consider possibilities for fruitful collaboration.

    In the early 1970s, engineering ethics seemed to be a promising field for philosophers to enter--along with the new field of bioethics (see chapter V), that had recently supplanted the old field of medical ethics, as well as business ethics and several other branches of what was coming to be called applied or professional ethics.  Technology was being widely criticized.  There were a number of scandalous cases or emerging issues associated with engineering and related areas of applied science.  Old codes of ethics were seen as in need of updating and better enforcement.  And some philosophers, perhaps especially those associated with technology and society programs in academia, thought they saw interesting issues ripe for conceptual analysis.  Besides, it was a time of retrenchment in the graduate education of philosophers, so there seemed to be opportunities for employment in engineering-related settings.

    My view is based on some experience with these efforts, but in any case common sense should tell us that there are several possible roles for philosophers to play when it comes to examining ethics and engineering.

    One can, for instance, play the role of external gadfly, where "external" refers to a position entirely outside the engineering community (see Churchill, 1978).

    This community, as I am defining it here, ought to include not only engineers in the strict sense but engineering managers and technicians as well as many other related technical workers--from chemists and applied physicists to econometricians engaged in technological planning or forecasting.  (On the other side, to philosophical critics I would add quite a few critics who are not professional philosophers--religious or other humanistic critics, literary critics, journalists and other non-academics, including laypersons who have taken it upon themselves to learn enough about engineering and technology to be responsible critics.)

    I have argued throughout this book and elsewhere (Durbin, 1992) that progressive social activism is the most likely solution for the major social problems facing our technological world.  I made my earlier appeal to technical professionals, urging them to join in with other social activists in seeking such solutions.  Here I acknowledge the leadership of the anti-technology gadflies I would ask the technical professionals to work with.

    It is also possible to play the role of internal gadfly, within engineering (or research-and-development) institutions; some people consider this to be the proper role of the philosopher (or humanist critic) with respect to the engineering or any other professional community (see Baum, 1980).  According to this view, one can be part of an ethics case review panel, or of a technology assessment team, or a philosopher/professor of engineering ethics in an engineering school and play the role of gadfly every bit as effectively as--perhaps even more effectively than--someone from the outside.

    It is also possible, finally, to serve on one of these committees without thinking of oneself as a stranger or gadfly.  Philosophers, for example, have been asked to help revise codes of ethics.  Some also (and occasionally religious ethicists do this as well) serve as laypersons on ethics review panels for engineering (and other) professional societies.  Not to mention the efforts of philosophers to elucidate concepts associated with engineering ethics (Baum, 1980, pp. 47-48 and 61-72) or to write engineering ethics textbooks (see Johnson, 1991; Martin and Schinzinger, 1990, and Pritchard, 19--).

    What can we conclude about these efforts of North American philosophers over the past quarter century?  I will try to summarize the results by looking at what happened at gatherings associated with the most ambitious project to be undertaken in the United States--the National Project on Philosophy and Engineering Ethics, directed by Robert J. Baum.

    The first stages of the development of this project have been well described by one of Baum's colleagues, Albert Flores (1977).  He starts by pointing out conflicts that persist for individual engineers even if they conscientiously follow their society's code of ethics; legal challenges to professional societies' activities; and thorny ethical issues associated with doing engineering in foreign cultures--in short, he recognizes that there are "serious issues that challenge the professional engineer's commitment to acting as a true professional."  Then Flores asks himself whether anything might be done to help solve these problems and says this:  "One plausible suggestion is that since these questions clearly raise moral and ethical issues, it seems reasonable to expect some helpful guidance from scholars and academics with competence in ethical theory."  The National Endowment for the Humanities agreed and provided funding for a multi-year project in which engineers would learn something about academic ethical theory, philosophers would learn more about engineering, and philosopher-engineer teams would develop ethics projects of various sorts.  An outstanding example of one of these projects is the textbook, Ethics in Engineering (1990), by philosopher Mike Martin and engineer Roland Schinzinger.

    Another feature of the National Project on Philosophy and Engineering Ethics was a series of national conferences, beginning with one at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1979.  Rachelle Hollander, a philosopher who is also the program manager for the agency of the National Science Foundation that funded the second and third national conferences, has described the second conference, held at the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1982.  Hollander (1983) focuses on philosophical contributions:

Philosophers . . . develop[ed] abstract principles on which engineering obligations could rest.  One presentation attempted to ground engineers' whistleblowing rights in more general moral rights to behave responsibly, while yet another developed an argument that engineers are morally required to act on the basis of a principle of due care, requiring those who are in a position to produce harm to exercise greater care to avoid doing so.

    The third national conference (and so far the last) was held in Los Angeles in 1985, and it picked up on Hollander's (and others') focus on the concrete problem of risk assessment.  The proceedings of the conference were edited by Albert Flores and published under the title, Ethics and Risk Management in Engineering (1989).  Almost half of the contributions, following the earlier pattern, are by engineers.  But philosophers and other critics outside the engineering community have interesting things to say in the volume.  Deborah Johnson argues on moral grounds that government needs to have a role in dealing with the risks associated with toxic wastes; Thomas Donaldson appeals to well known ethical theories to raise doubts about whether international standards can be established to regulate such risks; and Kristin Shrader-Frechette argues that all risk assessments necessarily involve value judgments.  In addition, Sheila Jasanoff discusses the differences between ethical and legal analyses of risk issues, while Carl Cranor focuses on the legal mechanisms--the law of torts and regulatory law--that currently control social responses to exposures to toxic substances and similar technological risks.

    These are worthy contributions to the literature, both of engineering ethics and of (applied) philosophy, and these same authors have produced several books extending their contributions (see Cranor, 1992; Jasonoff, 1986; and Shrader-Frechette, 1991).  But if we look beyond the three national conferences to the general body of philosophical literature in this period, one thing is overwhelmingly clear.  Nothing approximating the pronounced movement of philosophers into the field of bioethics ever occurred; there simply was no groundswell of philosophers moving into engineering ethics.  A diligent perusal of The Philosopher's Index from 1975 right up to the present reveals only a handful of articles and even fewer books on any aspect of ethics in relation to engineers.  In spite of early promise, (philosophical) engineering ethics remained stagnant while bioethics boomed--indeed, engineering ethics very nearly disappeared from the philosophical literature.

    No key concepts paralleling the so-called mantra of bioethics (see chapter V, above)--autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice--have ever been put forward.  Philosophers have written introductory textbooks, and contributed articles or chapters to anthologies (see, for example, the contributions to Johnson, 1991), but nothing even remotely approximating the attempts of bioethicists to provide philosophical foundations for their field (see Engelhardt, 1986 and 1991) has emerged.  I know most of the philosophers involved in engineering ethics, and, by these remarks, I mean no disparagement of their efforts.  But I believe all of us who had high hopes in the 1970s for the development of philosophical engineering ethics have been deeply disappointed.

    Is the record any less disappointing on the other side of the fence--among engineers, scientists in government and industry, think-tank technical experts, etc.?  Well, it happens that the American Association for the Advancement of Science--about halfway through the period under review here--conducted a survey of engineers' and scientists' ethics activities and published the results in a report (Chalk, Frankel, and Chafer, 1980).
    The stated objectives of the report included documenting the ethics activities of the AAAS-related societies surveyed; the codes of ethics and other formal principles adopted; significant issues neglected; and recommendations for the future.

    Four engineering societies reported on are the American Society of Civil Engineers (approximately eighty thousand members), the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (with roughly the same number), the National Association of Professional Engineers (about the same), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (more than double the size of the others).  All have active ethics programs, with differing levels of staffing, based in part on a code of ethics and enforcement procedures.  Few allegations of ethics violations are reported as being investigated and even fewer lead to sanctions--though in a handful of cases members have been expelled.  The electrical engineers, shortly before the report was issued, had initiated a formal program, with some funding, to support whistleblowing and similar activities.  And NSPE regularly publishes, in Professional Engineer, case reports and decisions of its judicial body.

    The American Chemical Society, another large technical group whose members often work with engineers in large technology-based corporations, is also reported on.  It too has an active ethics program, but one that seems most often to concentrate on allegations of unethical or unfair employment practices.

    Only a handful of the organizations discussed in the AAAS report replied that they spend much time or effort on "philosophical" tasks--defining and better organizing ethics codes or principles.  More work than before goes into education, increasing ethical sensitivity in the workplace, and providing better enforcement procedures.  The need for this last item, though it is important (and might lead to more enforcement proceedings), would seem not to have a high priority considering the small number of investigations the societies are actually conducting.

    The recommendations of the AAAS report will be summarized below.

    One can follow more recent developments in Professional Ethics Report (since 1988), another venture of the American Association for the Advancement of Science--this time, under the auspices of its Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility and Professional Society Ethics Group.  This quarterly newsletter provides regular updates on the activities of member societies--including all the major and some minor engineering societies and numerous other scientific and technical societies.

    In general, the activities reported--including new or updated codes of ethics, more rigorous enforcement and/or more equitable investigation procedures--are simply an extension, with modest increases, of the activities discussed in the earlier report.  There are regular reports on new legislation and court decisions, and there is even an occasional review of a book that contributes to the advancement of thinking about professional ethics.

    Activity on the enforcement front is best followed in the continuing series of case presentations, and quasi-judicial decisions, that appear regularly in Professional Engineer.

    Even if the incremental improvements reported in Professional Ethics Report, and the greater sensitivity to ethics issues displayed in Professional Engineer (and similar sources), continue into the future, we cannot expect a great deal from these efforts.  The recommendations of the 1980 AAAS report (mentioned earlier) included the following.  In addition to heightened sensitivity and more enforceable rules, as well as better and more frequently utilized investigational procedures, the other recommendations were:  better definition of principles and rules; recognition of the inevitable conflict between employee efforts to protect the public and employer demands; more publicity for sanctions imposed; coordination of ethics efforts of the various professional societies and inclusion of ethics efforts of such other institutions as corporations and government agencies; benchmarks for judging when ethics efforts have succeeded; and full-scale studies, including full and complete histories of cases.  Very few of these laudable ventures seem yet even to be contemplated, and there is little to suggest that very many of the recommendations will be carried out.

    In general, the ethics activities of the professional societies have been more successful than the efforts of philosophers to help out in the process, but there are still glaring weaknesses.  As one example, the ethics activities of the professional societies--however much publicity they sometimes receive--still represent a small, almost infinitesimal part of the activities of engineering and other technical societies.  Meanwhile, allegations of unethical or negligent behavior on the part of technical professionals seem to be increasing dramatically.

    If we turn from limited successes in the enforcement of ethics violations within the professional technical communities to broader concerns of social responsibility, there may be some hope for improvements--but only if there can be greater cooperation between engineers, other technical professionals, and non-engineers (including applied ethicists) interested in improving the situation.

    Among critics of engineering, there are several well known philosophers, historians, and other critics who harp on the shortcomings in the system of professional sanctioning of unethical, negligent, or incompetent engineers (and other technical professionals).

    Langdon Winner (1990), while criticizing the case approach to education in engineering ethics, says this:

Ethical responsibility now involves more than leading a decent, honest, truthful life, as important as such lives certainly remain.  And it involves something much more than making wise choices when such choices suddenly, unexpectedly present themselves.  Our moral obligations must now include a willingness to engage others in the difficult work of defining the crucial choices that confront technological society. . . . Any effort to define and teach engineering ethics which does not produce a vital, practical, and continuing involvement in public life must be counted not just a failure, but a betrayal as well (p.    ).

    In a similar vein, Layton's fellow historian, David Noble, in America by Design: Science, Technology and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (1977), argues that these same powerful engineering leaders throughout the twentieth century have worked hand-in-hand with other governmental, educational, and social leaders--in the name of "progressivism"--to shore up a threatened capitalism, using not only codes of ethics but the promise of "neutral" science and technology, to keep nascent workers' movements in check.

    Finally (among these social critics), Carl Mitcham (1991) maintains that engineering in the modern sense is driven by an ideal of efficiency, and any external values that might be said to influence it--political or legal, social, cultural, even economic values--must, if they are to be really influential, be stated in input-output terms or must be translatable into other sorts of quantitative formulations.  In Mitcham's view, this almost necessarily sets up a tension between engineering values and such non-technical ideals as living in harmony with nature, following otherworldly or transcendental ideals, or even making deontological ethical judgments about limits on human activities (including engineered systems but also almost any other type of social organization or group activity in a technological world).

    On the other side of the fence, even Samuel Florman (1976, 1981)--as staunch a defender of the "existential pleasures of engineering" against the profession's antitechnology critics as there is--admits that current-day engineering education plus a number of recent historical and cultural trends have conspired to produce a fairly conservative and non-imaginative engineering community today.  In Florman's words, "The unpleasant truth is that today's engineers appear to be a drab lot.  It is difficult to think of them as the heirs of the zealous, proud, often cultured, and occasionally eloquent engineers of the profession's Golden Age" (1976, p. 92).

    These criticisms, even if they are taken to be indicative of real problems, should not preclude discussion of potential areas of collaboration between engineers and critics in order to improve the situation.

    With respect to possible contributions from the  side of philosophers and critics, we can anticipate that some philosopher/engineering ethicists will continue to contribute to the ongoing reform efforts of the engineering and other technical professions.  Engineers seem still to want the help of philosophers (along with lawyers) in rethinking, revising, and coordinating their codes of ethics.  Ethicists (some from academia, others religious ethicists) continue to be invited to be members of ethics review panels, technology assessment teams, and similar committees and commissions.  And engineering ethicists are often members of business and professional ethics organizations attempting to improve the climate in corporations, government agencies, and other large, bureaucratic institutions.

    In addition, it seems clear that the handful of philosophers writing books on ethical concepts related to engineering--as well as the somewhat larger number writing about risk assessment and environmental ethics--will continue their efforts.

    On the other hand, among those drawn to the more critical, gadfly approach, I think there are even greater opportunities and challenges--but only under certain conditions.

    First, among engineers and other technical professionals, it must be recognized that with increasing technical advances come greater social responsibilities.  In an earlier book (Durbin, 1992), I have mentioned several specific areas of technological activity that have direct bearing on society--for example, biotechnology, computers, nuclear power (nowadays often concerns over nuclear wastes), and technological developments with a negative impact on the environment.  In these and other areas, I believe that engineers and other technical professionals (e.g., computer experts, environmental engineers) have a duty to society to deal effectively with any problems that are directly related to their work.  At the very least, they have an obligation to cooperate with government regulatory agencies legally mandated to solve these problems.  Too often, technical professionals view regulators as a nuisance and a bother rather than as collaborators in a joint effort to deal with what the public, and their elected representatives, perceive as social problems--even, in some cases, as catastrophes.

    To these specific areas of technological concern, I would add (again see Durbin, 1992) three others that are at least indirectly related to technical expertise--cries for educational reform (including cries for technological literacy on the part of the public) and for health reform (where at least some of the myriad problems are related to the continual introduction of new drugs and technologies--and the large number of technical personnel required to make them effective), as well as problems associated with the mass media.  In this last area, again, technical professionals often seem readier to complain about alarmism than to cooperate in getting out technically accurate news about new technical ventures, including the social problems that too often accompany them.

    In my opinion, all seven of these areas of social concern--and I would include under those broad headings a great many local instantiations of the problems--demand social responsibility on the part of individual technical professionals, on the part of their professional societies, and (often especially) on the part of the organizations in which they work.

    As for the philosophers and other humanistic and lay critics of science and technology, I see their principal obligation--in this context--as one of displaying a much greater spirit of cooperation, rather than confrontation, than is normally the case.  If the social critics of technology really want to do something about technosocial problems, it behooves them to work cooperatively with technical experts--not to mention with corporate and government officials.

    To sum up, I believe that the recent history of engineering ethics in the USA is not a happy one.  Philosophical engineering ethics has turned out to have an extremely limited impact in academia.  And the efforts of engineers and their professional societies are too limited in both scope and impact.  With Robert Baum and Albert Flores--in their original hopes for the National Project on Philosophy and Engineering Ethics--I believe that the way to go is through collaborative efforts involving philosophers and engineers.  But I would qualify my optimism about the approach by saying that its success depends on significant behavioral changes.  The engineers and their professional societies need to broaden their outlook, moving beyond a focus on individual misconduct to broader social responsibilities, and also to welcome a broader range of people into the dialogue.  On the other hand, philosophers, social critics, reporters and editors, environmental activists (and so on) need to be less confrontational and more willing to dialogue.  Together, I am convinced, we can hope to solve some of the more pressing social issues facing our technological society.

    This seems to me a better definition of engineering ethics than a definition that focuses mainly on individual engineers' and technical professionals' potential misconduct.  And actions based on the new focus might, in the next twenty-five years, see engineering ethics make a significantly greater impact on society than has been the case in the last twenty-five years.

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