the study outcomes
Practical use of the study outcomes The most obvious use of the outcomes, summarised in Table 1, is to provide engineers with a stimulus to reasoning about ethical issues. This could be done in an essentially ‘on-line’ way – that is, during the course of the substantive engineering process – by asking whether in one’s current project one is likely to violate ascribed ethics of the kind listed in the table. The idea is to have a checklist: something that reminds one of what others will see as requirements, whether reasonably or not. The second approach is to use the outcomes in an ‘off-line’ way – in some activity that is not part of the engineering process. For example it might provide a way of structuring a debate with oneself or colleagues about the scope and nature of one’s responsibilities. It seems quite likely that many engineers would want to reject some of the ethics ascribed to them, but at the same time they introduce concepts that may normally be passed over in, say, risk analyses. For example, the fact that airbags in cars are harmful to people who sit very close to them turns something that is generally beneficial into something that is harmful for a small proportion of the population. This discriminatory element is perhaps easily overlooked, but has implications for various decisions, such as the following: • When should a technology be introduced? Should it be introduced as soon as a
utilitarian calculation tips in its favour, or should it be delayed until no-one is made worse-off than hitherto?
• In what direction should further technological development take place – in further enhancing the protection of those already benefiting, or mitigating the harm to those currently losing? The airbags case also yielded a second expectation – that engineers should not rely
on people following a rule that was not ‘common sense’ (to the extent that people did not have to be told the rule in order to follow it). It is unreasonable for engineers to expect people to protect themselves from harm by engaging in a behaviour, such as following instructions, which they find difficult to adopt for some reason. The difficulty, but also the necessity, of influencing the way products are used17 seems to be a common problem for engineering. It seems evident that some engineers are prepared to draw the scope of their responsibility in such a narrow way that they can ignore it. This is an issue that engineers need to debate repeatedly as technological possibilities change and as societal norms change.
The Social Ascription of Obligations to Engineers
Science and Engineering Ethics, Volume 9, Issue 3, 2003 373
Problems with the ascribed ethics themselves Plainly the obligations that individual members of the public may ascribe to engineers may be problematic. They may be: • Odious, for example demanding that engineers subscribe to an extreme political
doctrine that espouses evil methods or makes vicious assumptions. None of the ascribed obligations revealed in this study were of this kind.
• Unfeasible, for example demanding expenditures on protection that cannot be funded – perhaps because the same people ascribing the obligation are also unwilling to pay higher prices or taxes for the services they receive.
• Idiosyncratic, reflecting the particular situation and background of the ascribing person. It is tempting to dismiss idiosyncrasies because an engineer dealing with a wide public, for example an engineer who designs a consumer product, cannot please all of the people all of the time. But averaging out the people one has in mind when, for example, deciding on acceptable levels of risk is not necessarily defensible.
• Unrepresentative, even of the person’s general feelings about engineers. This is especially so if they have arisen in distressing circumstances that do not lend themselves to disinterested reason. Victims of engineering failures, like accidents arising from defective axles on trains, are quite likely to ascribe obligations to people who could have prevented the failure, they are quite likely to generate sympathy among other members of the public, and they are quite likely to receive widespread attention.
• Inconsistent, with other obligations either ascribed to or espoused by engineers. Wealthy people who have easy access to goods are quite likely to emphasise engineers’ obligations to protect them from harm. Poor people are quite likely to emphasise engineers’ obligations to produce goods that are inexpensive.
• Ignorant, reflecting a lack of knowledge of the difficulties faced by engineers having to reconcile conflicting demands. Surely, an engineer might argue, people who ascribe obligations to others should not do so unless they are careful to understand what those others have to do. We have suggested earlier that problematic obligations are still informative. They
help to reveal the minds of people affected by engineering, and they can help engineers put reasonable bounds on general principles that they had hitherto thought universal. For example, as an engineer you might always have believed that any kind of protection against some harm is better than none: learning that some people expect you to protect different classes of people equally might lead you to qualify that. Looking at the entries in Table 1, they do not seem especially problematic in most of the senses we have just suggested, but they are demanding and difficult to meet as universal requirements. They do not leave open the engineers’ conduct to a utilitarian calculation but specify it, regardless of utilitarian considerations.
