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CHAPTER 1

The Ethics Gap in Contemporary Engineering

TWO VIGNETTES

During the night of December 2–3, 1984, one of the worst industrial disasters in history occurred at Union Carbide's plant in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India. Methyl isocyanate (MIC) liquid, an intermediate used in making Sevin, Union Carbide's name for the pesticide carbaryl, came into contact with water, boiled violently, and turned into MIC gas. Unchecked by various safety systems, tons of highly toxic MIC gas escaped from storage tank E610. A cloud of MIC gas descended upon crowded shantytowns just outside the plant, as well as on Bhopal city. Estimates of the death toll from exposure to the gas, immediately or in the first few days afterward, range from 2,000 to 10,000.

In February 1992, I attended a conference on professional ethics at the University of Florida, Gainesville. On the shuttle bus to the conference hotel, the only other passenger turned out to be a chemical engineer. I asked him whether there was any consensus in the chemical engineering community about what had caused the Bhopal disaster. His response was immediate and succinct: "Sabotage." Union Carbide has given the same explanation for three decades and continues to do so on its website.

On January 28, 1986, about 14 months after the Bhopal disaster, the U.S. space shuttle Challenger exploded and disintegrated 73 seconds after launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The entire crew perished: six astronauts and Christa McAuliffe, the first "Teacher in Space."

President Ronald Reagan appointed the late Arthur Walker Jr., at the time a faculty member at Stanford University, to serve on the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident. Reagan charged the commissioners with determining the cause of the accident. In late 1987, after the commission had submitted its final report, I ran into Professor Walker on the Stanford campus and invited him to give a talk about his commission experience to a faculty seminar on technology in society. After his talk, I asked Walker what was the single most important lesson to be learned from the Challenger disaster. He replied, "Hire smarter engineers."

A GAP BETWEEN EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE

The responses quoted in these vignettes are simplistic. The engineering outcomes involved cannot be explained as simply as those succinct replies suggest. The proffered explanations probably reflect the narrow educational backgrounds of those who offered them. Few intending engineers (or scientists) ever take ethics or social science classes that focus on engineering (or science) projects or practices. They are therefore predisposed to attribute the outcomes of destructive engineering episodes to technical failures or clear-cut, nontechnical factors. The latter include individual cognitive shortcomings, such as mediocre intellectual capability on the part of project engineers, and individual political motives, such as vengeful sabotage by a disgruntled employee.

Part of the appeal of such explanations is that they point up problems that can be readily "solved" by making specific changes, for example, hiring smarter engineers, and screening potential employees more rigorously. Engineers who never took ethics or social science classes closely related to engineering endeavor rarely consider the possibility that some harmful engineering episodes may be partly attributable to ethically problematic conduct on the part of engineer-participants. They also rarely consider the possibility that social or technical features of the often-complex contexts involved can help set the stage for and elicit such conduct.

Not only does contemporary engineering practice pose many ethical challenges to engineers, engineers are rarely adequately prepared to grapple with them in a thoughtful manner. There is an ethics gap in contemporary engineering, that is, a mismatch or disconnect between the ethics education of contemporary engineering students and professionals, and the ethics realities of contemporary engineering practice. One purpose of this book is to help narrow that gap.

EVIDENCE

Is there evidence of a gap between engineering ethics education for engineering students and the ethics realities of contemporary engineering practice? If there is, does it suggest that the ethics gap is substantial? Consider the following.

Between 1997 and 2001, the author conducted an informal survey of Stanford undergraduate engineering students and the practicing engineers they contacted about two topics: the study of engineering-related ethical issues in undergraduate engineering education, and the presence of ethical issues in engineering practice.

Of the 516 undergraduate engineering majors who responded and ventured an opinion, about 17 of every 20 (86.1%) indicated they expected to face ethical issues or conflicts in their engineering careers. But how well did respondents believe their education had prepared them to deal "thoughtfully and effectively with such ethical challenges as they might encounter"? About a seventh (14.2%) responded "a good deal" or "a great deal," whereas more than half (54.3%) responded "a little bit" or "not at all."

The undergraduates' responses did yield some encouraging findings. About three-fifths (62.2%) indicated that during their engineering education they had received the message that "there's more to being a good engineering professional in today's society than being a state-of-the-art technical expert." However, that finding was offset by the sobering fact that only 14.9% of the respondents indicated they had learned "anything specific" from their engineering instructors "about what's involved in being an ethically and socially responsible engineering professional in contemporary society."

Thus, while a healthy majority of the respondents had gotten a message that there's more to being a good engineering professional in contemporary society than being technically competent, the message often lacked specifics. Most students learned nothing concrete about the ethical responsibilities of engineers from their engineering instructors. As they left their classrooms and headed for workplaces where most expected to encounter ethical issues, few engineering students took with them specific knowledge of the ethical responsibilities of engineers.

But how likely is it that engineers will actually confront ethical issues in professional practice? Of the 285 practicing engineers who responded and expressed an opinion, 84.2% agreed that current engineering students are "likely to encounter significant ethical issues in their future engineering practice." Indeed, almost two-thirds (65.4%) of the responding engineers indicated they had already been personally "faced with an ethical issue in the course of [their] professional practice." Almost the same percentage (64.3%) stated they knew or knew of one or more other engineers "who have been faced with an ethical issue in their professional practice." Not surprisingly, a remarkable 92.8% of the practicing engineer respondents who ventured an opinion agreed that engineering students "should be exposed during their formal engineering education to ethical issues of the sort that they may later encounter in their professional practice."

Unless these two groups of respondents are atypical of engineering students and practicing engineers in general, these findings suggest a serious disconnect: between the levels of engineering-student expectation and practicing-engineer experience of being confronted by ethical issues in engineering work, and the amount of effective engineering-related ethics education provided to U.S. undergraduate engineering students.

IMPORTANCE

I shall proceed on the assumption that this disconnect persists and is substantial. Why is it important to bridge or at least narrow the gap between engineering-related ethics education and the ethics realities of contemporary engineering practice?

First, as the case studies in Chapter 4 make clear, misconduct by engineers sometimes contributes to causing significant harm to society. Making engineering students aware of ethical challenges in engineering practice and illustrating the serious social costs attributable to engineering misconduct could help prevent or lessen some of those societal harms.

Second, it makes sense for engineering students to learn upstream, for example, during their undergraduate studies, about material pertinent to challenges they are likely to face downstream, such as being faced with ethical issues during their engineering careers. For many years there was a disconnect between engineers' need for good technical writing and other communications skills, and the scarcity of training dedicated to cultivating such skills in undergraduate engineering education. Happily, in recent years technical communication classes and programs for undergraduates have emerged in a number of U.S. engineering schools, to the benefit of those able to access them. The same attention should be given to cultivating engineering-related ethics awareness and skills as it eventually was to technical communications skills. Failure to nurture the former does as much a disservice to engineering students as did failure to develop the latter. It sends them out into engineering workplaces ill-equipped to recognize and effectively grapple with another important type of professional challenge they are likely to face.

Third, acquiring intellectual resources useful for making thoughtful ethical judgments about engineering conduct can help empower engineers to make up their own minds about the ethical acceptability of prevailing workplace culture and practices. Engineers who lack the skills to make thoughtful ethical judgments about questionable features of workplace culture or suspect work practices are more likely to yield to pressure to go along with prevailing attitudes and practices.

Fourth, equipped with an understanding of responsible engineering decision-making and practices, young engineers in the job market can better assess how committed the firms recruiting them are to supporting ethically responsible engineering work. It would be useful for would-be ethically responsible engineering students and practicing engineers in the job market to know to what degree the firms they are considering joining expect and exert pressure on their new engineer-employees to follow orders uncritically, even when the engineers have concerns about the ethical acceptability of some of the tasks they are assigned.

Fifth, the ability to recognize and comprehend the ethical issues in an engineering situation should make inadvertent irresponsible behavior by engineers less frequent. That recognition and understanding will diminish appeals to the classic excuse "I didn't realize there were ethical issues involved in that situation." Presumably, some engineers who are able to recognize ethical issues in professional practice will choose to avoid conduct they deem ethically irresponsible.

Sixth, a quite different kind of reason for the importance of bridging the ethics gap in contemporary engineering is that in recent years, pressure to provide engineering students with opportunities to study ethical issues in engineering has grown. This pressure stems from multiple sources:

• In a 2003 request for proposals, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) stipulated that each group of universities submitting a proposal for funding to establish a network of nanotechnology research laboratories had to indicate how it was going to "explore the social and ethical implications of nanotechnology" as part of its mission.

• In 2004, the U.K. Royal Academy of Engineering recommended that "consideration of ethical and social implications of advanced technologies ... should form part of the formal training of all research students and staff working in these areas."

• In 2006, a survey of 1,037 nanotechnology researchers at 13 U.S. universities posed this question: "How much do you believe that study of ethical issues related to science and engineering should become a standard part of the education of future engineers and scientists?" About three-tenths (30.1%) of the respondents replied "quite a bit," while another third (33%) replied "very much." This suggests that significant interest in relevant ethics education exists among engineering students and young engineers themselves, not just on the part of accrediting agencies, professional societies, and engineering-related funding organizations.

• In 2009, NSF took a step toward requiring ethics education for engineering students. In implementing the America COMPETES Act of 2007, NSF stipulated that, as of January 2010, when an institution submits a funding proposal to NSF it must certify that it has "a plan to provide appropriate training and oversight in the responsible and ethical conduct of research to undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers who will be supported by NSF to conduct research."

• The U.S. Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) currently requires that engineering programs seeking initial or renewed accreditation of their bachelor's degrees "document" that most graduates of the programs in question have realized 11 "student outcomes." Among them are "an ability to design a system, component, or process to meet desired needs within realistic constraints, such as economic, environmental, social, political, ethical, health and safety, manufacturability, and sustainability [constraints]"; and "an understanding of professional and ethical responsibility."

In short, there are individual, organizational, and societal reasons why providing engineering students with meaningful engineering-related ethics education makes excellent sense.

UNFRUITFUL APPROACHES TO BRIDGING THE GAP

It is hoped that the reader is now persuaded that, all things considered, it would be worthwhile to expose engineering students to study of engineering-related ethical issues in their formal education. But even if that is so, the question remains: what kind of approach to providing engineering students with education about engineering-related ethical issues is likely to be fruitful?

I shall first describe two general approaches to engineering-related ethics education I believe are unlikely to be fruitful and then shall identify and briefly characterize one approach I regard as more promising. The two unfruitful approaches are (1) requiring engineering students to enroll in a traditional philosophy-department ethics course and (2) incorporating engineering-related ethics education into technical engineering classes.

Requiring a Typical Philosophy-Department Ethics Class

Requiring engineering students to enroll in a traditional philosophy-department ethics course is unlikely to be fruitful. Few such courses in the U.S. pay any attention to ethical issues in engineering. They tend to be concerned with ethical concepts and theories, the nature of ethical reasoning, and the status and justification of ethical judgments. With rare exceptions, the examples explored in such courses rarely involve professional contexts.

It is not surprising that engineering-related examples and cases are typically absent from such courses. Few philosophy-department faculty members in U.S. research universities or liberal arts colleges have substantial knowledge of or interest in engineering (as distinguished from science). The same is true of the kinds of concrete situations in which engineers can find themselves that may give rise to ethical issues. In more than four decades of teaching at Stanford University, to the best of my knowledge no ethics course offered by the Department of Philosophy has paid any attention to ethical issues in engineering. I suspect that the same is true of philosophy-department ethics courses at virtually all U.S. universities and colleges. Consequently, requiring engineering students to take a traditional philosophy-department ethics course with the hope they will learn something useful about ethical issues in engineering would leave it completely up to the student to work out how the ideas and theories explored in such courses apply to engineering situations. It would therefore not be surprising if most engineering students perceived such courses as irrelevant to their future careers.

Integrating Ethics Study into Technical Engineering Classes

A second option is to attempt to cover engineering-related ethical issues in technical engineering classes. This could be done by a nonengineer guest instructor with expertise in engineering ethics, or by the primary engineer-instructor of the course.

If a nonengineer guest instructor with expertise in engineering ethics provides the engineering-related ethics education, it is likely to be limited to one or two lectures. Unfortunately, class members will almost inevitably perceive the (limited) material covered in such sessions as peripheral to the course. Moreover, the material covered will probably not be well integrated (by the main instructor) into discussion of the technical material encountered elsewhere in the course.

(Continues…)

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