Ethical issues in engineering design - 3TU.Centre for Ethics and ...

Ethical issues in engineering design
1.1.1 Ethical issues
Until now I have assumed that the reader knows intuitively what ethical issues
are. I will now explain in more detail the meaning of the term “ethical” as used
here. 3 I will call a problem an ethical or moral problem if moral values are at
stake. In characterising moral values I will follow Thomas Nagel. According to
Nagel, there are different sources of value, special allegiances, general rights,
utility, perfectionist ends of self-development and individual projects, that cannot
be reduced to each other or to more fundamental values. Values based on special
allegiances are, according to Nagel a result of a subject’s relationships to others
and consist of special obligations to other people or institutions. General rights
are rights that everyone has as a human being. These rights constrain action;
actions that violate these rights are morally not permitted. According to Nagel,
‘utility includes all aspects of benefit and harm to all people (or sentient beings)’
[Nagel, 1979, 129]. Perfectionist ends of self-development refer to the intrinsic
value of certain achievements. Nagel provides examples of the intrinsic value of
scientific discovery or artistic creation. The fifth type of value derives from
individual projects. Nagel says that ‘this is value in addition to whatever reasons
may have led to them in the first place’ [Nagel, 1979, 130]. An example Nagel
gives is that if you have set out and started to climb to the top of Mount Everest
then this project gains importance. Ethical theories usually focus on one of the
sources of value. Kantianism focuses on universal rights. Utilitarianism only
accounts for utility. Virtue ethics concentrates on perfectionist end of selfdevelopment.
I do not want to limit myself to one source of value by choosing a
definition of ethical issues that refers only to utility or virtues or universal rights.
In this thesis, issues that are related to one of the sources of moral values
identified by Nagel are called ethical issues and decisions concerning ethical
issues are called “ethically relevant” decisions. For example, issues concerning
safety are related to utility but also to universal rights, therefore safety is an
ethical issue. The term “ethical issue” only indicates that the way engineers deal
with an issue can be evaluated from an ethical point of view.
This conception of ethical issues is used independently of what engineers
themselves think are ethical issues. Engineers may or may not share this
conception of ethical issues. Even in cases that engineers do not consider an
issue to be ethical, if it is an ethical issue according to the above conception I will
treat it as such in this research. There might also be issues that engineers call
ethical but that are not ethical issues according to the above conception; these
——————————————————————————————————
3 Some philosophers indicate that morality describes a code of conduct of a society or another
group [Gert, 2002]. Ethics or moral philosophy is then construed to be a critical reflection on
morality. I will use the terms “ethical” and “moral” interchangeably.
14