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

8 Conclusions of the empirical study
In this chapter conclusions are drawn based on the four case-studies with regard
to the working hypotheses that were formulated in chapter 3 in this chapter.
These working hypotheses were:
1a) The kinds of ethical issues faced by engineers depend on design type
and design hierarchy.
1b) The ways in which engineers deal with these ethical issues depend on
design type and design hierarchy.
2a) In normal design processes a regulative framework is used by
engineers to account for the decisions made on ethical issues.
2b) This regulative framework fulfils all Grunwald’s requirements and is
therefore a normative framework.
The results from the cases are first summarized in section 8.1. Subsequently the
empirical data with regard to working hypothesis 1a are discussed in section 8.2.
It is argued that the empirical data only partly support this working hypothesis.
Contrary to what was expected the design hierarchy does not seem to influence
the kinds of ethical issues. These issues only depend on design type. It will be
shown that the empirical data only support a part of hypothesis 1b in section 8.3.
The way engineers deal with ethical issues depends on design type and again no
influence of design hierarchy was seen. It will also be argued that the empirical
data are in accord with working hypothesis 2a. Engineers use a regulative
framework to deal with ethical issues in normal design. They do not use
regulative frameworks in radical design. The regulative frameworks encountered
in this thesis do not fulfil Grunwald’s requirements. So working hypothesis 2b is
not confirmed by the empirical data. This will be argued in section 8.4. Until
now, I have considered the design problem formulation to be given fact in
design processes. I discuss this assumption in section 8.5 and indicate that the
design problem formulation is not completely fixed and engineers have ways to
influence the design problem formulation. This is highly relevant from an
ethical point of view because the problem definition determines the design type.
Finally, an attempt is made to generalise the results from the cases in section
8.6, this generalisation is done on empirical and conceptual grounds.
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