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

Ethical issues in engineering design
8.1 Summary of the results
The results from the cases are summarised in tables 8.1 to 8.4. Short
descriptions of the ethical issues are given in the first column. The ethical issues
mentioned here were sometimes spontaneously mentioned by engineers, like
safety in the DutchEVO case. Other ethical issues like traffic safety in the trailer
case were not spontaneously mentioned but were recognised to be ethical issues
when this was pointed out to the engineers in the presentations I gave.
I have categorized the ethically relevant issues in the second column. The
categories were not defined before the empirical studies were done but came out
during the studies. Three of them can be related to actions in design processes
that can be ethically relevant, i.e. following Van de Poel: the formulation and
operationalisation of requirements and the assessment of trade-offs between
design requirements (see section 2.1). Most ethical issues were related to the
operationalisation of requirements and the making of trade-offs. In addition to
this, some problems concerning the division or ascription of responsibilities
were identified. The ethical issues could be divided into five categories. There
were two kinds of operationalisations made. Some operationalisations only
involved a choice between given options, for example the choice to work with the
regulative framework or a choice between different codes. In other cases of
operationalisations, these options were not given and a complete
operationalisation had to be made. The latter form of operationalisation is more
ill-structured. In the following, I refer to the operationalisation of requirements
by choosing between given options as “operationalisation I”; the ill-structured
kind of operationalisation is referred to as “operationalisation II”. There is a
category of ethical issues related to the making of trade-offs, plus a category of
ethical issues related to the division and ascription of responsibilities. There is
also a category of ethical issues related to the formulation of requirements. To
summarise, these five categories will be referred to as: operationalisation I,
operationalisation II, making trade-offs, division or ascription of responsibilities
and the formulation of requirements.
The approaches used to obtain arguments and make a decision concerning
the ethical issue are described in the third column. The persons involved in the
solution and decision approaches for the ethical issues are listed in the last
column.
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