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

Introduction
issues will not be considered ethical issues in this thesis. An example of this is
that some industrial designers conflate aesthetic and moral values.
Some of the ethical issues are also legal issues, for example safety issues.
There is a lot of legislation, standards and codes pertaining to safety and design.
This makes decisions regarding safety no less ethically relevant, it only provides
engineers with rules they should follow from a legal point of view when making
decisions. In these cases the way engineers deal with these issues can be
evaluated both from an ethical and a legal point of view. Decisions about the
safety of a product might then be morally right or wrong and legal or illegal. A
question that can be raised in such instances is whether a design that is safe
enough according to legislation is also ethically acceptable and vice versa.
Legislation, codes and standards regarding safety can also be evaluated ethically.
1.1.2 Ethical issues in engineering design
To take into account all ethical issues connected in one way or another to a design
process would be impossible. It is not that difficult to point out the ethical
relevance of what seems to be a very trivial choice, like which tea to drink during
meetings of a design team. Tea can be produced organically or with the use of
herbicides and under good or bad working conditions. The choice of what tea to
drink is therefore related to utility and universal rights. Lots of ethical issues
might play a role in the design context, for example some parts might be
produced in countries where child labour is usual and therefore it might be
assumed that these parts are made by children. Although all these issues like
child labour, exploitation of underdeveloped countries, use of herbicides and
pesticides are indeed ethical issues, these issues will not form the main focus of
interest in this research. I will concentrate on ethical issues that have a direct
influence on the design of a product and the way it is used. In particular, I will
focus on ethical issues concerning safety and sustainability. The reason for the
focus on safety and sustainability is that these play a dominant role in many
design processes. Given the conception of ethical issues it is clear that safety and
sustainability may give rise to ethical issues. Decisions made about these issues
are related to utility and general rights. Decisions regarding safety and
sustainability are made in almost every design process, although the importance
of these subjects may differ. In some cases, sustainability or safety will not be
regarded or discussed by the engineers, but this does not mean that there are no
choices made regarding sustainability or safety.
In the following two examples I will show that the impact of decisions made
during design processes concerning safety and sustainability may be far reaching.
In everyday life choices about safety and sustainability with regard to the use of
technological devices are often made, but the consequences of the choices made
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