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

Conclusions of the empirical study
design a product. Some regulative frameworks specify for example organisations
that should check the design and certify it. In these frameworks a product is
legally allowed to be sold and used only if it is certified. The certifying
organisations can help engineers when they are confronted with inconsistencies
in and conflict between elements of the framework or blind spots. Certifying
organisations can for example indicate which of the conflicting elements can be
ignored or how a trade-off is to be made; this allows ambiguity and inconsistency
to be dealt with to a certain extent within the framework.
One way in which engineering societies can help to reduce the ambiguity and
incompleteness of regulative frameworks is to provide further interpretations
and elaboration of codes, standards and legislation. Ideas on good design
practice evolve in engineering practice and are taught in education. These ideas
can be used to help to make a regulative framework less ambiguous and less
incomplete over time.
The above discussion indicates that it might be relatively easy to make
regulative frameworks more locally consistent, pragmatically complete and
unambiguous and that some of this can be done by the engineers, engineering
societies and standardisation organisations. However, from a moral point of
view, Grunwald’s requirement for acceptance seems to be the most important
because acceptance legitimises a framework. Acceptance of a framework is
related to trust (see section 2.3.3). Engineers cannot make the public accept a
regulative framework. Therefore, the most important problem concerning
regulative frameworks is that it is not clear whether they are accepted. I will
come back on the problems regarding the acceptance of regulative frameworks
in chapter 9.
8.5 Design problem formulation
Until now, I have considered the design problem definition as something that is
not part of but preliminary to the design process. At this point I want to make
some comments on the ethical relevance of the design problem definition. 1
I will first discuss why the design problem formulation is ethically relevant.
In a design problem formulation a choice is made between a normal or a radical
design and between a high level or a lower level design. 2 Requirements in the
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1 I will, however, not address the question as to whether engineers should, from a moral point
of view, refuse to design certain products. Questions regarding the moral desirability of
products are interesting but outside the scope of this thesis. These questions should be
addressed by more stakeholders than only engineers, amongst others governments, non-
governmental organizations and the public.
2 Of course the design type can change during the design process. A radical design process may
become more normal because a lot of normal parts are included or because the initial radical
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