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

Conclusions of the empirical study
It can be concluded from the conceptual and empirical considerations discussed
above that in general the way that engineers deal with ethical issues depends on
the design type. In normal design a regulative framework will usually be
available to provide operationalisations of requirements and gives some
guidelines as to what trade-offs are legally allowed. This regulative framework
will be used to decide on ethical issues. In radical design the regulative
framework will not be or only partly be used to make decisions on ethical issues.
Hypothesis 2b: the regulative framework fulfils all Grunwald’s requirements and
is therefore a normative framework, is not supported by the empirical evidence.
In this research at least three commonly used regulative frameworks, those for
the construction of bridges, of piping and equipment and for car design, did not
meet Grunwald’s requirements. Generally speaking, the following problems
may be expected in regulative frameworks.
(1) There will be a problem concerning acceptance; it is not easy to establish
whether all the affected actors accept the regulative framework.
(2) EU directives under the New Approach are formulated in a goal-oriented
manner for product groups [www.newapproach.org]. When defining
regulations for product groups instead of for specific products, it may be
necessary to be a bit vague and ambiguous. This vagueness and ambiguity
can be used to help make the directive applicable for a broad range of
products. So it is very likely that there will always be some ambiguity in
regulative frameworks based on EU directives.
(3) Regulative frameworks usually leave decisions to be made by the design
engineers and are therefore not pragmatically complete. It is impossible to
prescribe every little detail of a design even if this was the idea behind the EU
directives.
On these grounds it can be expected that in general, although a regulative
framework will be available for normal designs, such a framework will probably
not meet Grunwald’s requirements.
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