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

Towards warranted trust in engineers
unwanted side effects. In trusting engineers the public expects engineers to use
their skills and experience. If you bring your car to the garage because one of the
windows is broken, you would want the car mechanics to inform you if they saw
some other problems with your car, for example worn tires. You probably would
not want them to change the tires without asking you if they should, but you
would like to be warned. In this example it also depends on what discretion and
the assignment you gave the garage. If you asked the car mechanics to
thoroughly service your car then you would expect them to check everything and
repair it, including replacing the worn tires. In a similar way, engineers are
required to use regulative frameworks and to warn the appropriate organisations
if they encounter problems. Individual engineers and design teams have the
responsibility to report problems or difficulties to whoever has formulated the
specific part of the framework. However, individual engineers and design teams
do not have the responsibility to, nor are they allowed to, change complete
regulative frameworks. For example, if an engineer encounters problems with a
code then he or she should contact the commission that has formulated the
code, he or she cannot decide to change the code. New versions of codes appear
regularly and the comments of engineers who have experience with the previous
versions are incorporated in the new versions. This means that knowing how to
use a framework is not enough: engineers also need to know how a regulative
framework is formulated and know which organisations formulate which part so
they can report their experiences to the correct authority for changes to be made
if deemed necessary by that authority.
9.1.2 Grunwald’s requirements reconsidered
Based on Baier’s notion of trust, I have formulated a hypothesis on the
conditions for warranted trust in engineers making normal designs. One of the
conditions for warranted trust is that the regulative frameworks are adequate.
This means that the requirements for an adequate regulative framework need to
be in correspondence with the notion of trust. So an adequate regulative
framework should help to protect the things that affected actors value. Until now
I have accepted Grunwald’s requirements on normative frameworks as
requirements for an adequate regulative framework. There are, however, some
problems concerning Grunwald’s requirements that may affect whether the
normative framework can be considered a basis for warranted trust. I will look at
five problems, three problems concerning the requirement of acceptance and
two related to the requirements that a normative framework should be
pragmatically complete and unambiguous.
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