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

Ethical issues in engineering design
Identifying what affected actors value with regard to the design of a product
requires a degree of moral imagination from the engineers. 1 Different proposals
have been made to enhance the moral imagination of people by reading
literature or enjoying art; I will not discuss this further (for a discussion on the
importance of moral imagination and ways to develop it, see for example
[Nussbaum, 2001] and [Murdoch, 1997]). My proposal is that engineers should
use their personal experience to identify what affected actors might value. The
strength of my proposal is that engineers already use their personal experience
in radical design processes, as has been concluded for the case-studies on radical
design. The engineers have personal experience and they use it during a radical
design process, they only need to use this personal experience in a systematic
way.
The cases of radical design described in chapters 4 and 7 have shown that
decisions on ethical issues were made based on internal design team norms.
These internal norms were based upon the education that the engineers had
had, their design experience and sometimes their personal experience. Relying
solely on internal norms of the design team can lead to blind spots regarding the
values that the affected actors have, as can be seen in the trailer case. Traffic
safety was not taken into account in the structural design of the trailer. The
engineers were not used to accounting for traffic safety; they only felt
responsible for designing a safe, as in structurally reliable, light trailer. In this
trailer case, the engineers did not take their personal experience systematically
into account. The engineers did use their design experience and they called on
their education, but personal experience was only used if it was personal design
experience. Even though one of the engineers had personal experience with
driving trucks, references to personal experience outside that of engineering
design were rarely made. In the DutchEVO project, personal experience with
cars was mentioned very often. The project leader used his personal experience
as a parent to try and see what other parents would find acceptable in a
lightweight family car. In discussions on the idea of making the driver feel
vulnerable, the project leader indicated that the driver should not feel too
vulnerable because a driver would never put his or her children in the back of a
family car that gave the impression of being in a cardboard car. If engineers
design very different types of products they will not have a lot of design
experience with a particular product to use when making a radical design.
Taking the personal experience of engineers systematically into account could
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1 See also Patricia Werhane’s book on moral imagination and management decisions. She
argues that identifying different perspectives is necessary for good management decision
making [Werhane, 1999, 66-67 and 114-115]
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