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

Ethical issues in engineering design
on the different evaluative standards of the practices an engineer participates in
only as a tool to identify what other actors affected by the design might value.
Engineers need to do this in radical design processes because they need to take
into account what the public values for the public to have warranted trust in
them. Questions an engineer should ask him/herself are: What would I think is
important in the safety of this product if I were a bystander? For example, when
designing a radically new chemical installation, engineers should ask
themselves: What would I consider acceptable if I and my family were living in
the neighbourhood? Asking themselves such questions during a radical design
process should help engineers to reflect on operationalisations of ethical issues
like safety and the trade-offs made between ethical issues or other issues.
Engineer using their personal experience is not a guarantee that all things
valued by the affected actors will be taken into account but it is a way to include
more values in the design process. What engineers can identify as things that
affected actors value will ultimately depend on the sort of lives the engineers
taking part in the design team live. This has implications for what is desirable
with respect to the composition of a design team. To increase the chance that a
design team will be able to identify what affected actors value, it should include
engineers with different personal life styles and backgrounds. These different
engineers will all have access to different personal experiences thus diverse
design teams are desirable.
To conclude, the above means that besides having technical competence,
engineers working on radical designs should know what affected actors value
with regard to the product that is being designed. One way to identify what
affected actors value is to use one’s personal experience. If engineers
systematically use their personal experience, and think about what they would
value concerning a design of a product if they were the users or bystanders then
this reflection can be used to broaden the internal norms of a design team.
9.3 Further research
Further research on the formulation of the requirements that an adequate
regulative framework should meet is needed. An adequate regulative framework
and technically competent engineers are proposed conditions for warranted trust
in engineers making normal designs. Engineers can use such a framework in
their normal design practice and have some reason to believe that the designs
they make are acceptable. Broader questions regarding the acceptance of the
framework and designs made using the framework would have already been
solved because the framework meets the adequacy requirements.
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