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

Introduction
could not imagine human rights issues in their company. Second, others thought
that ethics was only concerned with what kind of life a person should live and
wondered what designing had to do with that. Third, some people, Bachelor
students especially, thought that I would study the etiquettes in their design
team. Fourth, some engineers shared the interpretation of ethical issues used in
this study and expected me to look at decisions concerning the safety of the
design or the prevention of disasters. I deliberately did not correct the engineers
who thought that I was interested in etiquette, the good life or human rights. My
presence might have influenced the design team but as most of the engineers did
not know exactly what I was looking at it is not likely that they placed more
emphasis on decisions concerning safety and sustainability. I taped whole design
meetings and made notes throughout design meetings and interviews, not only
when safety or sustainability issues were under discussion. If engineers asked
questions about my research results I usually referred to the presentation that I
would give later on.
As little is known about the way engineers deal with ethical issues in daily
engineering design, this was an exploratory research project. Based on ideas
taken from the literature on design processes, and to be presented in chapter 2,
working hypotheses were formulated. These working hypotheses and the
selected cases are introduced in chapter 3. The cases are described in chapters 4
to 7. Conclusions are drawn from the cases and an effort is made to generalise
the results of the case-studies in chapter 8. The results from this research are
used to make a start with defining conditions for warranted trust in designing
engineers, in chapter 9. These conditions lead to a preliminary delineation of the
moral responsibilities that engineers have during a design process.
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