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

2.2.2 Design problems
Engineering ethics and design processes
If design problems are problems in which the requirements alone determine the
solution then engineers can say that they are not responsible for ethical issues
because the requirements determine everything and the customers define the
requirements. Some authors maintain that engineers are not, and should not be,
involved in the formulation of design requirements, criteria or goals [Florman,
1983]. According to Florman, the formulation of requirements and goals is
ethically relevant, but this should not be done by engineers. Managers,
politicians, customers etc should formulate the requirements. In this line of
thinking, the task of engineers is to discover what is technologically the best
solution given certain requirements. This task is seen as ethically neutral. Ethical
questions may arise in the user phase when technologies are used for certain
purposes and produce certain (social) effects. According to Florman these ethical
questions concerning use are also outside the scope of the engineers and should
be solved by the user (see figure 2.1). In this model, the sole responsibility of
engineers is to carry out a task formulated by others in a competent way.
Figure 2.1: Division of labour with respect to engineering design if design
problems were well-structured problems in which the requirements fully
determine the solution, after [Van Gorp and Van de Poel, 2001].
Design problems are, however, usually not problems where a clear set of
requirements is available that completely determines the solution. Design
problems are more or less ill-structured problems ([Simon, 1973] and [Cross,
1989]). Simon states that in the ill-structured problem of designing a house:
‘There is initially no definite criterion to test a proposed solution, much
less a mechanizeable process to apply the criterion. The problem space is
not defined in any meaningful way,’ [Simon, 1973, 311]
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