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

Ethical issues in engineering design
regulative framework. Company specific norms and standards can therefore only
impose stricter requirements than the regulative framework.
The notion of a regulative framework differs from notions like technological
regime or technological paradigm in that the regulative framework includes only
formal norms, rules and their interpretations that pertain to the design,
certification and construction of a product. Technological regimes are defined by
Rip and Kemp as:
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‘the rule-set or grammar embedded in a complex of engineering
practices, production process technologies, product characteristics, skills
and procedures, ways of handling relevant artefacts and persons, ways of
defining problems- all of them imbedded in institutions and
infrastructures.’ [Rip and Kemp, 1998, 338]
A technological regime defined in this way includes much more than the
regulative framework as it also includes skills and ways of handling artefacts and
persons. Other authors have used other definitions of technological regimes. Van
de Poel for example focuses on defining technological regimes for design
processes. Although Van de Poel restricts his definition of technological regimes
to technical regimes for design processes, he includes more in a technical regime
for the design of a product than is included in a regulative framework, such as
promises and expectations of a product [Van de Poel, 1998 and 2000a].
2.3.2 Normative frameworks
The idea of normal design can be related to Grunwald’s idea that in ‘business-asusual’
technology development there is no need for engineers to reflect ethically
[Grunwald, 2001]. Grunwald suggests that there are situations in which an
engineer should ethically reflect on the development of technology and that there
are situations which he classifies as business-as-usual in which there is no such
need for ethical reflection ([Grunwald, 2000] and [Grunwald, 2001]). Grunwald
indicates that in “business-as-usual” a normative framework exists that governs
all ethically relevant decisions that are made during a design process. He thinks
that a lot, if not most, decisions in technology development are covered by
normative frameworks. According to Grunwald engineers have to apply the rules
from the normative framework without further ethical reflection if this normative
framework meets the following requirements: 8
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8 Grunwald does not explicitly state that engineers have an obligation to use the normative
framework but the requirement “observed” seems to imply this. In an article from 2005,
Grunwald has changed the requirement of observed to ‘compliance: the normative framework
also has to be complied with in the field concerned.’ [Grunwald, 2005, 189].