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

Ethical issues in engineering design
end. Unwise is a qualification that can be interpreted as instrumental;
something is unwise given certain goals. Morally indecent is an ethical
qualification.
In the following I will use a combination of Baier’s and Nooteboom’s notions
and apply it to engineering design practice. The implicit limitations to the power
given to a trustee and moral (in)decency of trust that Baier emphasizes seem to
be important where analysing trust in engineers designing products and
technology. Nooteboom’s inclusion of the context of action and the possibility to
trust organisations are also relevant, when both notions are combined you get
the following: engineers, when making a design, have some discretionary or
limited power and they have a responsibility to take care of things people value.
Engineers make designs in a context of action and within certain constraints;
they are part of a design team and part of an organization. Moreover, the
products they design are subjected to the laws of physics. Expecting an engineer
to design a perpetuum mobile and reconsidering trust in that engineer if he or
she does not do this, does not take into account the context of action by which
the engineer is bound. The power engineers have been given is sometimes
explicitly limited because certain things are not allowed by law. Some decisions
can be deemed too important and far-reaching to be decided by engineers. The
development of very new or controversial technologies like genetically modified
food or animals is questioned by different actors in society. In these instances, a
government has to define some explicit limits, for example whether human
embryonic cells may be cloned to be used in developing biotechnology or not. So
some limits to the development of technology are explicitly stated in legislation.
A tentative analysis of the influence of design type, hierarchy and in
particular the availability of a regulative framework on the trust relationship
between engineers and society will be given in chapter 9. A regulative
framework can be seen as a way to provide engineers with explicit limits within
which they are trusted to do their work. Regulative frameworks can be part of the
limits in which trust in engineers is the default. Besides making limits explicit, a
regulative framework can also be used to help to build and maintain trust, in
particular in what is called institutions-based trust.
Trust can be characteristics-based, institutions-based and process-based
([Nooteboom, 2002, 86] and [Zucker, 1986]). Characteristics-based trust derives
from membership of a community. You can for example trust someone because
you have worked previously with his sister and she behaved in a trustworthy
manner. Institutions-based trust derives from rules, codes of ethics but also
from the professional standards used in that institution. For example, trust in a
company that is going to produce something for you can be based on the fact
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