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

Ethical issues in engineering design
the design team felt the engineer was responsible for designing a car that
protected passengers and driver in the event of a crash.
These different reasons can lead to differences of opinions when it comes to
deciding whether to include passive safety systems in a car design. If the reason
to include passive safety systems is an economic one, a cost-benefit analysis can
be used to determine whether a system must be included. This requires,
however that monetary value is placed on the lost lives of car crash victims and
assigned for the types of injuries likely to be caused in a car crash. These
monetary values are always arbitrary to some extent, the costs of hospitalisation
can be estimated but the price for suffering is much more difficult to estimate. If
you think that an engineer is responsible for designing a car that protects the
people inside the car, the use of cost-benefit analysis can be problematic. There
was one discussion during a project meeting in which an assistant professor
specialising in reliability did not agree with the use of cost-benefit analyses
regarding safety issues. It was not right to put money on a person’s life in his
opinion. He thought it was not possible to decide about including passive safety
systems based on a comparison of the costs of these safety systems and the costs
of the human lives that would be saved.
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Associate professor: ‘But how many millions is it worth to save one
person? You can’t express the life of one human being in terms of the
costs of a change.’
Thomas : ‘In principle I agree but that’s how it works.’
Dave: ‘In aerospace we calculate it that way.’
With this the discussion ended and was never started again. The arguments put
forward by Thomas and Dave seem to imply a naturalistic fallacy: it is usually
done this way therefore it should be done this way. In other presentations where
‘the costs of unsustainabilities , i.e. deaths, injuries, lost labour hours, oil spills,
of car accidents’ were presented no one objected to putting a monetary value on
a human life and comparing this with the costs of removing oil from the road. 6
The fact that the project team was designing a very light car decreases
passive safety as the lighter car will always have the highest acceleration in a
crash with a heavier car. This is a law of nature and cannot be prevented. It is
however possible to change the design of cars in such a way that crashes cause
less damage to the drivers and passengers in cars. One way to prevent injuries is
to use airbags. Another way is called crash compatibility. A heavy car crashing
into a smaller lighter car already has the advantage of the lower acceleration.
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6 Note that in this presentation deaths are regarded as part of the “unsustainabilities” of traffic.
This use of the term unsustainabilities including deaths and injured people was observed
sometimes in presentations.