Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011 - rees2009

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) Página 616 de 957
Focus on Safety and Codes
Samuel Florman (2002) reminds us that “In the nineteenth century, Senator Thomas Hart
Benton, arguing against legislation intended to reduce the risk of steamboat explosions,
proclaimed that the proper way to tell if a boat was safe was to inquire personally as to
whether the machinery was in good working order.” Today, these days of non-regulation
are gone, but the sense of ethics as an imperative not to harm––or in an engineering sense,
to ensure safety––remains. Senator Benton’s trust is replaced by codes of ethics, now
ubiquitous among engineering societies, most of which lead with an imposition of a duty
to “hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public” (NSPE, 2011). Many
works on engineering ethics focus on the engineer’s responsibility to adhere to these
codes, and some focus on this alone, as if engineering ethics has to do with nothing else.
Humphreys (1999) for example, though it contains sections fitting categories below, is
dominated by sections on proper project management, professional development,
licensing and registration laws, the “engineers creed,” disciplinary boundaries, reasonable
safety, appropriate compensation procedures, and the fundamental canons. Flores (1989)
presents a collection of articles looking at engineering ethics as a dimension of technical
risk management. Flores (1982) develops a defense of the Monsanto Co., a producer of
industrial chemical products, as the premier “ethical” company of the time. His evidence?
Monsanto was among the “top six chemical producers in workplace safety” (p. 3). Why is it
that a safety record makes Monsanto an ethical company? Flores does not say. Many books
and articlesfocus on the importance of adherence to the codes of professional societies,
both for legalistic reasons and, so it would seem, though less commonly, for moral reasons
(examples of the latter: Davis, 1991, 2001, 2009, Harris, 2008).
Professional Responsibility
Professional responsibility describes those things engineers become tasked with when
they become engineers. While acting ethically would be included, professional
responsibility is broader, including, for example, the responsibilities that come along with
a job title. These responsibilities are sometimes confused for ethical responsibilities and
unless an author offers the philosophical justification for why a certain responsibility is
ethically important, it is difficult to know whether it truly is, or whether it is a case of a
non-moral responsibility going by the name of engineering ethics.
This confusion of professional responsibility, which appears in the literature, is similar to
thinking of ethics in a legalistic sense. True professional responsibility (in the non-moral
sense) might take the form of carrying out the many tasks or following the many rules or
guidelines set for you by your engineering firm or your professional society, something
which is actually well reflected (in a corporate sense) in Lockheed Martin’s ethics training
game, the Ethics Challenge (1997). Nearly all books surveyed mention the engineer’s
responsibility in one form or another. Harris, Pritchard, and Rabins (2005) have a nice
chapter dedicated to responsibility in engineering in which they consider the nature of
responsibility as well as common impediments engineers might encounter. Davis (1998)
provides a detailed explanation for why engineers are morally responsible for the morally
relevant aspects of their professional work.
Proceedings of Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011
Madrid, 4 th - 7 th October 2011