Transcript Day 1 - FacStaff Home Page for CBU

ENGM 604: Social, Legal and Ethical
Considerations for Engineering
Ethics and Professionals
The Challenger Disaster
• A Crucial Decision
• The Challenge: “Take
off your engineering
hat and put on your
management hat.”
• A Conflict of Roles
• Consequences
The ‘Red Adair of disaster relief’
• Frederick Cuny and
Intertect Relief and
Reconstruction Corp.
• Model or Anomaly?
• Implications for
engineering managers?
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The Pull of Morality
• How should we understand the claims that
morality has on us?
• Force?
• Scope?
• What is it about us that makes us
susceptible to these claims?
Engineers and Morality
• A more specific answer to the question of
susceptibility is available for engineers:
engineers are Professionals.
• Why would the professional status of
engineers make them subject to moral
concerns?
• Answer might be found in the definition of
profession (EE, p. 9).
The Professions: A Taxonomy
• The definition of profession gets us started, but it
obscures as much as it helps.
• A more detailed account of the characteristics
which distinguish the professions from other sorts
of occupations is needed.
• Training with a significant intellectual component.
• Professional activities are centrally concerned with the
well-being of society.
• Monopoly over the professional activities.
• High degree of work-place autonomy.
Grounds for Obligation?
• What does this list add up to?
• Taken individually and as a whole, the
characteristics of a profession provide a
basis for arguing that professionals have
significant moral responsibilities.
• Historically, professions have recognized
this and formulated these responsibilities in
Codes of Ethics.
What’s Different?
• Are professionals really that different from
other people?
• While they certainly have obligations
specific to their professional activities, this
specificity is in principle no different than
the many specific obligations that we all
have.
• Parents, Managers, Classmates
A Taxonomy of Morality
• Understanding the specificity of obligation
requires us to make some distinctions in the field
of morality.
• A common schema divides the field into regions
of increasing generality.
• Personal Morality: the set of moral commitments
specific to each individual.
• Role Morality: the set of moral commitments specific to
socially defined roles individuals inhabit.
• Common Morality: the set of moral commitments
exhibited by a culture or society.
Professional Obligations and Role
Morality
• According to this schema, professional
obligations would belong to the region of
role morality.
• They would thus be no different in kind
from the variety of responsibilities we all
have as role players.
• They would be different, however, due to
the specialized nature of the role.
Special Obligations of Professionals
• Most of our work in this module will focus on the
obligations specific to your roles as engineers and
business people.
• Before looking at these specifics, however, we can
point to a feature common to the majority of
professions.
• Generally, professional obligations are articulated
in codes.
• The text collects some samples starting on p. 365.
Codes of Ethics: Functions
• Professional Codes have a number of
functions.
• They make explicit the shared standards of the
practitioners of the profession.
• This is a benefit to the practitioners in that it
clarifies what is expected of them and what they can
expect of each other.
• It also benefits the public, providing the basis for
reasonable expectations of professional behavior
and competence.
Codes of Ethics: Functions
• Professional Codes have a number of
functions.
• They serve as a touchstone for the evolving
discussion of the content of professional
responsibility
• They perform an important protective function
by giving professionals cover under which they
can make unpopular or potentially
insubordinate decisions.
Types of Codes
• Professional codes of ethics come in all
shapes and sizes.
• Sometimes they are unwritten, part of the “common
understanding” of the profession; sometimes they are vaguely or
imprecisely written; sometimes they are written in very specific
detail.
• Sometimes they enunciate purely moral principles; frequently they
are a mixture of principles, rules of etiquette, and economic
considerations (rules against competition, etc.).
• Sometimes they make explicit reference to broader ethical
perspectives and practices (usually for purposes of justification);
sometimes they don’t.
Limitations of Codes
• Despite their undeniable benefits, codes
have significant limitations.
• Codes have force only for the membership of
the establishing association.
• Codes are insufficiently action guiding.
• Not an algorithm.
• Require significant casuistry.
• Coverage is incomplete.
An Ounce of Prevention
• The limitations of codes of ethics as action
guiding principles emphasizes the
importance of considering broader moral
contexts and personal judgment.
• In ethics, as in engineering, anticipation, in
the form of sustained reflection on the
nature and substance of our professional
responsibilities, is much more effective than
reaction at forestalling problems.