Reflection on “I only work here”
1. Identify the moral values, issues, and dilemmas, if any, involved in the following cases, and explain why you consider them moral values and dilemmas.
a. An engineer notified his firm that for a relatively minor cost a flashlight could be made to last several years longer by using a more reliable bulb. The firm decides that it would be in its interests not to use the new bulb, both to keep costs lower and to have the added advantage of “built-in obsolescence” so that consumers would need to purchase new flashlights more often.
b. A linear electron accelerator for therapeutic use was built as a dual-mode system that could either produce X-rays or electron beams. It had been in successful use for some time, but every now and then some patients received high deaths. One patient on a repeat visit experienced great pain, but the remotely located operator was unaware of any problem because of lack of communication between them: The intercom was broken, and the video monitor had been unplugged. There also was no way for the patient to exit the examination chamber without help from the out- side, and hence the hospital was partly at fault. On cursory examination of the machine, the manufacturer insisted that the computerized and automatic control system could not possibly have malfunctioned and that no one should spread unproven and potentially libelous information about the design. It was the painstaking, day-and-night effort of the hospital’s physicist that finally traced the problem to a soft- ware error introduced by the manufacturer’s efforts to make the machine more user-friendly. 8
2. Regarding the following example, comment on why you think simple human contact made such a large difference. What does it say about what motivated the engineers, both before and after the encounter? Is the case too unique to permit generalizations to other engineering products?
A team of engineers are redesigning an artificial lung marketed by their company. They are working in a highly competitive market, with long hours and high stress. The engineers have little or no contact with the firm’s customers, and they are focused on technical problems, not people. It occurs to the project engineer to invite recipients of artificial lungs and their families to the plant to talk about how their lives were affected by the artificial lung. The change is immediate and striking: “When families began to bring in their children who for the first time could breathe freely, relax, learn, and enjoy life because of the firm’s product, it came as a revelation. The workers were energized by concrete evidence that their efforts really did improve people’s lives, and the morale of the workplace was given a great lift.” 9
3. Should SUV problems at the macro level be of concern to engineers as a group and their professional societies? Should individual automotive engineers, in their daily work, be concerned about the general social and environmental impacts of SUVs?
4. It is not easy to define morality in a simple way, but it does not follow that morality is a hopelessly vague notion. For a long time, philosophers thought that an adequate definition of any idea would specify a set of logically necessary and sufficient conditions for applying the idea. For example, each of the following features is logically necessary for a triangle, and together they are sufficient: a plane figure, having three straight lines, closed to form three angles. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), however, argued that most ordinary (nontechnical) ideas cannot be neatly defined in this way. Instead, there are often only “family resemblances” among the things to which words are applied, analogous to the partly overlapping similarities among members of a family—similar eye color, shape of nose, body build, temperament, and so forth. 10 Thus, a book might be hardback, paperback, or electronic; printed or hand- written; in English or German; and so forth. Can you specify necessary and sufficient conditions for the following ideas: chairs, buildings, energy, safety, engineers, morality?
5. Mention of ethics sometimes evokes groans, rather than engagement, because it brings to mind onerous constraints and unpleasant disagreements. Worse, it evokes images of self-righteousness, hypocrisy, and excessively punitive attitudes of blame and punishment—attitudes that are themselves subject to moral critique. Think of a recent event that led to a public outcry. With regard to the event, discuss the difference between being morally reasonable and being moralistic in a pejorative sense. In doing so, consider such things as breadth of vision, tolerance, sensitivity to context, and commitment.
