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Engineering, Ethics and the New Millennium

The history of technology can be read as a chronicle of devices and schemes to regain the Garden of Eden. Some people, those now enjoying both the fruits of technology and the power to shape it, may even believe they have achieved that paradise already. Yet our time, the most bountiful ever, may also be the time of hunger, violence, desperation, and disappointment for more people than ever before. What has gone wrong? What can engineers do to help set it right?

The last 150 years have given us increasingly powerful technologies: mass production and automation; coal, oil, and nuclear energy; agricultural and human genetic engineering; instant world-wide communication; antibiotic medicines and convenient contraception; personal automobiles and the trucking industry. While these have done great good, they have also caused great harm. The harm is no longer evident just in the speculative foreboding of a few scientists, engineers, philosophers, and social commentators. The harm has become the daily experience of technology's users and those who bear technology's side-effects. Consider the automobile:

The first-time buyer will enjoy new convenience, comfort, and privacy. An auto may even provide a youngster in the family with the confidence- and responsibility- building pastime of maintaining the auto. That auto will, however, also contribute to: traffic congestion; increased chance of injury and death by accident; health-debilitating and planet-warming pollution from engine exhaust; toxic oil and gasoline leaks; micro-particles from the wearing of radial tires; the loss of valuable land to roads, parking lots, and driveways; community development that makes all of us dependent on the auto, limiting public transit and walking options; and the sacrifices necessary to project military power into the Middle East to main tain control over vital sources of petroleum. There is also the temptation to increase highway speed in order to travel faster and increase profits. Even though lowering the speed limit in the 1970s reduced driving-related deaths and injuries, Congress recently voted to increase the speed limit. How many deaths and injuries will occur because of the higher speed limit? Are they worth it?

What can we as engineers do about the harmful effects of technology? How does engineering ethics help us address these issues? Twenty years ago, the literature on engineering ethics was focused on employer- employee and consultant-client relationships: conflict-of-interest, safety and health, whistleblowing, how to minimize exposure to liability, and so on. Since then there has been a growing awareness among engineers of the pervasive role, both positive and negative, that technology now has, a growing awareness of how much individual engineering decisions affect the material status, health, and character of many people.

The profession of engineering may also be changing. Early in the nineteenth century, when the United States began building railroads, colleges began offering an engineering education. The engineers they graduated were equipped with a good understanding of how to develop and manage the new and increasingly complex technologies that became sources of economic power in the industrial age. These engineers were essential to channeling the inventive genius of people like Edison, Westinghouse, Ford, and Bell into the commercially successful products that have become the hallmarks of our time. Their education emphasized solving problems identified by their employer.

In recent years, however, more engineers are working in smaller businesses, as consultants, and even as individual contractors. Engineers today are making more direct contacts with clients and customers. We see engineers becoming more entrepreneurial, more aware of the trends that affect the relevance of their services and products, and better able to identify new opportunities and to avoid newly discovered bad side- effects. Engineers employed in larger companies are likely to switch positions and companies more frequently than in previous generations. They have to be nimbler, to think strategically and act adventurously, not only to keep abreast of the increasingly frequent changes in their industry but to help shape those changes.

So how can engineers today work to make the next century better? Here are some guidelines: 1. Choose to develop products and services that are good for people as well as profitable for your business. Not only should a good product or service not harm anyone, it should be designed to foster useful and healthy activity. A good product or service should create jobs with sufficient income, help people be more responsible and caring, provide opportunities for learning and developing new interests, and enhance (or at least maintain) the quality of the environment.

2. Try to work on technologies that are sustainable, equitable, and local. Technologies should replenish and refresh, not deplete and pollute. They should promote equitable shar ing and access, not concentrate wealth and power. They should make people less dependent on resources from distant countries. Engineers should try to avoid working on products which, though shown to be less than desirable for American consumers, are exported to foreign markets less able to control quality.

3. Don't restrict yourself to solving problems defined by others: train yourself to define new problems worth solving. Cultivate an understanding of how your particular specialty in engineering relates to key social issues. Understand how your product or service affects people, their organization, and their physical environment. Not only work to define a problem that should be solved, also work to present your solution in a manner your boss or client can appreciate. If you can organize the people, skills, and resources to tackle the problem, you may have created new work for yourself and others. Cultivate the perspective of a socially responsible professional, not a hired gun. Be a team player who, when necessary, can also be a maverick working for a higher good.

4. Try to devote some of your time to those who, while needing your professional skills, can least afford them. Identify worthwhile clients, such as inner-city community organizations or social-service agencies, that need your engineering. Sometimes such public service is not possible until late in one's career (when one's reputation is made, children are grown, and savings are enough for retirement). Generally, however, engineering pays well enough to allow an engineer to engage in some public service much earlier. In any case, try not to wait until retirement.

5. Work for people who are not only technically good but good people. Organizations are made up of people—they are not a higher level of being: choose an organization by the people who are in it, not by its reputation. Especially important is finding a good mentor. A good mentor is someone who will look out for you rather than compete with you, who will help you see how to do better engineering. Look for a good mentor.

6. Learn to attach the right level of value to your product or service. Cultivate the habit of learning from each of your clients their mission and their understanding of your role in it. Take the time to inform your clients how best to use your knowledge, skill, and judgment to fulfill their responsibilities—technical, legal, and moral. Avoid overstating or understating the significance of what you do or how you do it. Examine the advertising your company uses to sell your service or product. Is it truthful, or does it prey on the buyer s unrealistic yearning? Does it say too little? Advertising should reveal just how good a service or product is, no more and no less.

7. Learn when and how to say "no" to a client or job assignment. Learn to place a high value on your own time and the time of the people you work with. Periodically check to see that you have your priorities right. Avoid working for clients of dubious integrity or on a product or service of dubious value. Don't let your professional work consume all your waking hours. Don t fall for the rationalization "if we do not take this job someone else will". When you say "no", explain your reasons to your client or employer—and perhaps even to your competitors

8. Cultivate an attitude of service. Whether you are in manufacturing, selling tons of metal each day, or producing paper studies, you are providing a service to people. If you try to work for the good of your customer, company, employees, and—ultimately—society, you will learn the humility necessary to discern what is right and to express it without appearing self-righteous or arrogant.

9. Avoid false gods, especially the single-minded pursuit of money or power. Do a good job, all things considered, not just what is expedient, most profitable, or what you can get away with. Search for challenges that help you find what you believe in, what really matters to you. Ask yourself what projects are worth risking your job, your wealth, your health and safety, the well-being of your loved ones. Search for God in your work: don't make your work into a god.

Author			John Katrakis J. T. Katrakis & Associates


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Source			Oil Survey

Author			BRONWYN BARNETT


Publication Date			January 16, 2003


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Issue/Topic			Energy ( Oil )


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Source			Stanford Report