Engineering Ethics

Lecture by
Md. Raihan Goni
Ethics and morality
• In this course we define ethics as the systematic reflection on
morality. Morality is defined here as the totality of opinions,
decisions, and actions with which people express what they think is
good or right. This roughly agrees with the often-used definition of
morality as the totality of norms and values that actually exist in
society. Systematic reflection on morality increases our ability to
cope with moral problems, and thus moral problems that are related
to technology as well. Ethics, however, is not a manual with answers;
it reflects on questions and arguments concerning the moral choices
people can make. Ethics is a process of searching for the right kind of
morality.
• The study of ethics can be both of a descriptive or normative nature.
Descriptive ethics is involved with the description of the existing morality,
including the description of customs and habits, opinions about good and
evil, responsible and irresponsible behavior, and acceptable and
unacceptable action. It studies the morality found in certain subcultures or
during certain periods of history. Normative ethics takes matters a step
further. Descriptive ethics can discuss the morality of Indians or monthly
magazines for men without passing judgment. By definition normative
ethics is not value-free; it judges morality. It considers the following main
question: do the norms and values actually used conform to our ideas about
how people should behave? Normative ethics does not give an unambiguous
answer to this question, but in its moral judgment various arguments are
given based on various ethical theories. These ethical theories provide
viewpoints from which we can critically discuss moral issues.
• One central question in normative ethics is 'what is a right opinion, decision or
action?' To answer this question a judgment has to be made about the opinion,
decision or action in question. This is a normative judgment, because it says
something about what 'correct behavior' or a 'right way of living' is. Normative
judgments are value judgments but not descriptive judgments. Descriptive
judgments are related to what is actually the case (the present), what was the
case (the past), or what will be the case (the future). Descriptive judgments are
true or false. The assertion 'the Challenger met all safety standards of the time' is
a descriptive judgment: the assertion is true or false. A normative judgment is a
value judgment. Value judgments indicate whether something is good or bad,
desirable or undesirable; they often refer to how the world should be instead of
how it is. Such kinds of value judgments often refer to moral norms and values.
This can give rise to meaningful discussions, which is not the case for judgments of
taste, such as 'I do not like Brussels sprouts'. Examples of moral judgments are 'the
Challenger should never have been launched', 'Engineers should faithfully provide
measurements', and 'stealing is bad'.
• Norms, values, and virtues are the points of departure for the three
primary ethical theories - which provide viewpoints from which we
can critically discuss moral issues. We shall briefly discuss them.
Values
• Values help us determine which goals or states of affairs are worth striving for.
Moral values are related to a good life and a just society. They have to be
distinguished from the preferences or interests of individual people. Preferences
or interests are matters people feel they should strive for, for themselves. Moral
values are long-lasting opinions or matters that people feel should be strived for
in general and not just for themselves to be able to lead a good life or to realize
a just society.
• A distinction can be made between intrinsic and instrumental values. An
intrinsic value is an objective in and of itself. An instrumental value is a means
to realizing an intrinsic value. The value of money for Scrooge McDuck is
intrinsic. He values money independently of what you can do with money. For
Mother Theresa, however, money was an instrumental value to realize a higher
end: helping the poor. A person can consider his work to be both of intrinsic and
instrumental value.
Norms
• Norms are rules that prescribe what concrete actions are required,
permitted or forbidden. These are rules and agreements about how
people are supposed to treat each other. Values are often translated
into rules, so that it is clear in everyday life how we should act to
achieve certain values.
• Moral norms are indications for responsible action. Next to moral
norms there are other kinds of norms, such as legal norms (such as
traffic rules), precepts of decorum (for example ‘you should not talk
when your mouth is full’), and rules of play (for example in Ludo you
can only place a counter on the playing board once you have thrown a
six with the dice). Some moral norms, like ‘thou shalt not kill’ and
‘thou shalt not steal’, have been turned into laws.
• The difference between values and norms can be described as
follows. Values are abstract or global ideas or objectives that are
strived for through certain types of behavior; it is what people
eventually wish to achieve. Norms, however, are the means to realize
values. They are concrete, specific rules that limit action. Without an
interpretation, the objective cannot be achieved. Take for example
the need for traffic regulations to guarantee traffic safety. In
addition, norms have no meaning or are ineffective if the underlying
value is unclear or is lacking. So one can imagine that the norm 'all
bicycle bells must be blue' will be largely ignored. The norm has no
meaning – there is no underlying value. These differences are
summarized in the following table:
Virtues
• Next to values and norms we have another moral point of departure:
virtues. Virtues are human characteristics or qualities that has the
following five features:
• 1. They are desired characteristics and they express a value that is
worth striving for;
• 2. They are expressed in action;
• 3. They are lasting and permanent – they form a lasting structural
foundation for action;
• 4. They are always present, but are only used when necessary;
• 5. They can be influenced by the individual.
• The last statement suggests that people can learn virtues. It is a
matter of the shaping of a person’s character or personality. This
occurs during our childhood or our learning process within an
organization. Examples of virtues are justice, honesty, courage,
loyalty, creativity, and humor.
Utilitarianism
• In consequentialism, the consequences of actions are central to the moral
judgment of those actions. An action in itself is not right or wrong; it is
only the consequence of action that is morally relevant. We shall limit
ourselves to one type of consequentialism: utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is
characterized by the fact that it measures the consequences of actions
against one value: human pleasure, happiness or welfare.
• The only moral criterion for good and bad lies in the utility principle: the
greatest happiness of the greatest number (of the members of the
community). This principle is the only and sufficient ground for any action –
both for individuals and collectives (e.g. companies or government). It
gives us a reason to act morally. Moral terms like ‘proper’, ‘responsible’,
and ‘correct’ only are meaningful if they are used for actions that are in
agreement with the utility principle.
• The greatest happiness can be determined quantitatively according to the
founder of utilitarianism Jeremy Bentham. He believed that we can
calculate the expected pleasure or pain and can even indicate quite
accurately how much will be produced by a given action. Here, pleasure
and pain are given in terms of a measurable result, which can be made
suitable for calculation. So, utilitarianism requires drawing up a moral
balance sheet or a cost-benefit analysis to determine what the action with
the best consequences is. The costs and benefits for each possible action
must be weighed against each other. The action with the best result
(providing the most utility) is the one to be preferred. According to
Bentham, money can even be used to express quantities of pleasure or
pain, because these experiences can (almost) always be bought and sold.
The idea behind the calculation above is quite simple: an action is morally
right if it results in pleasure, and it is morally wrong is it gives rise to pain.
• To find out which action leads to the most happiness for the greatest
number of people, we need to count the pleasure and pain of all
individuals. This is no simple matter, because pleasure cannot be
measured objectively. First, the pleasure of different people cannot
be compared; pleasure is a rather subjective term. A person can
enjoy a composition by Mozart, while someone else experiences this
quite differently. Second, it is not easy to compare actions: is reading
a good book worth more than eating an ice cream? While applying this
hedonistic calculus this will often lead to problems, because it is not
clear how much pleasure a given experience produces for each
person. How much pleasure do social contacts, our health, or our
privacy give us? Since this is not clear, making moral judgments about
human actions becomes hard.
• One of the main criticisms is that that the position of individuals cannot
always be protected if the calculation indicates that the pleasure of the
majority outweighs the unhappiness of a few individuals. This could result in
the exploitation and abuse of minorities, because classic utilitarianism does
not say anything about the division of pleasure and pain among people. To
deal with this problem, John Stuart Mill (1859) has formulated the freedom
principle: "everyone is free to strive for his/her own pleasure, as long as
they do not deny or hinder the pleasure of others". Mill illustrates this
principle using the example of drunkenness. The right to interfere with
someone who is drunk only arises when the person who is drunk starts to do
harm to others. The freedom principle is also known as the no-harm
principle: "one is free to do what one wishes, but only to the extent that no
harm is done to others". However, the principle can hardly ever be applied
in full, since any moral problem involves possible harm to others, or at least
the risk of harm.
• Next to this there is the problem of distributive justice. Distributive
justice refers to the value of having a just distribution of certain
important goods, like income, happiness, and career. Utilitarianism
can lead to an unjust division of costs and benefits, even under Mill’s
freedom principle. It is a tricky question because numerous issues in
technology are concerned with this problem, such as how the risks
and benefits of technology should be justly distributed.
• Finally, certain actions are morally acceptable even though they do not
create pleasure and some actions that maximize pleasure are morally
unacceptable. In the next reading we will see that Kant always considers
lying to be morally wrong, even if it results in more or maximal pleasure in
certain situations. According to utilitarianism, even the most fundamental
rules, such as the human rights formulated in the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights (1948), can be broken if the positive consequences are
greater than the negative ones: ‘the end justifies the means. On utilitarian
grounds, an engineer could be asked to bend a fundamental rule of
professional conduct because of the positive consequence it would have.
• For example, that an engineer is asked to falsify the measurements he gave
in a report by the party commissioning the work, because the correct
measurement results would have major negative consequences, such as the
payment of damages or bankruptcy.
• According to the traditional utilitarian view, this behavior would be justified
in a certain situation. This traditional view is known as act utilitarianism
(Bentham's utilitarianism) because it judges the consequences of individual
acts. A solution to this problem is proposed by one variant of utilitarianism:
rule utilitarianism. Rule utilitarianism recognizes the existence of moral
rules, if only because life would be very complicated without them. For
each situation we would have to judge whether it was morally correct or
not, because each situation is slightly different from another. Rule
utilitarianism looks at the consequences of rules (in contrast with actions)
to increase happiness. Though the falsifying of measurements may increase
societal utility in a specific situation, a rule utilitarian will not allow it
because the rule ‘measurement data should be presented correctly’
generally promotes happiness within society. If such a rule withstands the
test of promoting happiness then it turned into a moral rule.