ENGM 604: Social, Legal and Ethical
Considerations for Engineering
Specifying the Call of Morality:
Engineering Responsibility
Specifying Responsibility
• This is a photo of the
exterior of the Chernobyl
power plant shortly after
the explosion on April
26th, 1986.
• Up to the present day, a
team of scientists and
engineers work a the
facility to try to contain
the massive amount of
radioactive material that
remains entombed at the
site.
• See Case #3 p. 302.
Specifying Responsibility
•
•
Why would people
voluntarily expose
themselves to such risk?
Perhaps because the
explosion was caused by a
mismanaged electricalengineering experiment.
•
•
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/show
s/reaction/readings/chernobyl.html
Why might other engineers
feel responsible for the poor
judgment of one of their
colleagues?
Different Senses of Responsibility
• In order to understand where responsibility
lies in situations like the Chernobyl
incident, we need to be able to make some
distinctions in the concept.
• There are at least three different senses that
would be helpful to distinguish:
• Obligation-Responsibility
• Blame-Responsibility
• Leadership-Responsibility
Filling in the Details
• Obligation-Responsibility is a way of talking about the
responsibilities established by assuming professional roles.
It is essentially a responsibility to do what is morally
required of us as professionals.
• Blame-Responsibility refers to the capacity to attribute
wrongdoing to a person, process or group, or institution.
We can talk of being “held responsible.”
• Leadership-Responsibility highlights the combination of
obligation- and blame- responsibility we have when we are
supervising the activities of others. Here it is a matter of
“taking responsibility.”
Obligation-Responsibility and
Reasonable Care
• For engineers, obligation responsibility is often
articulated through the ethical concept of
“Reasonable Care.”
• Typically, reasonable care is understood as
exercising due diligence in conforming to the
standards and practices of your workplace and
profession.
• The problem is that due diligence is not always
sufficient to avoid serious problems and/or
failures.
From Reasonable Care to Due Care
• In many situations, reasonable care does not seem
sufficient.
• Consider Case #31 on p. 324.
• A more robust standard of care would require
extending reasonable care beyond the confines of
consideration of established standards and
practices to include an affirmative consideration of
the impact of actions on potentially effected
parties: so-called “Due Care.”
• See Kenneth Alpern’s definition on p. 23.
Principle of Proportionate Care
• From his definition of due care, Alpern
derives what he calls a Principle of
Proportionate Care (p. 23).
• There are a couple of things to recognize
about this principle:
• Principle of proportionality is amount of
“harm.”
• Principle is not just negative or reactive, but
requires a positive, forward looking approach.
Obligation-Responsibility and the
Law
• Independent of questions of blame-responsibility,
individuals and companies are often held responsible for
events that they had an obligation to avoid.
• The legal remedy for this failure is typically addressed
through Tort Law.
• The standard applied by Tort Law shares much with the
standard of Due Care discussed previously (see p. 25).
• Though we may criticize certain awards under this
standard, it is clearly our responsibility as managers to be
aware of such liability and to avoid it. It is also clear that
the standard is well supported by our common as well as
specific role moralities.
Beyond the Limits of
Responsibility? Good Works
• So what does our analysis of obligationresponsibility tell us about the Chernobyl case?
• Sometimes people do things that seem that go
beyond their basic duties.
• To do so is to act in a commendatory fashion, or to
do what are commonly called “Good Works.”
• Typically, we don’t think that people have an
obligation to act in a commendatory fashion.
• Codes of Ethics embody this by focusing on basic
duties.
Fitting Good Works into
Engineering
• The focus of codes on basic duties raises questions about
the status of good works.
• We should note that not only are they relatively common,
but that in many situations they are highly desirable.
• Prevent serious harms not anticipated by basic duties; make up for
failures of others.
• But they are not always desirable, particularly in
organizations/businesses which may view them as
distractions to their goals.
• Nonetheless, an adequate account of ethics in engineering
seems to require taking them into account.
Engineers and Virtue
• One way to fit an account of the commendatory in
is through a consideration of the moral virtues
appropriate to engineers.
• A virtue, in this sense, is a disposition to act in a
certain way, a habit of character.
• Honesty, reliability, benevolence, civic-mindedness.
• While the virtues that an engineer should exhibit
may not be different from the virtues of anyone
else, that they should exhibit them seems to flow
directly from a consideration of their
responsibilities to human welfare.
Who’s to Blame?
• When we turn to blame-responsibility, the
issues that are most difficult are connected
to the problem of correctly specifying the
cause of an action.
• When we are identifying causes in this
context, it is not physical causes that are
most important, but agency.
• That raises important questions about who
counts as an agent.
Questions of Agency
• We have a strong moral intuition that agency
requires features that limit agency to people.
• At minimum these features are freedom and
knowledge.
• This analysis, however, leaves out an important
causal feature which doesn’t seem reducible to the
system of physical causation: institutional or
organizational causes.
• Think about both the Challenger and Columbia
disasters.
Organizations as Agents
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Philosopher named Peter French has an account
of agency that would seem to encompass
organizations in the way that seems appropriate
For French, agents are:
1.
2.
3.

Possessed of decision making mechanisms.
Possessed of decision guiding policies.
Possessed of interests in terms of which they make
decisions.
If this analysis holds,then it seems appropriate to
speak of organizational agents.
Responsibility and Accountability
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There are different levels of responsibility,
and distinguishing them is aided by
consideration of the relevant legal
standards or accountability.
Three levels:
1. Intentionally causing harm
2. Recklessly causing harm
3. Negligently causing harm
See 4 conditions for negligence on p. 34.
An Obstacle to Accountability
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•
One way which individuals in organizations try
to dodge responsibility is by invoking the
“problem of many hands.”
Though common, this dodge doesn’t typically
stand up to scrutiny:
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Larry May, “[I]f a harm has resulted from collective inaction,
the degree of individual responsibility of each member…[of
the collective] should vary based on the role each member
could…have played in preventing the inaction” (p. 35).
Two coordinate principles:
1. Principle of responsibility for inaction in groups
2. Principle of responsibility for action in groups
Challenges Responsible Agents
Overcome
•
When we are faced with choices for which we
have obligation- and perhaps blameresponsibility, our leadership-responsibility
sometimes requires us to overcome a range of
impediments
•
These include:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
Self-Interest
Fear
Self-Deception
Ignorance
Egocentrism
Narrowness of Vision
Uncritical Acceptance of Authority
Groupthink