MEETING REPORT

Engineering Ethics: Looking Back, Looking Forward

Richard A. Burgess • Michael Davis •

Marilyn A. Dyrud • Joseph R. Herkert •

Rachelle D. Hollander • Lisa Newton •

Michael S. Pritchard • P. Aarne Vesilind

Received: 22 May 2012 / Accepted: 11 June 2012 / Published online: 5 July 2012

� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012

Abstract The eight pieces constituting this Meeting Report are summaries of

presentations made during a panel session at the 2011 Association for Practical and

Professional Ethics (APPE) annual meeting held between March 3rd and 6th in

Cincinnati. Lisa Newton organized the session and served as chair. The panel of

eight consisted both of pioneers in the field and more recent arrivals. It covered a

range of topics from how the field has developed to where it should be going, from

Michael Davis is this commentary’s coordinating and corresponding author.

R. A. Burgess

National Institute for Engineering Ethics, Lubbock, TX, USA

M. Davis (&)

Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL, USA

e-mail: davism@iit.edu

M. A. Dyrud

Oregon Institute of Technology, Klamath Falls, OR, USA

J. R. Herkert

Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ, USA

R. D. Hollander

National Academy of Engineering, Washington, DC, USA

L. Newton

Fairfield University, Fairfield, CT 06824, USA

M. S. Pritchard

Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, USA

P. A. Vesilind

Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA, USA

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Sci Eng Ethics (2013) 19:1395–1404

DOI 10.1007/s11948-012-9374-7

identification of issues needing further study to problems of training the next

generation of engineers and engineering-ethics scholars.

Keywords Education � Ethics � Engineering � Future � Risk � Redundancy �Training

Introduction

Lisa Newton, Fairfield University

This Meeting Report began as conference panel I organized for the 2011 annual

meeting of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE).

‘‘Engineering Ethics’’ has been around, as a field, for about three decades. With

the help of Brian Schrag, APPE Executive Secretary, I picked the pioneers: Michael

Davis and Michael Pritchard, working with Rachelle Hollander and Vivian Weil,

brought out the first materials in the field, which had become an area of serious

concern after some high-profile accidents traceable to the neglect of basic ethical

principles. To these pioneers, I added some newer voices: Richard Burgess, Marilyn

Dyrud, Joseph Herkert, and Aarne Vesilind.

We asked them all to reflect on where the field was coming from, where it was

going, and what we ought to be doing now. We may divide their answers to the

questions posed into three categories: (1) developing and standardizing the field

itself; (2) developing the curricula, connections, colleagues and institutions we need

to bring up the field’s next generation of scholars; and (3) keeping up with the

developments in technology.

1. As Rachelle Hollander points out, the field began with the personal connections

among scholars at some distance from each other exploring the same topics,

scholars that she was able to bring together from her post at the NSF. We must

extend those connections to include all who will deal with today’s (and

tomorrow’s) major questions of technical policy.

2. Meanwhile, we should solidify positions in the standard settings for the

teaching of philosophy and traditional (academic) ethics. One pressing need is

to educate the next generation of scholars in engineering ethics. They must be

schooled in the workings of the business system and the historical commitments

of the engineer; they should be able to distinguish their engineering

commitments from their management commitments and to know when the

demands of public safety override the demands of economics. Since engineers

are often required to participate in matters of policy, significant research in the

ethics of technology will have to accompany this preparation.

3. As Joe Herkert argues, developments in technology outpace every predictor,

leaving us (humanity) with an inestimable universe of problems that (in the

nature of future technology) we simply cannot conceptualize, let alone arrange

to deal with. One collateral field of problems of vital moment to the health of

humanity, is the expansion of waste dumps, the leftovers of rapidly changing

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(and obsolescing) technologies. As Marilyn Dyrud points out, this mass of

unyielding matter, most from the USA, apparently has no future use except to

provide tiny amounts of precious minerals for sale on the open market—after

poisoning the workers who extract them and the air, land, and water in the area

where they are extracted. This is an engineering problem: as early as the 1990s,

Natural Capitalism, the pioneering work by Lovins, Lovins and Hawken,

described a manufacturing sector whose products would be totally reusable and

recyclable. Much of Europe, and other homes of enlightenment, have carried

out their recommendations. Where is the United States in all of this?

Connections

Rachelle D. Hollander, National Academy of Engineering

Intellectual and personal connections are important to develop a field; so is funding.

The program Ethics and Values Studies at the National Science Foundation

supported the beginnings of the field of engineering ethics in the 1980s. The issue of

risk provided an intellectual construct that engaged many scientists, engineers and

scholars as well as non-scholarly individuals and groups. How to define,

characterize, understand risk became and remains central to controversies involving

science, engineering, and technology. This intellectual focus exemplifies how

questions of engineering ethics require trans-disciplinary attention.

Connections create research communities. In the 1980s Michael Pritchard of

Western Michigan University talked to Michael Rabins and Ed Harris at Texas

A&M University because they were working on some of the same problems. The

collaboration has lasted more than 20 years; their textbook Engineering Ethics:

Concepts and Cases is in its fourth edition. A next generation of faculty including

both philosophers and engineers now teaches engineering ethics at TAMU; stand-

alone courses and infusion of ethics across the engineering curriculum are more and

more common; ABET requires engineering colleges to address ethics in accred-

itation; the NSF program ‘‘Ethics Education in Science and Engineering’’ has been

supporting engineering ethics education since 2004.

There is clearly progress (with a small ‘‘p’’). The discussion of the ethical

parameters that are critical to professional ethics–of character and judgment, and of

organizational constraints and opportunities—is increasingly sophisticated. Two

current projects at the Center for Engineering, Ethics, and Society (CEES) at the

National Academy of Engineering (NAE), supported by the National Science

Foundation, demonstrate this.

‘‘Energy Ethics in Science and Engineering Education,’’ a collaborative project

of CEES with Arizona State University (ASU), examines individual and collective

responsibilities for improving energy supply, distribution, and use in the U.S., using

a model that examines technological and sociological plausibility as well as ethical

desirability of energy options. It tests materials and approaches in graduate

programs at ASU. In 2013, a National Institute on Energy, Ethics, and Society

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(NIEES) will engage fifteen graduate students from energy research programs

around the nation in a week-long program, to prepare them for leadership in energy

ethics and energy ethics education; and a public workshop at the NAE will work

with energy science and policy audiences on expanding energy ethics education.

In the second award for a Phase I Climate Change Education Partnership

(CCEP), the NAE is working with ASU, the Museum of Science-Boston, the

University of Virginia-Charlottesville, and the Colorado School of Mines to develop

a national network to address the challenges of climate change and engineered

systems in society. The goal is to enhance education on these issues, including

issues of governance, sustainability, justice, and trust and public engagement. The

audience: educators, students, engineers, policymakers and leaders from public and

private sector organizations. The network will develop programs for engineering

education in colleges, K-12 education, and informal education in science centers

and citizens forums.

These projects draw from prior years’ efforts to develop connections. I hope they

add to them. To find out more, contact rhollander@nae.edu.

Risk

Michael S. Pritchard, Western Michigan University

As I reflect on the challenges posed by such recent ‘‘big news/bad news’’ events as

the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, I am struck by the apparent lack of

preparedness to respond effectively to them. These events differ in important ways

from most of the ‘‘big news/bad news’’ stories that are staple fare in engineering

ethics classes. The Pinto could be recalled and a buffer inserted between the gas

tank and the protruding bolt that threatened to cause an explosion if it penetrated the

tank. The structure of the Hyatt Regency walkway could be easily remedied, and it

was presumably one-of-a-kind, a serious departure from standard construction

practice. And so on. While such improvements could hardly be expected to remove

all risk of failure, they could render them acceptable.

But what is our understanding of ‘acceptable risk’? This, it seems to me, is a very

problematic matter when we consider engineering projects that expose the public to

risks that, when something very bad happens there is no adequate ‘‘game plan’’ for

effectively managing the damage and recovering from its blows.

For example, in calculating risks in deep water oil drilling, one obvious risk is

that the joints of the pipes will not hold. It might be calculated that the risk of such a

thing happening is very slight. But it would seem that more than this must be taken

into account in determining the acceptability of taking that risk. We also need to

know what the likely consequences will be should this unlikely event occur. And we

need to know what sorts of precautionary measures will be taken to keep the odds of

such an accident from occurring as low as projected. Finally, we need to know what

sorts of measures will be taken to contain and rectify matters should such an

accident occur, despite our best efforts to minimize its occurrence.

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Safety and risk go hand-in-hand. To set standards of safety requires a

determination of acceptable risk. Of course, we may find it necessary or desirable

to accept risks even when we cannot plausibly say that a product, process, or project

is ‘safe’. Here we might say it is ‘safe enough’, an indication that we are willing to

assume substantial risks in order to obtain whatever benefits might be expected from

the product, process, or project. Perhaps we could call it ‘‘acceptably unsafe.’’ These

thoughts are just the beginning of what could prove to be a complicated analysis of

an interesting and important set of interrelated concepts—acceptable/unacceptable,

safe/unsafe, risk/risky, and so on.

This is a forward-looking agenda for engineering ethics—an agenda that can be

informed by the problems we have not handled so well thus far. But by helping us

all learn from our mistakes and oversights, engineers can help us better meet the

challenges of the future. And if they don’t accept this as their responsibility, who

will?

The Next Generation of Scholars

Michael Davis, Illinois Institute of Technology

Engineering ethics has achieved much since its inception more than three decades

ago. It now has half a journal of its own (Science and Engineering Ethics)—as well

as several other journals that regularly print work in the field. It has several good

textbooks for teaching an undergraduate course—whether called Engineering

Ethics, Engineering Professionalism, or the like. These textbooks, used around the

world, have—along with a number of scholarly works—helped to define the field

and distinguish it from two near neighbors, studies in technology and society (STS)

and philosophy of technology. Engineering ethics has also had more than three

decades of success in winning funds from public and private sources.

In only one respect is there much reason for worry. In North America, the field’s

birthplace, there is not, as far as I know, a single program to train the next

generation of scholars—as there is for medical ethics, business ethics, and other

important fields of practical or professional ethics. If we look beyond North

America, we will, as far as I know, find only one program that can count as training

the next generation of scholars in engineering ethics—at Delft Technological

University in the Netherlands.

I should therefore like to sketch a curriculum for a North American version of

Delft’s program, hoping someone reading this will, seeing the market for

philosophers or engineers so trained, find the money and faculty to set up such a

program.

First, the next generation should know something about the history and sociology

of engineering. I stress ‘‘engineering’’, not ‘‘technology’’. Technology predates

engineering—and even today much technology is the work of architects, chemists,

computer scientists, web designers, and other non-engineers. To understand

engineering, especially engineering as a discipline or profession, it is necessary to

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understand how engineers differ from other ‘‘technologists’’, especially in their

training and ways of working.

Second, the next generation should know how to talk with engineers about their

work, especially about the ethical problems that arise in it. That sounds easy, but in

fact it is not. The difficulty of talking with engineers is one reason why a number of

philosophers, including Michael Pritchard and I, have had to do empirical research

not only on ethical issues in engineering but on what engineers do. The social

scientists who should be doing this sort of empirical work seemed—and, for the

most part continue to seem—unable to do it.

Third, the next generation needs to know enough philosophy to count as

philosophers—or, at least, to draw on philosophy without finding philosophers

intimidating.

There is, of course, much more to say about what should go into a good program

to train the next generation of scholars in engineering ethics—but I have now used

the space allotted to me. And, of course, the hard question is: How do we

(concerned scholars, administrators, and philanthropists) start up one or more such

programs in North America?

Educating the Next Generation About Engineering

Richard A. Burgess, National Institute for Engineering Ethics

The National Institute for Engineering Ethics (NIEE) has recently partnered with the

T-STEM Center at Texas Tech University (TTU) to examine how engineering

ethics can and should be incorporated into K-12 engineering education/outreach. In

so doing, NIEE is following in the footsteps of others who have worked to educate

the ‘‘next’’ generation about engineering and its impact on human life. The hope is

to incorporate existing insights, develop new ones and, most importantly, help

acquaint a new generation with the responsibilities and opportunities that

engineering represents.

Following the successful incorporation of ethics in the 2010 Bernard Harris

Summer Science Camp at TTU, the staff at NIEE and T-STEM began exploring

additional ways in which ethics could be seamlessly included in K-12 engineering

education. T-STEM has developed a model of the engineering design process called

FRAME. This model is used to educate teachers about engineering and to provide a

heuristic for completing classroom engineering projects. The current focus is on

developing an ethical reasoning process that will fit each step of the FRAME model.

The new model will be utilized in T-STEM’s work with local middle and high

schools and it will be incorporated into annual summer workshops held for K-12

educators.

Not surprisingly, teaching ethics in a K-12 setting introduces several challenges.

Perhaps one of the most obvious of these is the potential to alienate parents by

stepping on their territory regarding moral education. This challenge is, in my view,

not as worrisome as it may appear. It is important to stress that the project is focused

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on cultivating sound engineering judgment and not on identifying ultimate moral

principles that, in some respects, inform this judgment.

A thornier challenge arises when considering how to empower K-12 teachers to

both confidently and competently discuss ethics with their students. Teaching ethics

can be difficult even for those with an extensive background in the subject. Effective

K-12 ethics education will not only raise ethical issues for discussion, but will

improve how students grapple with these issues. Thus, the K-12 teacher’s job will

be to do more than introduce a couple of thought provoking questions about the

ethical implications of a project.

Arguably, the most interesting challenge is determining what to teach. Enhancing

sensitivity and the ability to reason have been traditional goals of ethics education.

However, is this all we (educators) wish to accomplish when talking to students

about the obligations engineers have? Or, should we adopt a more proactive and

robust view of the process? Do we, in other words, structure engineering ethics

education to reflect a specific, normative view of engineering? While more overtly

paternalistic, such an approach would offer an inoculation against the increasingly

‘‘gun-for-hire’’ view of engineering that pervades the attitudes of so many

engineering majors today. The approach is made even more attractive when we

consider developments in energy, communication technology, the built environment

and so on.

While I’ve outlined several challenges, it is worth emphasizing the opportunity a

project like this one represents. Regardless of a student’s future career choice,

developing a more sophisticated understanding of engineering is a substantial

benefit.

Sustainability

P. Aarne Vesilind, Bucknell University

Engineering has always had an uneasy relationship with ethics. The first known

effort by engineers to codify the practice of engineering was the 1914 ASCE Code of

Ethics which addressed ethical concerns between and among fellow engineers and

included such rules of conduct as ‘‘do not steal another engineer’s client’’ and ‘‘do

not speak disparagingly about a fellow engineer.’’ With time, the code incorporated

the engineers’ duties to employers and to clients and such rules as ‘‘be loyal to your

employer’’ were added. Then in the 1970s the recognition that engineers have a

moral responsibility to the public led to the addition of the famous ‘‘engineers shall

hold paramount the health, safety, and welfare of the public’’ clause.

During the past few decades, as engineers have became increasingly concerned

with their role in environmental protection and destruction, they have recognized,

with some embarrassment, that the ASCE Code of Ethics had little to say about

questions regarding the engineer’s responsibility to the environment. The code did

not spell out what if any responsibility engineers had to non-human animals, plants,

or places, and did not offer advice on what to do about such problems. The only

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guidance engineers had was that the actions of the engineers should not diminish the

welfare of the (human) public.

Luckily for the engineers, a 1987 United Nations commission introduced the

concept of ‘‘sustainable development.’’ Engineers immediately embraced sustain-

able development because it allowed ‘‘development’’ while at the same time

searched for ways to provide for ‘‘sustainability.’’ Accordingly, the first canon of the

ASCE Code of Ethics was modified to include not only the engineer’s responsibility

to public health, safety, and welfare, but it now requires that the engineer also

‘‘consider the principles of sustainable development.’’

This modification, the first attempt at trying to include environmental concerns in

an engineering code of ethics, is to be lauded, but the revision of the code falls far

short of defining an environmental ethic for engineers. The objective of sustainable

development is to enhance the living standard (of people) without destroying non-

replenishable natural resources. The natural environment is valued only for what it

can provide for our benefit, which is an inadequate environmental ethic. The

statement is also weak in that all it asks of the engineer is to ‘‘consider’’ the

principles of sustainability. If an engineer considers these principles and then rejects

them, he or she has not acted unethically, according to the code.

Obviously, there is a lot work to be done. Engineering societies such as ASCE,

and individual engineers in practice, have to figure out how to incorporate

environmental concerns into their ethical thinking and evaluation. The future of

engineering, and perhaps the future of the world, depends on how successful they

will be.

Keeping Up with Technology

Joseph R. Herkert, Arizona State University

As the field of engineering ethics moves forward, one area demanding more of our

attention will be the ethical challenges of emerging technologies (Marchant et al.

2011). The term ‘‘emerging technologies’’ generally refers to developments in such

fields as nanotechnology, neurotechnology (and cognitive science), biotechnology,

and robotics, as well as advanced information and communication technology.

An example of the hundreds if not thousands of emerging technologies under

development is the concept of ‘‘pervasive computing’’ which expands the notion of

the ‘‘smart house’’ to the entire built environment (and perhaps the natural

environment as well). A fictional representation of pervasive computing can be

found in the Steven Spielberg film Minority Report, but pervasive computing is

hardly science fiction. Its broad outlines are already beginning to take shape in

today’s world of smart phones (now including built-in geographical positioning

systems), microprocessors embedded in everyday objects such as wrist watches,

smart cards, radio frequency identification tags and implants, and face recognition

technology, all potentially wirelessly interconnected in faster and faster broadband

networks. Such technical possibilities pose daunting ethical challenges such as

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protecting personal privacy in a system designed explicitly to know who you are,

where you are, and your personal preferences.

A key question for ethics is whether such emerging technologies have unique

characteristics that set them apart from previous technologies. Many observers

believe the answer is an unequivocal yes and point to such novel characteristics as

accelerating pace of development, mind-boggling systems complexity, seemingly

unlimited reach, embeddedness, specificity, and malleability of form. Another factor

often highlighted is that these technologies are not being developed in a vacuum but

rather tend to converge with one another in both processes and products.

The engineers and computer scientists behind these technologies often seem quite

convinced of the ethical imperative behind such developments, from military robots

that can be programmed to follow the conventions of war to autonomous machines

that transcend not only human intelligence but also human moral character. Ethicists

such as James Moor have taken a more cautious view of such developments,

suggesting that emerging technologies call for more than ‘‘ethics as usual,’’

including ethical thinking that is better informed, more proactive, and characterized

by more and better interdisciplinary collaboration among scientists, engineers,

ethicists and others.

In confronting emerging technologies, ethicists can draw on concepts that have

successfully been applied to earlier technologies. Moral imagination, for example,

can be useful in addressing the complexity and malleability of emerging

technologies; and preventive ethics can provide useful lessons on the need for

ethical analysis to be more proactive rather than post hoc. But new ethical tools are

also needed. For example, Deborah Johnson and others, drawing on concepts from

science and technology studies, have been developing an anticipatory ethics

specifically geared to the pace, complexity, and embeddedness of emerging

technologies.

Whether we will one day encounter moral machines remains to be seen; a more

immediate problem is to prove the moral reasoning of humanity is up to meeting the

ethical challenges posed by emerging technologies.

E-Waste: A Looming Issue

Marilyn A. Dyrud, Oregon Institute of Technology

Where do old computers go to die? In Japan, they go to recycling centers; buyers

pay a modest recycling fee folded into the unit’s retail price. In the European Union,

old computers also go to recycling centers: the 2000 WEEE legislation requires that

each computer part be stamped with a recycling center identifier, and that center is

responsible for disposal; export is forbidden. In the United States, the process is

simplified: outmoded computers and peripherals are sent to third world countries,

thus circumventing the issue. The US has no coherent federal recycling program for

e-waste and is the world’s leading exporter of outmoded electronics, discarding

about 130,000 old PCs daily (UNEP 2009).

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The US fixation on ‘‘new toys’’ is devastating both to the environment and

humans in developing countries. Guiyu, for example, is a ‘‘recycling’’ center in

Southern China focusing on materials recovery: workers, unimpeded by protective

equipment, smash open computers with sledge hammers and cook circuit boards in

acid baths to extract traces of precious metals (gold, silver, titanium, copper),

practices that release toxic materials, such as phosphorus and cadmium, into the air.

Non-recoverable materials are burned and the debris tossed in the nearby river. As a

result, the once-pastoral rice fields have been transformed into mountains of

electronic trash, and 50 % of area school children experience significant respiratory

illnesses. Guiyu has no potable water, and the river is so acidic that it eats metal

(2002).

Recent statistics are truly staggering: in 2007, the US disposed of 3.16 million

tons of old electronics; internationally, the total was 20–50 million tonnes,

anticipated to increase substantially in the next decade (2010). More disturbing,

those numbers do not include the burgeoning countries of India and China, where

use of electronic gadgetry is accelerating: according to UNEP 2009, computer waste

will increase from 2007 levels by 400 % in China and South Africa and 500 % in

India by 2020.

Engineers are uniquely suited to contribute to the solution rather than the

problem. Engineering schools can begin the process by enlightening students to the

enormous issue of e-waste and the havoc it wreaks; industry can complement

education by introducing some relatively easily implementable changes, including

designing with disposal in mind and increasing product life cycles (PCs currently

have a life span of 18 months). Most importantly, the US needs to develop a

coherent national recycling plan, rather than the current patchwork of impotent state

programs. Following the example of the EU’s RoHS and WEEE legislation would

be an effective strategy, forcing the country to clean up its own foul nest, rather than

exporting toxic waste to the third world.

References

Electronics Takeback Coalition. (2010). Facts and figures on e-waste and recycling. Retrieved from

http://www.electronicstakeback.com/wp-content/uploads/Facts_and_Figures.

Marchant, G., Allenby, B., & Herkert, J. (Eds.). (2011). The growing gap between emerging technologies

and legal-ethical oversight: The pacing problem. NY: Springer.

Puckett, J. et al. (2002). Exporting harm: The high-tech trashing of Asia. Basel Action Network, Greenpeace.

Retrieved from http://www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/eastasia/press/reports/exporting-harm-the-

high-tech.pdf.

United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). (2009). Recycling—from e-waste to resources.

Retrieved from http://www.unep.org/PDF/PressReleases/E-aste_publication_screen_FINAL

VERSION-sml.pdf.

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