Engineering Ethics

Foreword

by

Dennis A. Gioia

Professor of Organizational Behavior

Smeal College of Business

Penn State University

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Like many of you perusing this book, I was once a budding young

engineer, anticipating a career working on some interesting technical

problems for some exciting Fortune 500 company. I loved engineering.

I loved the whole idea of it—from the intense puzzling over some difficult

technical challenge, to the intellectual high of discovering the “elegant

solution,” to the implementation of that solution in practice. Science and

engineering were full of elegant solutions just waiting for me to find

them, and I thanked my lucky stars that I was not going to be dealing with

the messiness of ambiguous decisions and people problems associated

with the less technically accomplished students’ careers. Engineering

had a purity and an idealism that were very appealing to me, as I suspect

they are to you.

My first engineering job was with Boeing Aerospace at Cape Kennedy,

working on the Apollo/Saturn lunar program as an apprentice. It was the

embodiment of every engineering ideal I had ever imagined. That program

was pure science and engineering, with the loftiest conceivable goal—to

put people on the moon and return them safely to earth—but it was so

pure in purpose that it left me unprepared for life in the “real world” of

business. You probably can imagine my surprise when I joined Ford Motor

Company and found a realm of complexity and ambiguity requiring a

myriad of judgment calls—some of them involving competing values and

murky ethical choices. Sure enough, I found myself working on quite a

number of interesting engineering problems, but now many of the solu-

tions to those problems were colored by legal issues, social issues, and

moral issues. Some of them, such as the problem with Pinto fuel tank

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integrity during rear-end collisions, even involved choices with life-and-

death implications. Heavens. My engineering training hadn’t prepared me

for anything like this!

My experience in the automotive industry, however, turned out to be

closer to the norm than the exception. These days, most engineering deci-

sions are couched within some larger domain involving social, political,

and ethical choices. Engineering is no longer a pure discipline (if it ever

was). Engineers can no longer practice their skills independent of these

larger domains but rather must consider them as a constituent part. For that

reason, in the modern era, it is no longer acceptable to become an engi-

neer without an appreciation of the ethical context within which we serve

society, usually through our work in industry. And that’s why it is impor-

tant for you to read this book and consider with care the instructive cases

that harbor lessons for you as you prepare for your now more complicated

career as a responsible engineer.

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