Engineering Ethics

Preface

xvii

While I was finishing my MS degree and conducting interviews for my

first job in industry in 1986, the Challenger space shuttle exploded. As the

details came out that Chief O-ring engineer Roger Boisjoly had recom-

mended the launch be postponed, I found it incomprehensible that expert

engineering opinions would be ignored. Now, with 16 years of industrial

experience, I realize how frequent this situation has become. As former

Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill noted in The Price of Loyalty, “there had

been an ongoing shift, across nearly two decades, of what is acceptable

conduct for a corporation .... There were tens of thousands of companies

in America...that were operating with virtually no proactive standard to

compel probity” (Suskind, 2004).

I decided to write this book after a difficult 12-month period in engi-

neering ethics. On September 25, 2002, scientific fraud at Bell

Laboratories was exposed. While truly a question of scientific, rather

than engineering, ethics, Bell Labs was the first company for which I

worked as an engineer. I could not imagine how a former paragon of

ethics had fallen. On February 1, 2003, the Columbia space shuttle

exploded. Although initial reactions included suspicions of terrorist

activity, I suspected that when the facts came out, it would be proved

again that expert engineering opinions were ignored. On June 12, 2003,

Guidant Corporation agreed to the largest payout ever, $92.4 million, for

violating the Food and Drug Administration’s medical device report

requirements for its Ancure Endograft System. Finally, on August 14,

2003, the Northeast blackout occurred.

The thesis of this textbook is that within the course of their industrial

careers, many new engineering graduates will be exposed to serious ethics

violations. Thirteen detailed case studies, including the examples above,

are given of situations in which an engineer (or in the case of Bell

Labs, a scientist) warned his superiors of a potentially grave situation but

was ignored. Unlike case studies in other engineering ethic texts, these

cases are not written in narrative form. Rather, each is presented in the

following format: 1) the reported (newspaper) story, 2) the back story,

Prelims-P088531.qxd 3/1/06 3:09 PM Page xvii

xviii Preface

3) applicable regulations, 4) an engineering perspective (warnings before

the event), and 5) questions for discussion.

To complement these case studies, a discussion of personal responsibil-

ity and how an engineer sets his or her personal engineering ethics thresh-

old is presented in Chapter 1.This chapter includes descriptions of some of

the major ethical theories (Utilitarianism, Duty Ethics, Rights Ethics, and

Virtue Ethics) and references to engineering ethics codes. In Chapter 2,

options for engineering actions when this personal threshold is reached are

detailed. In Chapter 16, actual anonymous industrial cases of engineering

ethics are presented that include an abbreviated description of each situa-

tion and how each engineer responded. The engineers who shared these

personal experiences want students to be prepared for ethical situations

before they encounter them in industry.

This text may be used within an Introduction to Engineering or Senior

Design course if it is decided that engineering ethics be taught within

another course to meet the ABET ethics requirement. Alternatively, this

text may be used as an adjunct to any of the new engineering ethics text-

books because most do not provide extensive case studies or a concen-

trated industrial perspective. Although two current textbooks provide 31

and 57 case studies, these case studies are not as comprehensively detailed

as the case studies in this book. Almost all of the other textbook authors

are professors without industrial engineering experience. I believe that

incorporating an industrial perspective is important in an engineering

ethics course.

Ultimately, this text does not provide solutions. I believe it is necessary

that students discuss engineering ethics in school and, during their first

year in industry, come to an understanding of the industrial culture in

which they function. With an engineering ethics foundation, I hope each

will then be able to choose his or her personal engineering ethics threshold

and determine a suitable course of action when this threshold is reached.

The impetus for this book was an engineering ethics discussion I had

with Drs. John Enderle and Jerry Jakabowski during an ABET visit in the

fall of 2003. Reflecting on this discussion a few months later over

Christmas vacation, I noticed the similarities with discussions I had with

my friends, Bob Ward and Dr. Sandy Ng.As I began to discuss engineering

ethics with my very patient family, my brother-in-law, Steve Conklin,

taught me about Qui Tam.

I would like to thank my dear friends, Fred Bacher, Simon Finburgh,

and James Grove, for encouraging and editing this manuscript. Dr. Dan

Porte, Jr., provided helpful reviews of foundational Chapters 1 and 2. My

editors Joel Stein and Shoshanna Grossman supplied valuable feedback

during the writing process. My friend Paula Mason acted as the spiritual

Prelims-P088531.qxd 3/1/06 3:09 PM Page xviii