Engineering Ethics

Part II

National Case Studies

September 2002 to August 2003 was a terrible 12-month period in

engineering ethics. During this time, a scientist at Bell Laboratories committed

nanotechnology fraud, the Columbia space shuttle exploded, Guidant

received the largest pay-out to date from the Food and Drug Administration

for hiding medical device defects, and the New York City blackout occurred.

While reflecting on these events, I wondered how often disasters occurred

after warnings by engineers. I knew that warnings about the Columbia

explosion mirrored the warnings about the Challenger explosion. As

an experiment, I challenged myself to find similar major disasters. Within

4 hours of Googling, I found eight other national examples. Later, in early

2005, I replaced the eighth example with the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004.

Each of these 13 disasters is detailed in a case study chapter. Each case

study chapter contains the following sections: the news story as reported by

the New York Times, the back story, applicable regulations, the engineering

warning, and discussion questions. Case analysis is used in programs such as

Harvard Business School because it prepares students to deal with the types

of problems encountered in professional practice. Using an ethical vocabu-

lary based on previous experience and study, we discuss the decisions made

by engineers and their managers that eventually made headlines.The discus-

sion questions at the end of each chapter are intentionally vague in order to

stimulate discourse. By practicing ethical analysis, we strengthen our ability

to conduct it.

Ch03-P088531.qxd 2/22/06 11:44 AM Page 37

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

This Page is Intentionally Left Blank