Ethics

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Science and Engineering Ethics (2003) 9 353-361

Science and Engineering Ethics, Volume 9, Issue 3, 2003 353

Keywords: ethics, morality, profession, philosophically interesting, engineering

ABSTRACT: What makes a subject philosophically interesting is hard-to-resolve confusion about fundamental concepts. Engineering ethics suffers from at least three such fundamental confusions. First, there is confusion about what the “ethics” in engineering ethics is (ordinary morality, philosophical ethics, special standards, or something else?) Second, there is confusion about what the profession of engineering is (a function, discipline, occupation, kind of organization, or something else?) Third, there is confusion about what the discipline of engineering is. These fundamental confusions in engineering ethics connect with philosophically interesting work in moral theory, political philosophy, and philosophy of science. Work in these areas may help with the philosophical problems of engineering ethics. But, equally important, work in engineering ethics may help with the philosophical problems in these others fields.

Introduction

My title is a question familiar to most philosophers working in engineering ethics. Some philosophers ask it of them as a challenge; some, out of curiosity. Over the years, I have developed a technique for answering, one likely to be useful both to philosophers interested in engineering ethics and to non-philosophers trying to draw a philosopher into engineering ethics. I begin with the philosopher’s typical device, a counter-question: “What makes a subject philosophically interesting? Is it enough that some philosophers find it interesting?” The counter-question generally surprises the philosopher to whom I address it. His (or her) response is therefore predictable in the way off-guard responses typically are: “No,” the philosopher says, “philosophers are

What’s Philosophically Interesting about Engineering Ethics?

Michael Davis, Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, Illinois, USA

Address for correspondence: Michael Davis, Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, Illinois 60616, USA; email: [email protected]. Paper received, 2 February 2003: revised, 3 March 2003: accepted, 24 March 2003.

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interested in many things beside philosophy. ‘Philosophically interesting’ must mean more than of interest to philosophers.”

“What then is philosophically interesting?” I ask. Generally, the answer to that question is a list of subjects, the curriculum of the graduate program about the time the philosopher graduated, or its equivalent, such as “the perennial [or core] problems of philosophy”. To this list, I respond: “But ’philosophically interesting’ can’t be defined as what we (or our teachers) thought was interesting when we were in graduate school. While most subjects philosophers found interesting then are still with us, some are not. For example, much of what was philosophy of language when I was in graduate school is now taught in the linguistics department. Much of the history of philosophy is the departure of subjects once ‘philosophically interesting’.”

By now, the philosopher I’m addressing has recovered from surprise and wisely returns to the original question, though in a more serious tone. And this time I answer: What seems to me to make a subject “philosophically interesting” is confusion about fundamental concepts. By “confusion” I mean an understanding of a subject so flawed that even those who know all that is known about it do not know whether they can answer the questions they are putting or even what they need to know to answer them. So, for example, the relation of mind to body has long been philosophically interesting because our understanding of mind (consciousness, an activity seemingly without location in space) makes it hard to understand how body (which has a location in space) could affect or be affected by mind in any of the ways it obviously is.

Once the confusion is reduced enough to allow ordinary methods of inquiry to function in a relatively reliable way, philosophers lose interest—until new confusions arouse new interest. The so-called “perennial [or core] problems of philosophy” are simply those problems that philosophers have been working on for a long time. We do not know that they cannot be solved; hence, we cannot know that they actually are perennial (much less that philosophy would not be philosophy without them). Indeed, as soon as some philosopher showed that they could not be solved, philosophy would be done with them. There is nothing philosophically interesting about a problem without a solution—except, perhaps, explaining in what sense it can still be a problem. What makes a subject philosophically interesting, or at least should make it philosophically interesting, is that the subject is confused in a way that can be resolved using the methods of philosophy: definition, sorting out of issues, deduction, and so on. That a philosophically interesting subject connects with other philosophically interesting subjects adds to the interest, especially if the other subjects have interested philosophers for some time, but those connections seem to me to add to the interest rather than constitute it. Philosophy is independent of any particular question, problem, or subject. If philosophy has a core, it is its method, not its subject matter.

If this seems a good way to understand “philosophically interesting”, then it is easy to make a case for the philosophical interest of engineering ethics today. Since I was originally a political philosopher, what tends to catch my attention are questions of engineering ethics related to political philosophy (including social philosophy). Though I will try to overcome that bias, I will nonetheless probably underestimate the philosophical interest of engineering ethics for moral philosophers, philosophers of

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technology, and philosophers of science. Anyone who thinks I have not done justice to some philosophically interesting question engineering ethics raises should feel free to say so. Indeed, I intend this paper to start a discussion, not to finish it off.

There seem to me to be two central questions in engineering ethics. First, what is “ethics” (in that context)? Second, what is “engineering”? These two questions seem central because their answers must shape how we interpret the field, what will seem within it and what will not. These questions are both sources of confusion because there are several defensible answers for each, though which answer a particular philosopher considers good—or, at least, the best—seems to depend on commitments in other fields of philosophy. We do not yet know how to choose among these alternatives. Let me begin with ethics.

What is Ethics?

“Ethics” has a number of senses in English (and, it seems, in other languages that have—like English—adopted the word from ancient Greek). For our purposes, at least four of the senses are relevant. First, “ethics” can be a synonym for ordinary morality, those standards of conduct that apply to everyone as moral agent (“Don’t lie”, “Don’t cheat”, “Keep your promises”, “Help the needy”, and so on). Anyone understanding “ethics” in this sense will understand the term “engineering ethics” as (more or less) equivalent to “moral problems in engineering”. Engineering ethics will then seem a kind of casuistry, the kind involving engineering cases instead of other kinds. Engineering ethics will be philosophically interesting only insofar as its distinctive moral problems are philosophically interesting.

Second, “ethics” can be understood as “the art of living well”. Engineering ethics will then have two sides. One—the individual—will be concerned with what engineers should do to flourish as human beings. The individual art of living well will include morality, but a good deal more, for example, developing various intellectual virtues. The other side of the art of living well—the social—will concern what engineers should do to help others flourish (and perhaps what others should do in response). There will be connections between the individual and the social—insofar as part of living well oneself is doing one’s work well, benefiting others, and living in a world one has made better. Engineering ethics (in this sense) will differ from other kinds of ethics (in this sense) only insofar as engineers differ in nature or position from other people.

Third, “ethics” can be understood as special morally-permissible standards of conduct that apply to members of a group simply because they are members of that group. Navajo ethics apply to Navajo and no one else; business ethics, to people in business and no one else; and engineering ethics, to engineers and no one else. Ethics (in this sense) resembles law in being relative to a group. Ethics nonetheless differs from law in being—by definition—morally permissible. “Ethics” (in this sense) is not mere ethos or the plural of “ethic”, but something distinct from other positive standards. There can be no immoral “ethics” (in this sense)—even though there can be immoral laws, customs, and conventions.

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In at least the first and third senses of “ethics”, there is an important distinction between general (or prima facie) standards and their application in particular circumstances (“actual obligation, all things considered”). Standards may be rules (that apply or don’t apply), principles (considerations that have a certain weight), or ideals (what it is good to try to achieve but not wrong not to try to achieve). All else equal, an ethical standard should be followed—where “should” here may mean either “required subject to certain specified exceptions” or a consideration sufficient to decide a question if all else is equal. A requirement cannot be overridden, though an exception to it can be justified. There is, for example, a general rule “Don’t kill”. It has a few exceptions (for self-defense, protection of the innocent, just war, and so on). To show that an act fits one of the exceptions is to offer a justification. To show that a killing was justified is to show not only that the rule (with the exception) does not cover the act, shielding one from moral blame, but that the act was in some respect positively good, justifying moral praise—if only “You did right to defend yourself against such an attack.”

Like rules, principles cannot be overridden. But, unlike rules, they can be outweighed. For example, though the principle “Help the needy” has no (standard) exceptions, I may nonetheless (justifiably) not help the needy any time other considerations (even my own personal convenience) outweigh my “obligation” to help. Helping the needy is not a requirement. It is only an “obligation” or “responsibility” in a weaker sense (that is, a consideration an indefinitely large number of other considerations might individually or collectively outweigh in particular circumstances). I do all I should to help the needy if I give due weight to that principle in all my deliberations.

Fourth, “ethics” can mean a field of philosophy (the attempt to understand ethics, in one or more of its other senses, as a rational undertaking). A philosophy course in engineering ethics (in this sense of “ethics”) differs from a philosophy course in Kant’s ethics only in its subject matter. A philosophy course in Kant’s ethics would attempt to understand what Kant said about ethics, to evaluate the arguments he offered, to offer improvements in his formulations and arguments, and so on. A philosophy course in engineering ethics attempts to understand what engineers (and others) say about what engineers should do, to evaluate the arguments they offer, to offer improvements in their formulations and arguments, and so on. Though both these philosophy courses concern a set of problems or questions about conduct, neither tries to teach students how to act (though students, seeing the point of the arguments, can learn much about how to act from either course). Which problems or questions we will want to include in a philosophy course in engineering ethics will depend (in part) on whether we think engineering ethics is primarily about morality, the art of living well, special standards, or something else.

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Some Interesting Problems the Different Senses of Ethics Generates

I believe we should understand the “ethics” of “engineering ethics” in the special- standards sense. I therefore avoid a problem that those understanding “ethics” in the first or second sense do not. I avoid having to explain how we move from ordinary morality, or abstract claims about how to live well, to specific engineering judgments. I need only look to the engineers’ code of ethics, and other special standards, reasoning from these much as a lawyer or judge reasons from statute to specific judgment. I may substitute a relatively well-understood theory of rule-interpretation (a part of jurisprudence or, what in the US, we also call “the philosophy of law”) for one of the deeper problems of moral philosophy. I avoid having to assume that morality is rich enough to instruct engineers on, for example, how to choose a safety factor or when to decline a gift. I may assume a morality consisting of a relatively few uncontroversial rules rather than having to argue for a richer—and therefore more controversial— conception.

Avoiding a controversial conception of morality in this way is, however, not without cost. The first or second sense of “ethics” automatically carries a normative charge—the charge that comes from being part of ordinary morality or of being part of the art of living well, given that we all want to live well. Special standards, however, insofar as they need only be morally permissible, do not automatically carry a normative charge. They must nonetheless carry such a charge. We are generally unwilling to call anything “ethics” unless it has a moral claim on us. We have other words for special standards that do not make such a claim: custom, law, convention, and so on. So, the special-standards approach requires an explanation of how standards that— by definition— need only be morally permissible can nonetheless become morally binding.

You will, no doubt, recognize the problem of finding such an explanation as a variation of the ancient problem of moral obligation to obey the law. This is a variation, however, not exactly the same problem. Engineering ethics might derive its moral authority from law, a possibility not open to law itself. But it might not. Whether it does or not depends on a) what the (justified) authority of law, government, or state is and b) what engineering is. When engineering ethics is understood in such a way as not to derive its moral authority from law (or from morality directly) the problem of the moral authority of engineering ethics at least seems to pose the same problem as obligation to obey the law.

What the (justified) moral authority of law, government, or state is is a question central to political philosophy. Today, that question is most often raised in the context of (what we now call) “human rights” and “civil society”. The moral status of human rights is controversial. At a minimum, human rights are those rights of human beings as such that moral considerations (among others) give us good reason to recognize in every legal system. For many writers, however, human rights are much more, moral requirements that exist independent of any legal system.

Civil society is that domain of conduct that starts with what morality allows (but does not require) and ends with what law (justifiably) requires (or forbids). It is the

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domain of markets, clubs, religions, and other voluntary activity. If morality requires too much, there will be no civil society, and any theory of engineering ethics will have to be a part of ordinary moral theory. If law (justifiably) demands too much, engineering ethics (in the special standards sense) will still be possible, even though civil society will not be. But engineering ethics will be a part of ordinary law (and any moral obligation engineers have to their special standards as such will rest either on the general moral obligation to obey the law or on some special—more demanding— obligation to obey certain kinds of law).

Such connections between engineering ethics and lively parts of moral or political theory suggest how little we understand engineering ethics, how deeply confused the subject remains. Such connections also suggest ways in which studying engineering ethics might lead to arguments for or against certain moral or political theories. What arguments will depend in part on what we take engineering to be.

What is engineering?

We have at least four (non-exclusive) ways to think about engineering: as function, as discipline, as occupation, and as profession. For those who take engineering to be a mere function—for example, the design and making of useful objects—, engineering may be at least as old as the first tool (depending on how we understand “design”). An engineer is anyone who performs the engineering function; hence, almost every human society over at least the last few hundred thousand years has had engineers (even if called “builder”, “architect”, “artisan”, or something else). This way of thinking about engineering fits best with “ethics” in the first or second sense: why should there be special standards for a category so long so close to ordinary life?

For others, engineering is a discipline (whether a single function or not) defined by a certain combination of knowledge, skill, and judgment. Engineering is the systematic application of mathematics, chemistry, and physics to practical problems on a substantial scale according to certain historically evolving methods or routines.a

Engineering (in this sense) began in Western Europe in the seventeenth century. An engineer (in this sense) is anyone trained in the discipline. A discipline might include special standards of conduct.

For others, engineering is an occupation, that is, a way to earn a living defined by the practice of the engineering discipline more or less full time. Engineering (in this sense) did not exist before the nineteenth century for the simple reason that the discipline presupposed an education only gentlemen could acquire, and only in the nineteenth century did it become possible for gentlemen to work for a living. Until then, gentlemen (in Europe and its colonies) were, by definition, people who did not have to work for a living but lived instead on their family’s wealth or on the patronage

a. Though the connection between engineering and the natural sciences seems permanent, the list of

natural sciences necessary for engineering might change over time. Right now, engineers seem to be considering whether biology might be on its way to being as essential to engineering as chemistry and physics have been for the last three hundred or so years.

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of others. They were not “in trade” even though they “performed services” and often received “pecuniary acknowledgements” in return.

For most of us who work in engineering ethics, however, engineering is a profession (as well as a discipline and occupation). We work in a field of professional ethics. Working in a field of professional ethics presupposes a definition of “profession”. Since there are many definitions of “profession”, there are many ways to conceptualize the field. Some conceptions differ markedly from others. Many differences can be explained by different approaches to working out (or evaluating) definitions. Someone in the philosophy of language may find sorting out and evaluating these different approaches interesting, especially since they seem to have significant consequences for empirical research on the professions as well as for the questions that get assigned to that field of professional ethics we call “engineering ethics”. For now, however, it will be enough to have before us one definition of “profession”. Here is the one I prefer:

A profession is a number of individuals in the same occupation voluntarily organized to earn a living by openly serving a certain moral ideal in a morally permissible way beyond what law, market, and morality would otherwise require.b

According to this definition, a profession is an organization. There can be no profession with just one member. Because a profession is an organization, it must have come into existence at a certain time as a result of human choice. There will be no natural professions—and no reason why professions might not differ from place to place or even not exist in some places where the corresponding occupation does. While law may create a framework for the organizing of professions, law cannot mandate professions. A legal mandate could create an agent of government, such a corps or bureau, but not a profession. Individuals must voluntarily organize a profession. Membership in a profession is—by definition—also voluntary.

Some theorists nonetheless argue that professions can only be organized by some act of society, operating through law, government, or some other agent. A would-be profession undertakes certain duties and in return receives the right to organize as a profession. Moral obligations to the profession’s special standards rest (they say) on this contract with society. This contract-with-society view seems to fit medicine, law, and other licensed professions well. The license to practice an occupation looks like the return for undertaking the duties understood to belong to that occupation. The contract- with-society view seems to fit especially well professions in which members must swear an oath as part of the ceremony preceding admission to practice (as lawyers must do in the US). One of the features of engineering that makes it especially interesting as a profession is that it generally does not fit this model. In few countries, if any, is there an oath an engineer must take to practice. In some countries, including the US, engineers need a license only to do certain kinds of work, such as signing construction

b. For explanation and defense of this definition, see my Profession, Code, and Ethics (Ashgate

Press: Aldershot, England, 2002).

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drawings or doing official safety inspections. In such countries, many, or even most, engineers are in fact unlicensed.

For other theorists, the right to associate, including the right to form a profession, is a human right (what Americans call “the freedom of association”). On this view, Society has a right to interfere with that right only when the would-be organization threatens some substantial harm, something organizations fitting my definition of “profession” are unlikely to do. So, on this view, professions are as free to organize as sports clubs, churches, charities, and other voluntary associations are. Society has no right to demand anything in return for allowing a profession to exist. There need be no contract with society to explain the existence of a profession. The moral obligation to a profession’s special standards might nonetheless arise from law, assuming there is a general moral obligation to obey the law. But for professions not having legal standing, such as engineering in the US, this source of moral obligation does not seem plausible (or, at least, does not seem plausible given this way of thinking about human rights).

There is an alternative to the contract-with-society view just described: Professional obligation arises from voluntarily claiming membership in the profession—for example, by truthfully claiming to be an engineer when being an engineer is a qualification for the job. One claims membership in the profession (“I am an engineer”) in order to get the benefits of membership in that profession. The benefits derive in part at least from the special standards engineers have followed over the years; engineers have a better reputation than they would otherwise have had, and a better reputation (for the purpose in question) than an alternative often available (chemists, architects, industrial designers, technicians, and so on). To voluntarily claim the benefits of a profession without living up to the standards of the profession would be to take unfair advantage of a voluntary cooperative practice, that is, to cheat. Since cheating is (prima facie) morally wrong, members of a profession have a moral obligation to do as their profession’s special standards require—so long as they claim the benefits those standards help to generate.

This explanation of professional obligation is, of course, a close analogue of traditional theories of social contract. The chief difference is that the society in question consists of the members of the profession rather than of members of society at large. How good a theory of professional obligation this is depends on how we answer the following three questions (among others): • Is there a human right to associate? • Does that right extend to associations, such as the profession of engineering, that

have important effects on society as a whole? • Is the principle of fairness (“Don’t cheat”) morally binding on someone who

voluntarily claims the benefits of a practice that will exist whether or not she follows its rules? These are interesting questions both within engineering ethics and within political

philosophy generally, that is, questions to which there remains a confusing array of pretty good but inconsistent answers. These are also important questions. Some insights into social contract gained in political philosophy should carry over to

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engineering ethics, helping to shape the field—and some insights gained in engineering ethics should carry over to political philosophy.c

Another philosophically interesting question about engineering

My discussion so far has assumed that we understand the discipline of engineering well enough to know who belongs to the profession and who does not. That is only roughly so. There are in fact some people with “engineer” in their occupational title who are not engineers (in the sense appropriate to engineering ethics), and some without “engineer” in the title who are. About some of these, there is no confusion. For example, the drivers of railway locomotives, though called “railroad engineers”, are not engineers (in the sense appropriate for engineering ethics), while naval architects are, even though they are called “architects” and most people called architects are not engineers. The definition of the discipline I prefer—the systematic application of mathematics, chemistry, and physics to practical problems on a substantial scale according to certain historically evolving methods or routines—does explain these two cases. Neither locomotive drivers nor architects systematically apply mathematics, chemistry, or physics to practical problems on a substantial scale according to engineering’s methods or routines. Naval architects do. But the definition does not so quickly settle such new uses of “engineer” as “software engineer” or “genetic engineer”. To settle these, we need to replace “engineering’s methods or routines” with something more enlightening. Several recent books have tried to offer something more enlightening.d But we remain a long way from understanding what makes a method or routine “an engineering method or routine”. Until we understand that, we will not know (in the way philosophers like to know) who is, and who is not, an engineer to whom a code of engineering ethics applies. Why does engineering’s code of ethics not apply to computer scientists or synthetic chemists? What is the connection between engineering and science?

Aren’t such questions philosophically interesting?

Acknowledgement: An early version of this paper was presented at a national workshop hosted by the Philosophy Department, School of Information and Sciences, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan, 7 December 2002. I should like to thank Tetsuji Iseda for inviting me to try to convince an audience of Japanese philosophers that engineering ethics is philosophically interesting. I should also like to thank the audience for more than two hours of very helpful examination of what I said.

c. I speak from personal experience of the effect engineering ethics may have on political

philosophy. I have a book, just published, Actual Social Contract and Political Obligation (Edwin Mellen Press: New York, 2002), that explicitly uses approaches originally developed for engineering ethics to interpret the early history of social contract theory.

d. See, for example, my own Thinking Like an Engineer (Oxford University Press: New York, 1998).

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