one page reflection paper double space

Science and Engineering Ethics (2003) 9, 363-376

Science and Engineering Ethics, Volume 9, Issue 3, 2003 363

Keywords: ascribed ethics, risk, engineering, moral imagination

ABSTRACT: Discovering obligations that are ascribed to them by others is potentially an important element in the development of the moral imagination of engineers. Moral imagination cannot reasonably be developed by contemplating oneself and one’s task alone: there must be some element of discovering the expectations of people one could put at risk. In practice it may be impossible to meet ascribed obligations if they are completely general and allow no exceptions – for example if they demand an unlimited duty to avoid harm. But they can still serve to modify engineers’ prior ethics, for example by limiting a purely utilitarian approach to deciding who should bear risk and how much risk they should bear. Ascribed obligations can also give engineers insight into the public reaction to risks that arise from engineered systems, and the consequent expectations that the public have about how much protection is desirable and where the responsibility for this protection lies. This article analyses the case for taking ascribed obligations seriously, and reviews some of the obligations that have been ascribed in the aftermath of recent engineering failures. It also proposes ways in which ascribed obligations could be used in engineers’ moral development.

Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ethical issues arising from the risks that engineers cause for others, typically by designing products or systems from which hazards can arise. More particularly, however, the intention is to consider the ethics ascribed to engineers by the people at risk, and the contribution of these ascribed ethics to the ethics that engineers actually espouse. The principle is that engineers’ responsibilities are defined at least in part by social ascription,1 that engineers or

The Social Ascription of Obligations to Engineers

J. S. Busby and M. Coeckelbergh Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, University of Bath, UK

Address for correspondence: J. S. Busby, University of Bath, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Design, Bath BA2 7AY, UK; email [email protected]. Paper received, 18 September 2002: revised, 1 April 2003: accepted, 9 April 2003.

1353-3452 © 2003 Opragen Publications, POB 54, Guildford GU1 2YF, UK. http://www.opragen.co.uk

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engineering organisations cannot simply define their own responsibilities. This then raises a number of questions – for example about the efficiency with which potential risk bearers’ expectations are communicated to engineers, the extent to which such expectations are consistent with one another, and the extent to which they can reasonably be met in a world of finite resources.

We have had two main aims in this article. The first has been to develop an argument that says ascribed obligations are important to engineers, not because they provide pre-formed rules that engineers can blindly follow, but because they can be used to help engineers develop a capacity for moral imagination.2 The second aim has been to make inferences about the obligations that people have in fact ascribed to engineers in the aftermath of some recent engineering failures. These yielded some interesting if not unexpected insights into what people at large expect of engineers – for example in terms of whether improvements in technology should be taken as improved protection or improved performance.

The ascription problem

The relevance of ascribed obligations The first argument to make is that engineering is not, in practice, morally neutral. Engineers are certainly constrained by the prevailing culture, client relationships and subordination to managers in the firms for which they work.3 They plainly do not enjoy complete freedom, and in many cases their work only involves the detailed embodiment of some general solution principle. Most of their decisions perhaps do not cause widespread harm or disquiet. When their decisions or their conduct do have the potential for harm they are often quite rigidly constrained by the law. For example, in the UK there are statutory regulations requiring major accident hazards to be treated by quantitative risk analyses, accompanied by predetermined acceptance criteria. Even if the artefact being designed by an engineer has the potential for harm, it will not have been the engineer who decided such a harm was the price worth paying for whatever benefit accrues. It will similarly not have been the engineer who determines what is an acceptable distribution of the potential harm. Generally, the degree of risk may be an engineering problem but its acceptability is not,4 so it will not have been up to an engineer to decide.

But the picture of engineering as morally neutral is misleading. Engineers do not simply implement managers’ goals5 because such goals are invariably incomplete. Telling someone to develop a design for a hazardous installation, within the law and subject to prevailing engineering standards, does not relieve engineers of the moral burden of deciding, for example, whether certain kinds of maintenance staff should be put at risk by adopting certain designs. Statutory risk acceptance criteria are also sufficiently imprecise to allow the engineer the latitude of asking ‘how could I justify the design I want to develop’ rather than ‘how could I find the design that reasonably minimises risk?’ And the fact that a client might instruct an engineer that a certain risk is acceptable does not mean the engineer is relieved of the responsibility to consider the risk and its moral dimensions. The argument that the engineer is so constrained that his

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or her actions are morally neutral ignores the moral question as to whether the engineer should accept such constraints. It therefore seems to us that engineering is not morally neutral, in general, even if much of the engineering routine does not raise moral dilemmas.

The next argument to make is that engineering does not simply amount to utilitarianism. The importance of trade-offs in engineering decisions, the naturally quantitative inclination of engineers, and the advocacy of utilitarian decision models for engineers and managers, all suggest that engineering is essentially utilitarian. The history of engineering, as an enterprise that has involved risk in order to find a better future, reinforces this. And some contemporary views go along with it. Loui6 states that most engineers use consequentialist reasoning, and Vesilind and Gunn7 suggest that engineers’ utilitarian orientation naturally puts them at odds with a public that does not develop expectations of engineering along utilitarian lines. But some recent work looking at engineers’ routine decision-making8 suggested that it is rather seldom that engineers perform cost benefit analyses, and that they are much more often guided by duties like following a ‘matching’ or reciprocation principle. Davis9 has suggested that engineers are in fact less inclined to balance risk against benefit than managers. There is also empirical research10 that found that both scientists and administrators reason about the ethics of research practice mainly in terms of what the investigator does, rather what the final outcome turns out to be. The harm that might arise from an investigator’s actions was virtually irrelevant to the judgments of whether the actions were ethical. We cannot assume from this that people would necessarily think about engineers’ ethics in the same terms, but in the absence of a similar study on engineers it seems to us quite likely that they would. The upshot is that a consequentialist orientation both to examining engineers’ actions and describing how engineers themselves make their moral determinations would be inappropriate.

The implication is that one cannot find the optimal ethical action by considering the properties of the available actions alone. There have as a result been various recent proposals for virtue ethics in engineering. Both Robinson and Dixon11 and Pritchard12

offer suggestions for suitable virtues. The difficulty with these virtues, however, is their provenance. Should the suggested virtues be whatever occurs to respected commentators? Should they be the product of engineers’ own contemplations? Some naturalistic theories argue that ethical conduct arises in self-affirmation, where the self is defined by its relationships with others.13 But again the tenor is of the self determining what matters in morality, without giving the others participating in the relationships a say. There is a basic difference between defining what is good for other people in one’s conduct by self-inspection, and defining it by acquiring empirical knowledge about other people and what they expect. Our view is that the latter is as important as the former.

The benefits of thinking about ascribed ethics One argument in favour of discovering what responsibilities other people expect you to meet, as an engineer, is its causal importance: its importance in causing other people to behave in particular ways towards engineers and (in particular) engineered systems. In

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accident causation, the misconceptions of people operating complex systems about the responsibilities of designers, and vice versa, are prime contributory factors. For example, operators sometimes act as though they believe designers have a duty to make system boundaries obvious and benign, and on the basis of this ascribed duty they seem to predict that designers will in fact make boundaries obvious and benign. As a designer you may not feel you have obligation X, but if someone else expects you to have obligation X and bases their behaviour on it, and imperils their own and others’ safety in doing so, you may come to take on obligation X. Taking on X need not spring from a belief in the intrinsic rightness of X. A difficulty in this respect is that the operator-designer relationship is mediated by the product, and is often not a direct one. Designers and operators ordinarily cannot reveal and resolve discrepancies in ascribed and adopted responsibilities by direct negotiation.

A second argument in favour of considering ascribed ethics is that discovering one’s own ethics can be a process of finding out what others’ expectations are. It is rather like the activity of risk identification, in that the best risk identifiers tend to be people who go out and talk to others, make a wide range of contacts, read widely, and generally look to the external world to stimulate their imagination. Risk identification performed by isolating oneself from the world and engaging in contemplation is usually an impoverished exercise. It seems to us reasonable that, for most people, coming to an ethical view both about the particular and the general would be assisted, not obstructed, by finding out others’ ethical expectations. This is likely to be especially true where there is asymmetry in a relationship. Engineers have an expertise that many people bearing the risks of engineering lack, and the relative ignorance of risk bearers can contribute both to the perception of the risk and its substantive nature. It is quite possible, then, that others’ expectations would not be obvious to engineers, and would be material to the obligations engineers feel towards such others.

A third argument in favour of ascribed ethics is that moral imagination is an important element in one’s ethical conduct, and that discovering ascribed ethics assists with its development. The ability to imagine the implications of one’s actions, such as taking risks with others’ welfare in one’s product design, seems to us to be as important to morality as any general principle. Principled thought is arid if the principles are not applied to a profound and extensive understanding of the world. One can make a utilitarian calculation based on ridiculously narrow conceptions of what is good and harmful. One can consistently perform universalisable duties (like being truthful) with no good content (such as being truthful and at the same time highly ignorant). One can continually demonstrate virtues like moderation and yet be moderately engaging in behaviours that have no obvious goodness. The capacity to imagine others in each of these instances seems to be what is missing: to imagine the goods and harms experienced by others; to imagine the duties that others attach to one by virtue of one’s role or standing; to imagine the judgments that others make about what is virtuous and the desirability of consistent virtuousness. We are also suggesting that a powerful component in the development of this imagination, and its maintenance, is the discovery of ascribed ethics. The imagination cannot be developed by contemplating oneself and one’s task alone: there must be some element of

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discovering others’ expectations. The claim that imagination is a prerequisite to being moral does not imply that being imaginative is necessarily moral. A reviewer of an earlier version of this paper gave an example where engineers had used their imagination to plainly immoral ends. But the case that morality hinges on imagination does seem cogent to us.

In a recent paper on the problem of patient autonomy in medical ethics, Atkins14

drew on Nagel’s work to point to the subjective character of experience – the fact that a reductionist strategy can help us envisage what it would be like for us to have the characteristics of another being, but not what it is like for the other being to have those characteristics. There is a need, according to Atkins, for an epistemological humility with respect to the lives of others and what can be said to be right for them. Appreciating this subjectivity of experience lies at the heart of empathy. This is very much in tune with our own proposal, because we are arguing that it is not enough for engineers to know the facts of a risk that some piece of engineering imposes on people. Knowing the objective characteristics of a risk and putting himself or herself in the shoes of a risk bearer is not a sufficient process for the engineer to develop empathy. He or she must also find out what the risk bearer thinks, and should pay attention to the obligations the risk bearer ascribes to the engineer.

The upshot is that we cannot simply fall back on general, universal principles: it will still be informative to know about the responsibilities that people in other roles ascribe. These might turn out to be quite obvious, but even if they were obvious when one is confronted with them there might be virtue in being reminded of them. They might turn out to be highly unreasonable, but even if they were they might give useful insight into others’ expectations that one can modify. They might well turn out to be inconsistent, with different people having mutually exclusive requirements. But it might be possible to use them to refine one’s existing obligations. An engineer who stresses above all a duty of care might be dismissive of public consultation on the basis that the participation of non-experts in decision processes diminishes the likelihood that optimally safe options are chosen. Discovering that the public ascribes a duty to consult and involve risk bearers might influence the engineer at least to broaden his or her inventory of duties – if not to re-think the commitment to duty ethics more generally.

A brief examination of ascribed ethics

Our approach has been to find a feasible, if limited, approach to discovering ascribed ethics, and developing some tools to help engineers think through moral problems based on social ascription as a central element. The basic procedure was to analyse a series of reports on hazardous engineering failures written in the UK broadsheet press. This analysis involved making inferences about lay people’s expectations of engineers’ conduct towards technology that could cause harm. For example, one of the reports concerned the design of air bags in cars. A short person, who had had to sit very close to the steering wheel, was injured by the deployment of the airbag. The report described how the person in question felt aggrieved towards the designer because this

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protective technology was positively harmful to a small section of the population whose stature meant they had to violate a rule to sit at a certain distance from the device. Our inference was that people sometimes ascribe an obligation to engineers not to discriminate unreasonably among those they protect from harm. As with most of the ascribed obligations, it seems likely that those who ascribe them only do so because they have had reason to discover them through some set of events, typically being the victims of a harm of some kind. There is therefore no suggestion that these ascriptions are general to society in any sense.

An attempt was made to generalise on these ascribed obligations so that they could be made independent of a particular technology. For example, obligations that referred to airbags in cars were generalised to obligations about protective devices of any kind. The results are shown in Table 1. The first column is essentially a label, and the second a brief description, of each type of obligation.

It is important to emphasise that this was not an empirical piece of research to characterise the nature and variety of public expectations. It was rather an attempt to stimulate ethical development and understanding by making explicit the ethics that some people, especially in the aftermath of a harm, ascribe to engineers. Plainly there are severe limitations in this approach: • Expectations evoked by some harm are likely to be of a harsh and demanding

nature, and not necessarily expectations that the same people would have at other times.

• In many cases people will probably have no expectations on the matter in question until they or someone close is harmed, and will often be irrelevant otherwise.

• Not everyone in the same circumstances would develop the same expectations so they are hardly universal.

• Relying on journalists’ accounts of the harm and of people’s reactions and expectations is suspect.

• A sample of 50 reports is plainly not enough for inferring a full set of ascribed obligations. Nonetheless, despite these limitations, the procedure gives us a way of generating

ethics that could be ascribed to engineers at some time or other.

Observations

The expectations shown in Table 1 did not seem at all surprising and some were rather trite – for example the obligation that engineers should incorporate the lessons of experience. If there is a virtue in citing such obligations it is that sometimes there will be good reason not to meet such obligations (for example a particular historical experience may be irrelevant to a new technology), and people will expect some demonstration or argument as to why the obligation is inappropriate. Ascribed obligations are not simply there to be met, but reveal the legitimate concerns of a society to one of its professions. They perhaps reflect an increasingly assertive public that is increasingly averse to risks that are not voluntarily borne, but it would be arrogant for engineers not to communicate about such concerns.

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Table 1: Some examples of inferences from articles in the general press

Ascribed obligation Brief explanation

Nondiscriminating conditions

Devices should not impose safe operating conditions that leave certain classes of user less protected or at risk of positive harm

Uniform benefit Technology improvement should be used to protect those at risk equally Unsurprising rules Safe use of artefacts should not require the application of unintuitive rules Precautionary principle Defective tests should lead to the inference that tested products are

defective Knowing failure Known failures, especially, should be averted Reliability gain Technological progress should be taken as a reliability gain, not just a

performance gain Required disclosure Failures of products in service should be disclosed to the public Appropriate claims Commercial exploitation of claims to safety should be matched by safety

performance Implementing knowledge

Failures that can be predicted or envisaged should always be counteracted

Incorporating experience

Recommendations arising from failures should always be implemented

Systemic responsibility Human error on the part of users and operators should not be regarded as the basic cause of failures

Independent oversight Regulatory oversight should draw on independent information Positive integration Engineering organisations should not rely on market mechanisms to

integrate a fragmented system Timely investment The no-right-time-to-invest problem should not be allowed to delay

investment Unpalatable obsolescence

Systems should be renewed if technology is developing significantly over time

Significant disagreementLack of consensus among engineering decision makers should lead to the application of precautionary principle

Legitimate subjectivity The engineering culture of objective, deterministic certainty should be circumscribed to allow reasonable doubt

Allowable dissent Engineers should be able to show professional dissent from managerial decisions

Repeated failure Repeated failures should not be allowed to occur, regardless of relative frequency

Distraction failure Failures that are not safety critical but distract attention should be treated as safety critical

Remaining traces Systems that have been designed to have autonomy should leave full traces of their decision making

Political subsumption The risks arising in engineering projects should be subsumed by political and commercial considerations

Meaningful reputation Performance, for example in terms of reliability and safety, should match reputation

Cue provision Engineers should avoid hiding cues that reveal danger even if this means reducing comfort

State-of-art investment Investment should be made in the state of the art technology Lifestyle consistency Engineers’ lifestyles should be consistent with the values embodied in the

technologies they are developing Collateral protection Technologies should not be developed without accompanying

technologies that protect against their harms

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It is perhaps also true to say that most of the expectations listed in Table 1 are non- utilitarian in requiring engineers to avoid some harm, without qualification. They did not involve avoiding some harm as long as doing so was reasonably practicable, for instance. This is probably inevitable given that such expectations have been voiced in the aftermath of failures of various kinds, when the victims, especially, are concerned not with the balance of risk and benefit prior to a failure, but with the actual harm that follows a failure. But the broadly non-utilitarian nature of the expectations is consistent with Vesilind and Gunn’s7 view that public morality tends to be deontological in nature, in contrast with what they claim is the utilitarian nature of engineering thinking. We argued in the Introduction that utilitarianism was not a particular feature of engineers’ reasoning, but it is true that the engineering task requires some reconciliation of trade-offs. The inferred expectations in Table 1 make little concession to this. For example the obligation to avoid discriminating between risk bearers in the extent of the protection afforded to them would rule out any technology that cannot protect people equally well. It would rule out car airbags that protect most of the people most of the time because people who have to sit too close lose out on the protection and are vulnerable to a positive harm from the airbag’s deployment. This is all fairly informative to engineers, showing that a utilitarian defence of a technological decision will not suffice, in some people’s eyes, in the event of some harm.

Some of the expectations in Table 1 were concerned with how benefits should be taken from technology improvements. For example the ‘uniform benefits’ expectation was that as technology improved all risk bearers should gain, in roughly equal or proportionate measure. This was inferred from an article that described improvements in the safety of car occupants and the lack of improvement in the safety of pedestrians and others outside cars who were vulnerable to impact with cars. The ‘reliability gain’ expectation was that technological improvement should be taken as a reliability improvement rather than a performance improvement. In other words, if there was some improvement in technology, this should be used in a such a way that it makes products less likely to fail, rather than, say, operate more quickly. This is rather similar to Reason’s15 point about how safety gains are often converted into productivity gains. The ‘unpalatable obsolescence’ expectation was that old systems should be renewed as technology improves, and should not be left in place, side-by-side with new systems that embody the latest technology. There is an essential unfairness for those who have to use the old systems. And the ‘collateral protection’ expectation was that we should not be putting technologies that produce some harm into effect until there are accompanying technologies to deal with this harm.

Not all the ascribed obligations were about the minimisation of harm, at least in a direct sense. The ‘meaningful reputation’ obligation, for instance, was that engineering firms should act in a way that is commensurate with their reputations, and the fault where they do not is a fault of deception as much as a fault of poor workmanship. Reputation is important information in a market economy and firms have a duty to maintain it. The argument that there is no moral element to this – that firms will simply suffer commercially if they do things that are at odds with their reputations – is inadequate because, by the time a reputation has been damaged, people who acted on it

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might have been harmed. Thus society tolerates variability in performance so long as it knows who are the high and low performers.

One could also argue that many of the ascribed obligations are relevant to managers in engineering industry rather than engineers themselves. For example, the obligations related to the distributions of technological improvement really point to managerial decisions about where and how to invest, as much as engineering decisions about how a technology should perform. This would be consistent with Goldman’s3

‘socially captive’ view of the engineer. It is difficult, however, to draw a clear line between engineering and management within engineering firms, and it is perhaps as much a matter of self-image as objective test when an engineer advancing through the management structure becomes a manager and loses his or her role as an engineer. It is also difficult to look at the decision, for example, of whether to take a technological improvement as a protection gain or a performance gain, and say that this is clearly a management decision or an engineering decision. When, for instance, a new kind of device can be used to make a process faster or safer it is not necessarily clear whether the decision to do one or the other is a managerial one or a technical one. Questions both of technical difficulty and commercial attractiveness will enter into the decision, and will in any case be inter-related. It seems to us reasonable, therefore, that we should treat the entries in Table 1 as obligations ascribed to engineers, but not exclude their relevance to managers.

Finally, we wanted to describe a case described in one of the reports where we felt that both public and designers were neglecting a relevant duty. The case concerned an infant’s spoon that changed colour if food it came into contact with was too hot for a child to eat. Both commentators and evidently designers saw this protection as being desirable. But it is not hard to see that such protective products have the drawback that they relieve parents of the need to develop their own judgment about hazardous conditions. This leaves them less well prepared in situations where the device is unavailable, and in such situations perhaps more likely to hurt the child. There is thus a kind of protection to which both designers and users subscribe, but which is actually rather ambiguous in terms of its benefits. This is rather similar to the ‘levee’ effect cited by Fischhoff et al.16 Protective measures, for example against the effects of flooding, are seen as desirable by both engineers and members of the general public who are thereby protected. But the defences lead people to neglect additional hazards which the defences do not tackle. This is also similar to the ‘abused redundancy’ effect that we have found in our own work. A designer sees there is a possibility an operator will forget an action so provides an automatic device to protect the system. It is quite likely that operators or their representatives will bring such possibilities to the designers’ attention in the first place. However, operators in practice – when they see such devices – often take their existence as an opportunity to neglect the action completely and rely completely on the automatic device. The device is designed only to provide sufficient protection as an occasionally activated device, so soon fails when relied on routinely. The upshot is that both engineering designers and users can both, inadvertently, advocate protection when it is inappropriate or ineffectual. This then seems to imply that designers cannot depend solely on ascribed obligations as a way of

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limiting their responsibilities, or providing moral ideas. An engineer might find this unfortunate, since it would be a source of certainty to be able to say that if users want protection X they should be given it. But it does not seem defensible to do so. Thus ascribed ethics can be informative and arresting, and capable of affecting engineers’ morality, without taking on some higher status than other influences on this morality.

Conclusions

Practical use of the study outcomes The most obvious use of the outcomes, summarised in Table 1, is to provide engineers with a stimulus to reasoning about ethical issues. This could be done in an essentially ‘on-line’ way – that is, during the course of the substantive engineering process – by asking whether in one’s current project one is likely to violate ascribed ethics of the kind listed in the table. The idea is to have a checklist: something that reminds one of what others will see as requirements, whether reasonably or not. The second approach is to use the outcomes in an ‘off-line’ way – in some activity that is not part of the engineering process. For example it might provide a way of structuring a debate with oneself or colleagues about the scope and nature of one’s responsibilities. It seems quite likely that many engineers would want to reject some of the ethics ascribed to them, but at the same time they introduce concepts that may normally be passed over in, say, risk analyses. For example, the fact that airbags in cars are harmful to people who sit very close to them turns something that is generally beneficial into something that is harmful for a small proportion of the population. This discriminatory element is perhaps easily overlooked, but has implications for various decisions, such as the following: • When should a technology be introduced? Should it be introduced as soon as a

utilitarian calculation tips in its favour, or should it be delayed until no-one is made worse-off than hitherto?

• In what direction should further technological development take place – in further enhancing the protection of those already benefiting, or mitigating the harm to those currently losing? The airbags case also yielded a second expectation – that engineers should not rely

on people following a rule that was not ‘common sense’ (to the extent that people did not have to be told the rule in order to follow it). It is unreasonable for engineers to expect people to protect themselves from harm by engaging in a behaviour, such as following instructions, which they find difficult to adopt for some reason. The difficulty, but also the necessity, of influencing the way products are used17 seems to be a common problem for engineering. It seems evident that some engineers are prepared to draw the scope of their responsibility in such a narrow way that they can ignore it. This is an issue that engineers need to debate repeatedly as technological possibilities change and as societal norms change.

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Problems with the ascribed ethics themselves Plainly the obligations that individual members of the public may ascribe to engineers may be problematic. They may be: • Odious, for example demanding that engineers subscribe to an extreme political

doctrine that espouses evil methods or makes vicious assumptions. None of the ascribed obligations revealed in this study were of this kind.

• Unfeasible, for example demanding expenditures on protection that cannot be funded – perhaps because the same people ascribing the obligation are also unwilling to pay higher prices or taxes for the services they receive.

• Idiosyncratic, reflecting the particular situation and background of the ascribing person. It is tempting to dismiss idiosyncrasies because an engineer dealing with a wide public, for example an engineer who designs a consumer product, cannot please all of the people all of the time. But averaging out the people one has in mind when, for example, deciding on acceptable levels of risk is not necessarily defensible.

• Unrepresentative, even of the person’s general feelings about engineers. This is especially so if they have arisen in distressing circumstances that do not lend themselves to disinterested reason. Victims of engineering failures, like accidents arising from defective axles on trains, are quite likely to ascribe obligations to people who could have prevented the failure, they are quite likely to generate sympathy among other members of the public, and they are quite likely to receive widespread attention.

• Inconsistent, with other obligations either ascribed to or espoused by engineers. Wealthy people who have easy access to goods are quite likely to emphasise engineers’ obligations to protect them from harm. Poor people are quite likely to emphasise engineers’ obligations to produce goods that are inexpensive.

• Ignorant, reflecting a lack of knowledge of the difficulties faced by engineers having to reconcile conflicting demands. Surely, an engineer might argue, people who ascribe obligations to others should not do so unless they are careful to understand what those others have to do. We have suggested earlier that problematic obligations are still informative. They

help to reveal the minds of people affected by engineering, and they can help engineers put reasonable bounds on general principles that they had hitherto thought universal. For example, as an engineer you might always have believed that any kind of protection against some harm is better than none: learning that some people expect you to protect different classes of people equally might lead you to qualify that. Looking at the entries in Table 1, they do not seem especially problematic in most of the senses we have just suggested, but they are demanding and difficult to meet as universal requirements. They do not leave open the engineers’ conduct to a utilitarian calculation but specify it, regardless of utilitarian considerations.

What to do with the ascribed ethics First, if engineers are to recognise ascribed obligations in the development of their ethics they need some kind of meta-ethic that modifies or combines these obligations

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with the ethics they hitherto espoused. We have suggested earlier that this could take the form of limits to prior generalisations. If, for example, one has a general utilitarian ethic, and encounters problems, like that with the airbag, where utilitarianism has been followed but a small group of product users do not receive the benefit of protection, then one could modify the general utilitarian principle. For example one could espouse the principle that the best course of action is utilitarian unless there is a group of people who are positively harmed by the action. Or the principle could be stricter, and insist that no actions which provide protection differentially (even though no-one is positively harmed) is acceptable. The former seems more plausible than the latter. There is a danger of moral relativism here, of modifying every universal principle until it fits every situation in a different way.

Second, it seems to us that some concern with ascribed obligations should be introduced into moral maturity models. There are various models of moral maturity in existence – models that are both descriptive of moral development, such as Kohlberg’s, and models that are essentially normative. A normative model used for teaching is, for example, reported by Spier.18 This refers to qualities like the capacity to make a moral determination that is above personal values, and implement a moral decision in the face of forces that militate against it, but it does not refer to moral imagination or empathy. Whether or not it is a descriptive dimension of maturity, there is a good case, based on our earlier arguments in favour of ascribed ethics, that moral imagination and empathy should also be a dimension of normative maturity models. It should be used to judge the extent to which engineers are morally developed.

Third, it seems quite likely that being confronted with others’ expectations could help engineers find imaginative solutions, not just be imaginative about the consequences of their decisions. Whitbeck19 has observed that it is misleading to characterise the ethical problems of engineers as ‘multiple choice’ tests in which one is simply choosing among a small set of pre-defined options. It is more realistic to view ethical problem solving as finding options in the first place. If an engineer were designing an airbag system and had to think about its discriminatory properties (s)he might start to think about what physical constraints have this discriminatory consequence, and might be able to ask how such constraints can be circumvented. There is plainly no guarantee this would yield new possibilities, but perhaps it could. There is a sense in which knowledge about ascribed obligations can be unfavourable, in making the engineering job even harder, but also a sense in which it can be favourable, being a stimulus for thinking beyond the normal run of concerns.

Aren’t engineers part of the ascribing group? It is important not to differentiate too definitively between engineers and the people (the ‘public’) who sometimes bear risk arising from engineers’ decisions. Engineers are product buyers, users, maintainers and disposers in contexts other than their work. They are fully socialised as a rule, despite their image. They would probably also be uncomfortable with compartmentalisation20 and would not deliberately hold one, general moral expectation of designers at home and another at work. Nonetheless it seems to us that compartmentalisation is probably true some of the time, not least

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because much human activity is concrete, and a response to particular situations, so is not entirely subject to generalisation and being tested against general rules of conduct. It also seems to us that the moral case against compartmentalisation is not completely compelling. If one is inconsistent in one’s principles there is an evolutionary advantage, in the sense that this allows one to see how different principles work out, provided that one knows that one has adopted different principles. There is also an argument that you cannot perform as well as possible as an X if you cannot subscribe single-mindedly to the values of role X but instead try to take account of all possible perspectives on the actions of an X. Substantial engineering successes would never have come into being if the engineer had not ignored the fact that if he or she were someone who could be harmed by the enterprise then he or she would have objected to it. This seems to us to be a weak argument because, as well as permitting great engineering successes, it would also permit great engineering failures. But the point is that compartmentalisation has certain goods as well as bads, and probably exists to some degree. Therefore the idea that engineers could learn something from ascribed ethics is not vitiated by the fact that in some contexts engineers are also users of engineered artefacts.

Limitations of the work Our treatment of engineers making decisions that create risks for others has dealt with the engineer largely as an individual, although an individual who works in a formal organisation. It has ignored the role of various cultures – for example at the level of firm and profession – and the role of social constraints. It has also concentrated on the engineer as risk creator and ignored the situations where engineers face moral difficulties in the risks they observe others creating. The procedure we adopted to explore the responsibilities that members of the public ascribe to engineers was also limited in reach. It looked predominantly at the ascriptions of those who had recently suffered some harm, and it looked only at the way journalists had written about these. It provided a way of generating possible ascriptions rather than producing a definitive empirical study of them.

Nonetheless the study has made a start in dealing with an issue that is central to a profession’s ethical development. Professions such as engineering that deal in a relatively impersonal way with risks that are often borne by a non-voluntary population need to deal both with the objective qualities of those risks and with the subjective. They need to define their responsibilities by drawing on both their own moral precepts, and the morality that outsiders expect them to exhibit. Taking ascribed ethics seriously is a way of keeping in touch with a changing society – a society that is perhaps becoming increasingly averse to risks arising from technology that is increasingly taken for granted.

Acknowledgements: Many thanks are due to all with whom we have had discussions during the course of this work. Thanks are also due to the anonymous referees for their constructive criticisms. The study was partly funded by the UK EPSRC under grant GR/R12503.

J. S. Busby and M. Coeckelbergh

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

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