Online Ethics Center: Teaching the Individual Engineer's Responsibility for Safety

I. What to Stress

II. Suggested Pre-Assignments

III. Expanding Design Course Material

IV. Web Resources and Bibliography

I. What to Stress

Engineers should understand that they have a responsibility to assure public safety and welfare. This duty is central to professional conduct. But often an individual engineer faces obstacles to this duty; often in the form of other duties which conflict with it. Sometimes an engineer must trade one safety concern for another. Other times, an engineer's duty to maintain client confidentiality can conflict with the duty to ensure safety. Often, an engineer must make tradeoffs between safety and cost. For example, we might be able to make cars far safer, but only at incredible cost to the company and consumer. How safe, then, is safe enough?

Professors should discuss these obligations and the kinds of conflicts that arise between them and should show students how to recognize these conflicts in the course of their work. Have students identify the people to whom they will likely have obligations in the course of their work; co-workers, managers, clients, general public, themselves (family), and their profession. Ask students to list the obligations they believe they have to each of these groups of people.

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Suggested Pre-Assignments

Based on the discussion above, ask students if they can think of realistic situations in which the obligations they identified can conflict. Students should come up with a scenario that depicts a conflict. After sharing this scenario, keep embellishing it with different "facts" to show students how the introduction of new facts alters their perception of the conflict they initially depicted. Professors can make use of the assignments described in the Background Skills page of this section to further this discussion.

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Expanding Design Course Material

Rosa Lynn Pinkus and Claire Gloeckner have developed an interesting and empirically tested project that helps students learn about these issues by expanding design course material. After having students create scenarios that depict conflicts between these obligations, students should try to do this with their own research and design projects.

In their article, "Want to Help Students Learn Engineering Ethics? Have them Write Case Studies Based on Their Research/Senior Design Project," Pinkus and Gloeckner explain the benefits of this assignment (over having students write about scenarios not associated with their own research).

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Web Resources and Bibliography

Ethical Decisions-Morton Thiokol and the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster

A background summary by Roger Biosjoly of important events leading to the Challenger disaster starting with January, 1985, plus the specifics of the telecon meeting held the night prior to the launch at which an attempt was made to stop the launch by the Morton Thiokol engineers. A detailed account will show why the off-line telecon caucus by Morton Thiokol Management constituted the unethical decision-making forum which ultimately produced the management decision to launch Challenger without any restrictions.

The Composite- Bicycle Case: Optimization, Option Disclosure, and Problem Redefinition: Derivative Moral Obligations of Engineers and the Case of the Composite-Material Bicycle

Case study and analysis by Robert McGinn based on a consulting engineer's experience coping with ethical conflicts at work; a conflict between the duty not to undermine another consulting engineer who has hired him in an attempt to secure a contract to develop a composite material bicycle and the obligation to uphold public safety, and a conflict between directives to heed the problematic work orders of his client's manager and specific obligations to follow good practices derived from the engineer's general obligation to serve the legitimate interests of the client to the best of her or his ability.

An Investigation of the Therac-25 Accidents

Nancy Leveson and Clark Turner investigate the Therac-25, a computerized radiation therapy machine that massively overdosed patients at least six times between June 1985 and January 1987. An assessment of the factors that undermined safety are examined.

Three Mile Island Nuclear Accident

This page provides a thorough case study of the TMI-2 accident including a description of the series of events which led up to the partial meltdown of the reactor core. These events were a combination of human error, insufficient training, bad operating procedures and unforseen equipment failure. Thus, this is a nuclear accident that could have easily been prevented.

This page contains links to several cases which situations that raise ethical questions about public safety and welfare. They are based on original cases brought to the BER (Board of Ethical Review) of the NSPE (National Society of Professional Engineers) for review. These cases can be used as grounds for discussion, as is suggested above.

William LeMessurier: The Fifty-Nine Story Crisis: A Lesson in Professional Behavior

William LeMessurier, one of the nation's most distinguished structural engineers, served as design and construction consultant on the innovative Citicorp headquarters tower, which was completed in 1977 in New York. The next year, after a college student studying the tower design had called him to point out a possible deficiency, LeMessurier discovered that the building was indeed structurally deficient. LeMessurier faced a complex and difficult problem of professional responsibility in which he had to alert a broad group of people to the structural deficiency and enlist their cooperation in repairing it.