9789144127682 by Smakprov Media AB

ETHICS IN ENGINEERING

THOMAS TARO LENNERFORS

The book is also available in Swedish: Etik för ingenjörer, Studentlitteratur 2019.

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Art. No 40007 ISBN 978-91-44-12768-2 First edition 1:1 © The author and Studentlitteratur 2019 studentlitteratur.se Studentlitteratur AB, Lund Book design: Jesper Sjöstrand/Metamorf Design Cover design: Jens Martin/Signalera Cover illustration: Shutterstock.com Photo of author: Mikael Wallerstedt Printed by Eurographic Group, 2019

Innehåll

Preface 7

1 Introduction 9 The three domains of engineering practice 11 What is ethics? 13 The insufficiency of law 21 The structure of the book 22

2 Awareness 25 Working with technology 26 Working together with others 30 Ethics in your personal life 35

3 Responsibility 41 Freedom to – agent-specific aspects 43 Freedom from – context-specific aspects 46 Impact 47 The components of responsibility in practice 48 Responsibilities of designers and users 50 Why take responsibility? 54

4 Avoiding responsibility 57 We are determined 57 No resources 58 Lack of time 60 Too many demands 60

Respect for authorities 61 Peer pressure 63 Division of labour 64 Rationalizations 65

5 Responsibilities of professional engineers 71 What is a profession? 71 The engineering profession 74 Responsibility of engineers and codes of ethics 77 Professional ethics in conflict with other values 81

6 Critical thinking 85 Emotions and reason 86 Six models for critical thinking 89 Discourse ethics 102 Casuistry 107 Strategic, biased, and reflective uses of the models 107

7 Consequentialist ethical theories 113 For whom? 115 What? 118 Rules and consequences 121 Total happiness or happiness for all? 121 Possibilities and risks 122

Traditional deontological systems 129 Kantian duty ethics 133 Prima facie duties 136 Rights: patient-centred duty ethics 137

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8 Duties and rights 129

9 Virtue ethics 143 Plato 143 Aristotle 146 Modern virtue ethics 149 Virtues or situations? 152 The Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path 154

10 Ethics of freedom 161 Nietzsche 162 Kierkegaard: the aesthetical and ethical way of life 165 Authenticity 166 Life and death 169 Libertarianism 170 Autonomy 170

11 Relational ethics 177 Ethics of care 179 Ethics in different relationships 183 Trust 186

12 Justice and fairness 193

Basic concepts of justice 194 Justice and its relation to other ethical claims 200 Unfairness and injustice 202 John Rawls 203 Robert Nozick 204

13 Environmental ethics 211 A brief background to environmental ethics 212 Sustainable development and sustainability 214 The moral standing of animals and other things 217 Deep ecology 219

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14 Action and beyond 225 Ethical action following a judgement 225 Ethical action over time: a roadmap 227 Ideals and how to relate to them 228 The linear process becomes circular 229

15 Assignments and case studies 233 Awareness: assignment for chapters 1–2 233 The Kista construction accident: case study for chapters 3–5 233 GMO salmon: case study for chapter 6 236 Bribery: an exercise in casuistry (chapter 6) 236 Autonomous cars: case study for chapters 6–8 238 A robot to love: case study for chapters 9–11 240 Nuclear waste: case study for chapters 12–13 240 Interview study: assignment for chapters 1–13 242 “Just do it”: assignment for chapter 14 243 Technical development project and thesis work 243

Notes 247 Image sources 253 References 255 Index of persons 261 Index of topics 263

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Chapter 1

Introduction

An episode of the TV ser ies 24 is about a software engineer who is the

only one able to program a bomb that some terrorists want to detonate in the middle of a large city. They kidnap him on his way to work and they try to persuade him to do what they want. He refuses. The terrorists threaten him and push his head underwater, but he resists. Not until one of the terrorists takes out an electric drill and threatens to use it on the engineer does he yield and start programming the bomb. This brief, macabre episode shows that the engineer was valuable to the terrorists since he had knowledge – unique knowledge – about a particular technology. He didn’t want to use his knowledge for evil purposes but was forced to comply. Did he do the right thing? Was he responsible for the consequences when the bomb detonated? Let us now turn to another example a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. If you have seen Star Wars IV: A New Hope you probably remember that the rebels could destroy the Death Star by dropping a bomb into a duct leading all the way into the very core of the construction. And maybe you, like engineers and others, wondered how one could design something that senseless. If the evil imperial forces had the technical knowledge to construct such a marvellously horrible death machine, how could they have made such an error? We get the answer in the 2016 movie Rogue One, where Galen Erso, an engineer forced to work for the Empire, designs

Darth Vader.

Chapter 1 Introduction

the Death Star with this flaw in order for the rebels to be able to destroy it. He engaged in an act of insubordination. This is clearly an example of ethics in engineering. Could the engineer have done otherwise? One alternative would be to raise his voice against building the Death Star, but most likely the Emperor, Darth Vader, and the others would have remained unconvinced, and the consequences for the engineer would have been fatal. For long, Galen Erso tried to avoid the imperial forces, hiding on a desolate planet, but when he was apprehended and forced to carry out the completion of the Death Star, he had no reasonable chance to quit his job. The Empire is not just something you quit. Further, Galen could have remained loyal to the Empire by designing the best Death Star possible, truly following orders and pleasing his bosses, but that would have been against his principles. So, was his choice correct?

These are two extreme examples of ethics in engineering. But also, away from the extreme example of fictive terrorists and now, on our planet, engineers and others who are developing, implementing, maintaining, and using technology face ethical issues.

The three domains of engineering practice As an engineer, you will work with technology, which is the first domain of engineering practice. Technology – whether defined as artefacts, the skills and knowledge to produce such artefacts, or as more intricately linked technological systems – shapes our society by shaping our perceptions and actions (see further chapter 2). Technology thus has an impact on humans and nature. BUILDING BRIDGES The movie Dream Big features Avery Bang. When she was an engineering student, she did not really know what to do with her life, but then she studied abroad in Fiji. There, she realized how simple bridges could transform people’s lives, and therefore she decided to dedicate her life to building bridges. She is now the president and CEO of Bridges to Prosperity, which contributes to community development by providing footbridges over impassable rivers.

THE SLOPPY INSPEC TOR An engineer was hired by a construction company to inspect a facade on a building in Manhattan. In 2011, he filed a report stating that the facade was safe. Four years later a part of the facade fell down and killed an infant. The engineer admitted that he never inspected the site and that the report was completely fake.1

As a developer of technology, you could be the very mind behind the technology, or the one improving and changing it. Your decisions affect how people relate to the technology and thus you shape people’s perceptions and actions quite directly. You might also be the one who maintains the technology, controlling it, inspecting it, and adapting it to the present

Chapter 1 Introduction

T WO-SIDED PRINTING 3D printing has allowed engineers to create prototypes and products in a way that used to be impossible. For example, there are already now people who have managed to print semi-automatic guns. But, on the other hand, 3D printers may also be used to print prosthetics.

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Chapter 1â&#x20AC;&#x201A; Introduction

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needs. You could also be an implementer who decides which technologies others should use. Examples of implementers are municipal buyers and managers. Implementation may concern robotic process automation of project management, robots in healthcare, the decision to adopt climate change geoengineering, and so on. As both a professional and a private individual, you are also a user of technology. You actively decide to use a particular technology, such as a social media platform, how much you want to use it and when. By using technology, you support it and indirectly contribute to developing and spreading it. All of these different roles have a different impact. While all people are users of technology, engineers to a greater extent work with development, implementation, and maintenance of technology. Engineers therefore have a greater impact than other people when it comes to technology. If engineers have such an impact on our perceptions and actions, how should they use that power? Given this power, a main idea in this book is that one ought to promote ethical reflection about engineering practice. If more engineers were to reflect upon their own impact and the positive and negative sides of the technologies they develop, it is likely that they would develop technology with a positive impact on humans and nature. But it is not easy to be a reflecting engineer, particularly not when it comes to technology. In the early 20th century, sociologist William Fielding Ogburn 2 coined the term cultural lag, which points out that societal reflection, thinking, and discussion always lag behind technological innovations and changes. Technology seems to outspeed ethics.

Apart from working with technology, engineers constantly work together with others, which is the second domain of engineering practice. These others can be stakeholders, such as customers, suppliers, and managers. Here, issues such as workplace relationships, fair compensation, bribery, and the handling of sensitive information come up. A third area is ethics in your personal life, since this often has an impact or is impacted by your engineering practice. It may relate to you as a consumer or family member. What do you do if your job has a negative impact on your private life, or vice versa? The book aims to cover these three domains.

What is ethics? In general, ethics is about how one should live one’s life, what is good, what is the right way to act, and what one should do. And in that sense, ethics is everywhere. Philosopher Claes Gustafsson argues that a basic human activity is that we moralize, which means that we constantly evaluate other people’s actions from an ethical perspective:3 “She shouldn’t have lied in this situation.” “When you make a business deal with this company, count the number of fingers you have left after shaking hands with their representatives.” “A robot can never be human.” “That dude bought a sex robot – yuck!” But moralizing is not enough. It is rather automatic and at times you only end up reproducing what others are saying and thinking. But how about you? What do you think? Perhaps you rely on your gut feeling. But is the gut feeling correct? Did people in former days not have a gut feeling that slavery was okay? Or that women were not allowed to vote? Furthermore, you might face ethical dilemmas in your life which you cannot just moralize about. For example, should you try to study two different master programmes at the same time to learn more, or should you instead take care of your relationships with your family, your friends, and your partner? Should you doublecheck all the calculations made by your colleague or do you trust her competence? Should you accept the offer to work at a company developing weapons systems or not? In these dilemmas, you do not moralize, nor make judgements about a certain ethical issue, because the dilemma concerns you directly. The aim of this book is to support you to develop the skills to make judgements and

Chapter 1 Introduction

navigate through dilemmas within the three domains of engineering practice. This is important for your future working life, so important that it is required in the Swedish Higher Education Ordinance for all bachelor’s, master’s, and 3-year and 5-year engineering programmes. A key concept for this is critical thinking (see chapter 6). To learn how to think critically about ethics, it is important to think with others. Therefore, the book will guide you through ethical theory as it is discussed in various academic fields, as well as some more popular contexts. At the universities, ethics is often seen as a part of philosophy, where philosophers have discussed what concepts such as “good”, “evil”, and “right” mean. These philosophers have also proposed normative ethical theories – what principles should guide us in our lives. However, ethics is also a central concern in other fields, such as anthropology, psychology, and sociology. In these fields, ethics is often more descriptive. In other words, they study how ethical decision-making works, how we respond to various moral dilemmas, the norms, values, and cultures in different groups, what role trust plays in building a functioning society, and so on. In short, it studies what ethics is to people, how it functions. Ethics is also studied by historians of philosophy, who try to understand Immanuel Kant, Mary Wollstonecraft, Friedrich Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt, and other philosophers in new ways. Furthermore, ethics is discussed by practitioners and academics from various more practical fields, such as engineering. In this book, you will think together with all of these sources of inspiration.

Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre described in the 1980s how the theoretical discussion about ethics was fragmented and incomplete, and this also applies to a great extent today.4 He argued that when we talk about ethics, both in practice and in academic debates, we use a wide range of concepts that are all based on different theoretical foundations and which stem from different historical contexts. Furthermore, sometimes we use the same ethical concept to refer to different things. It is difficult to define ethical concepts, and even if one manages to create a definition, it is not certain that people will accept or use it. The ethical concepts are discursive constructs,

Chapter 1 Introduction

Ethics is messy

which means that they are created as words, concepts, and sentences in our social practices (in groups, in societies, and so on). This means that it is difficult to be sure of the exact meaning of an ethical concept. One cannot merely look it up in a dictionary, on Wikipedia, or in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. In these sources, we get a particular view of how the concept is understood, or should be understood, but not the “objectively true” way, because there is (probably) none. In his late work, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that it is not easy to create precise definitions of a certain concept.5 He tried that in his youth but gave up. For example, it is very difficult to define the essence of the concept game, but all games share some characteristics of the concept, such as chess, golf, badminton, soccer, and Monopoly. However, the same features are not found in all of them. They have “family resemblances”, Wittgenstein said. The same goes for ethical concepts. Take the example of the difference between ethics and morality. They stem from the same word in two different languages – ancient Greek and Latin. Seen from that light, they should mean the same thing. In everyday speech, some use them to express the same thing, while others believe that there is a difference. In philosophy, the concepts often mean different things. However, academics distinguish between the concepts in different ways, which leads to conceptual confusion, particularly since they are sometimes not open to other ways of looking upon the issue. The most straightforward distinction, which may be found on Wikipedia, is that morality represents the beliefs that people hold and how they act within the sphere of doing good, right, and so on, while ethics represents the systematic reflection about morality. So, ethics would be the philosophy of morality or, in other words, moral philosophy. This differs somewhat from existential philosophy (see chapter 10), where morality represents the (often somewhat boring) norms of society. Ethics for these existentialists concerns being true to yourself and not wasting your life following the rules of others. As the Swedish band Broder Daniel sings, “Why is it so we die just as copies/If it’s so we’re born originals.” There are other distinctions as well. Some say that ethics is the guidelines provided by an external authority, such as codes of conduct or religious principles, while morality is personal convictions and one’s own principles

Chapter 1 Introduction

about what is right and wrong. Another way of distinguishing between the concepts is that morality is about what should or should not be done (for example not to violate human rights), while ethics describes the process of reaching a judgement about what to do. In this text, we use ethics and morality synonymously, since there are more conceptual disadvantages than advantages involved in distinguishing between the two. So, how can we study this messy field? We could, on the one hand, structure the chaos by providing clear definitions of concepts. This strategy would probably still lead to not everyone accepting and using the concepts in the way we intend. And if we have a strict definition and others use another definition, it will limit our ability to communicate, which creates frustration and conflict between us. On the other hand, and which is what this book suggests, we could embrace the messiness, muddle through ethics, and try to sketch a preliminary outline of how we generally use these ethical concepts and how they relate to each other. In this way we can add nuance to discussions, and we learn to think rather than slavishly follow strict definitions. Additionally, it allows us to be flexible when new concepts appear in the debate, which they will definitely do. This is also a way to use the theories about ethics for our main purpose – to think critically. In the next part, we make a first attempt to think critically about some ethical concepts we face in our everyday lives.

We have already discussed the distinction between ethics and morality. Another important concept sometimes used is norms. A norm is some kind of rule of action that is normative – and normative means how we should or ought to behave. If someone says that “it’s not cricket” they mean that the norms of fair play or decent behaviour are being broken. Norms specify what is normal. Norms are not always good. Perhaps being heterosexual is the norm if you are an engineer, and gay and lesbian engineers then have to hide their sexuality to safeguard their careers.6 In engineering practice, norms may also have a non-moral meaning, for example technical norms. Rules are similar to norms, but in everyday speech they are not always as embedded with value as norms. For example, there may be rules of soccer,

Chapter 1 Introduction

Ethical concepts

which might not be related to ethics (but following them is an ethical issue). Rules are frequently distinguished from principles, which are seen as more directly stemming from some kind of ethical argumentation and ethical values. Principles are also broader than rules. During the history of ethics, there has been a lot of critique against rule-following. For example, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has argued that the Holocaust was not based on evil but on rule-following.7 Yes, perhaps there were genuinely evil people around, but the main bulk of those carrying out the Holocaust were people who just followed rules. And this is yet another argument for the importance of critical thinking. Another word related to ethics is values. One is often confronted by questions about what one values in life, or which values one lives by. In many companies, the “core values” of the company are described, for example stating that the company should not only be profitable, but also care about values such as corporate social responsibility (CSR) or sustainability. Intrinsic or inherent value is often distinguished from extrinsic or instrumental value – do we believe that something is valuable in itself (intrinsic), or just as a means to something else (extrinsic/instrumental)? For example, one might debate whether the environment has intrinsic or instrumental value. If we want to preserve the environment for the sake of human beings, then it has instrumental value. If we preserve it for its own sake, we take it to have intrinsic value. There are also values that do not relate to ethics, such as aesthetic values. You might think that a piece of music is good, that it has aesthetic value, and that it has little to do with ethics. We may also say that various business deals have economic value. So, value is a broader concept than ethics. Right is yet another word related to ethics. “She did the right thing” is an expression that we often hear. The right thing may be linked to ethics if it concerns the right choice in an ethical dilemma, but it may also be disconnected from ethics if it concerns the right answer to a mathematical problem. Sometimes one distinguishes between the right and the good, where “the right” is more concerned with principles and “the good” with outcomes. “The right” is more often linked to deontological, duty-based theories (see chapter 8) while “the good” often is related to consequentialist theories (see chapter 7). But sometimes we use them in other ways.

Chapter 1 Introduction

Often we distinguish between the normative and the descriptive. The descriptive is when we account for something as it is. It is more related to facts. The normative, which is sometimes called prescriptive, concerns how we want things to be. Others distinguish between prescriptive – something that should be done – and proscriptive – something that should not be done – which is somewhat similar to the distinction between maximalistic ethics (reaching standards of ethical excellence) and minimalistic ethics (doing only what is required of you).8 Returning to the distinction between the descriptive and the normative, the 18th-century philosopher David Hume has argued that there can never be normative conclusions stemming from descriptive premises, something that is called the is/ought gap or Hume’s law.9 Imagine someone saying that human beings evolved as meat-eating animals and therefore we should eat meat. Hume would say that although it is a fact that human beings did evolve in this way, it does not follow that we ought to eat meat. Rather, there is an implicit assumption that we ought to do what we evolved to do.10 Many ethical theories concern the normative – how we should live, what we should do and so on, but theories may also be descriptions of how we behave. Although Hume’s law is sometimes called Hume’s guillotine, the distinction is not clear-cut. Remember the fact that many homosexual engineers hide their sexuality at work. Within this descriptive statement, there is also a more normative message – they should not have to do this. Still, the distinction is useful for thinking about ethics.

Psychological egoism is a descriptive theory saying that we are egoists – we think about ourselves all the time. Ethical egoism is a normative theory (see chapter 7) saying that we should be egoists.

Yet another concept is etiquette. While ethics is about “taking serious things seriously”, as philosopher Göran Collste11 writes in his Introduction to Ethics, etiquette primarily concerns things that could be seen as less serious than ethics. Sometimes we describe etiquette as manners. In Japan, “manner mode” means silent mode on a mobile phone. Even though

Chapter 1 Introduction

DESCRIP TIVE AND NORMATIVE EGOISM

Manner rules in the Tokyo metro.

etiquette might seem irrelevant for ethics, our behaviour when it comes to minor matters could raise awareness about larger issues. Look at the Japanese manner rules in the figure above. If we realize that we cause harm by being drunk and passed out on the train, litter, or open an umbrella so that some people are exposed to water, we are likely better equipped to see our impact in other, more important practices. So, the next time you hold the door for someone, perhaps you learn something very deep.

Ethics as awareness, responsibility, critical thinking, and action In this book, a process is presented which sees ethics as consisting of four steps: awareness, responsibility, critical thinking, and action. Let us first discuss awareness. If we are not aware of ethical issues, then it is of course difficult, if not impossible, for us to act ethically, to do good. Therefore, a first step must be to become aware. This seems simple, but it is not. We are often used to one way of seeing things. Ethical issues may be hidden behind what Claes Gustafsson calls the wall of obviousness – a psychological barrier limiting our perception of reality,12 and more specifically in this book, a barrier making us blind to ethical issues. This wall is built by our expectations, and its bricks are our habits. Being able to identify an issue as ethical is a first step. It is about making the practices that you are part of an object of reflection, to become sensitized to ethics.

Chapter 1 Introduction

The second step is to make the ethical issue your own, in other words to take responsibility for it. It is easy to say that this or that particular ethical issue is not your concern, that somebody else should deal with it, that you do not have the means to have an impact on it even if you tried. Certainly, you do not have to carry all the burdens – some issues are the responsibility of others to solve, but perhaps fewer than we regularly think. To make an ethical issue your own, or to take responsibility, is thus the second step in this ethical framework. But what is responsibility? And what are our usual ways of avoiding it? The third step of the ethical process is critical thinking. Critical thinking does not mean to be “against something”, to criticize, but to see an issue from various perspectives, highlight the advantages and disadvantages, the good and bad sides, and, based on this process, to reach a judgement about the issue. Critical thinking is about thinking yourself, but is assisted by thinking together with others. This does not mean that we can hide behind others or behind ethical theories. Critical thinking demands that ethics is more than political correctness. Even if a lot of people, including your friends and family, even the entire society, thinks that some practice is ethically good, critical thinking still requires us to think and reach our own judgement, even though it is much easier to go with the flow.

Chapter 1 Introduction

The wall of obviousness.

The fourth step is action. It is not sufficient to just judge what is right in a particular situation, and then do something else. For example, perhaps you know that you should not go by car to work because of the environmental impact, but you do it anyway. Ethics can never be about only thought and reflection. Ethics is intrinsically linked to action. The various steps in this model will be explained in the book. But before that, we need to turn to an argument that says that ethics is not needed at all.

The insufficiency of law Think about all the laws that exist in the world, which allegedly are based on what we believe to be ethically correct. For example, since we value that everyone, irrespective of gender, ethnicity, religion, and so on is treated the same way and has the same opportunities, there are laws against discrimination. So why is ethics needed if such frameworks are already in place? Why do we have to think about ethics rather than just following the law? First of all, we can never be sure that the rules, laws, and frameworks are ethically correct. Throughout history, we have reformed law because our values changed, or when the power structure of society made it possible for us to change it. For example, voting rights were for a long time restricted to men and slavery was permitted. While we might think that we are at the “end of history”, the final state in which all laws are just and right, we should probably think that some laws still need to be reformed. There might thus be a potential conflict between ethics and law. Some claim that anti-piracy laws are immoral since they just protect the interests of powerful corporations. Others claim that a strong right to ownership (which is protected by law) is immoral since it makes society unequal. This discrepancy between ethics and law is one reason why following the law is simply not enough. What is interesting, however, is that we often learn about morality through what is legal and illegal. In other words, we might learn to think that something is unethical because it is illegal. Second, and in line with the preceding argument, it is important to remember that laws and principles are socially and politically constructed, which basically means that they seldom represent a potential objective

Chapter 1 Introduction

truth, but rather emerge from social processes. The laws allowing slavery were not created by the slaves, but by others. This might seem to open up to too much arbitrariness, but it also gives us the insight that laws can be changed by social processes. If there are laws we do not find ethically correct, it is possible to change them. Third, it is not entirely easy to follow a law. It is well-known that all laws need to be interpreted to work in practice. There is also a need for judgments about how the law should be applied in each particular case, which is the reason why there are courts. In each case we need to think about what the law means and how it should be applied. There is thus a need for a reflective, critical attitude rather than one of pure submission. This is what we try to promote by means of the ethical process. Fourth, one needs to remember that not everyone always follows the law. Perhaps you walk or cycle against a red light, which is illegal in many countries. Imagine then what others might do.

The structure of the book

Responsibility Chapters 3–5

Awareness Chapter 2

Critical thinking Chapters 6–13

Action Chapter 14

Chapter 1 Introduction

The structure of the book.

In chapter 2, awareness is discussed, and examples are provided from the three domains of engineering practice: working with technology, working together with others, and your private ethics. At the end of the chapter, you will for the first time meet a case that you will follow throughout the book: you are going to imagine that you are working at a company which will develop a robot and think about the ethical issues you will face. Chapters 3–5 concern responsibility. Chapter 3 is about the components of

responsibility, what it means to be responsible, and when we can say that we are responsible for something. Chapter 4 describes how we willingly or unwillingly do not take responsibility. Chapter 5 concerns the particular responsibilities that professional engineers have. Chapters 6–13 concern critical thinking. In chapter 6, models of ethical judgment and decisionmaking are presented. The rest of the chapters concern thinking together with others by studying ethical theory: consequentialism, duty ethics, virtue ethics, ethics of freedom, relationships, justice, and environmental ethics. All these theories are expected to contribute to the judgment and decision-making model in order to create better and more reflective decisions. Chapter 14 concerns action – the last step in the ethical process. The book is concluded by a number of assignments and case studies.

STUDY QUESTIONS

1 Did the engineer in the TV series 24 who programmed the bomb do the right thing? 2 Was Galen Erso from the movie Rogue One right not to follow orders? 3 What are the three domains of engineering practice? 4 What does it mean that ethics is messy? 5 In which academic fields is ethics studied and are there any differences in how ethics is studied in these fields? 6 What does it mean that ethical concepts are discursive constructs and how does that influence the meaning of ethical concepts? 7 What is the difference between ethics and morality? How do you use the concepts? 8 What are norms, rules, values, the right, the normative and the descriptive? 9 What are the steps in the ethical process described in the chapter? What do you think about that process? 10 How can we think critically by using ethical theory? 11 What are the differences and connections between ethics and law?

Chapter 1 Introduction

Thomas Taro Lennerfors is an associate professor at the Department of Engineering Sciences at Uppsala University. He teaches ethics and sustainability for engineering students. His research is in the interstices between ethics, philosophy, business and technology.

ETHICS IN ENGINEERING What is ethics in engineering? Engineers develop technology that has a major impact, positive and negative, on people and the environment. This means that engineers must take a stand and make moral judgements. Also, they need to take other stakeholders into consideration – employees, owners, customers and suppliers – who might have conflicting interests. In this book a practical, hands-on process for handling ethical dilemmas is presented: awareness, responsibility, critical thinking and action. The author gives many examples from engineering areas ranging from construction to transhumanism. In a recurring case you as a reader think through each of the steps in the process: to develop or not develop the “Life Partner”. What is good and evil, right and wrong? That is the question.

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