Investigation of ethics in engineering design

Abstract

Unlike natural disasters, artificial engineering disasters are avoidable. However, accidents do happen, and the bulk of the post-situational analyses of these disasters comprise ethical reviews and appraisals. Consequently, these reviews usually focus on the outcomes of these accidents: how they could have been averted by appropriate actions on the part of the engineers involved, rather than the actions and inactions during the design process, which ultimately led to the accident. In their work, Van de Poel and Verbeek (2006) examined how engineering ethics and science/technology studies (STS) complement one another vis-à-vis the various ethical issues that arise and also engineers' responsibilities for technological development. In this paper, the authors investigate whether ethical considerations by design engineers depend on the nature of the engineering design process involved and the external and internal dynamics of such process. It also examines how engineers' responsibilities affect ethical considerations.