Abstract
Engineering ethics represent a key point of interaction between the humanities, social sciences, and engineering. The dominant approach to engineering ethics tends to be quite narrow and relies on the use of case studies involving ethical dilemmas and professional codes of ethics. It is individualistic in its approach assuming a capacity for moral agency. Given the problems with the dominant approach, a number of alternatives have been proposed. This has contributed to confusion around the purpose of ethics education. Given this divergence in approaches, it is necessary to develop tools to understand these different approaches and how they might relate to each other. This may allow us to explore the possibilities for developing an integrated approach and set out more clearly what is required to address the inadequacies in the dominant approach. There are similarities between the growing divergence in ethics education and debates in sociology/social theory about the nature of the discipline. Drawing on work focused on meta theorizing in sociology and using a number of dualisms used in this debate, the chapter will examine the assumptions underlying different approaches to engineering ethics. It will address the question as to whether alternative approaches actually escape the focus on individual agency prevalent in the discipline. It will seek to elaborate an approach that retains a focus on the responsibilities of engineers but also includes a focus on the wider social context in which they work.
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Notes
- 1.
See also Chap. 10 in this volume.
- 2.
This assumes that increasing diversity and fragmentation are a problem. An anonymous reviewer of an article some colleagues and I submitted for a leading journal in the field of engineering ethics consistently contested this assumption. I think what applies to sociology also applies to engineering ethics, and I agree with Ritzer (2001), who has designated sociology as a multi paradigm science, that “each paradigm, standing alone is inadequate. Each needs insights from the other paradigms to fully explain social phenomena” (p. 73). We need to explore the presuppositions of different paradigms as a basis for moving towards an integrated approach (see also Porpora, 2015).
- 3.
With others I have attempted to do this elsewhere. See Martin et al. (2021a)
- 4.
This approach is also confirmed by my 30 years of social, political, and trade union activism during which I have seen how collective action can overcome system constraints and deliver real change. I have also experienced the obduracy of the economic and political system. In a sense I have developed some capacity to discriminate between “open doors and brick walls” and how they shape our capacity to “intervene in the course of social change to realize valued and contested ends” (Reed, 2005, p. 291).
- 5.
I acknowledge that this list is somewhat selective, but these works have been chosen because some of them have shaped my own thinking and I am sympathetic to the Critical Realist approach argued for by Archer and Porpora (see Conlon, 2019). They have also been chosen because they span a number of decades and illustrate that the issues discussed here have remained relevant over time. Indeed, some have suggested, following Gouldner (1970), that sociology is inherently a crisis science “because it was spawned by that great crisis that produced modernity and therefore mimics that crisis, leading to a permanent crisis in the discipline” (Steinmetz & Chae, 2002, p. 113). One aspect of this crisis is seen to lie in the lack of homogeneity in the discipline. Craib (1992) says its “incurably fragmented” (p. 15).
- 6.
As Marx argued, there would be no need for science “if the outward appearances and essences of things coincided” (Marx, 1966, p. 817). The idea that the world consists of what we can know about it has been labelled the epistemic fallacy by the founder of CR, Roy Bhaskar (2009). Ironically both positivism and its interpretivist alternatives are seen to suffer from it given their focus on either observable behaviour or the interpretative activities of actors (see Porpora, 2015). Johnson et al. (1984) label both empiricism and subjectivism as “nominalist” as opposed to “realist”.
- 7.
It should be noted that STS is not a unified field. Herkert (2006) has delineated different STS traditions drawing a key distinction between scholarly and activist traditions within STS. My focus here is more academic approaches which have an internalist orientation and have had an influence on developments in engineering ethics.
- 8.
Some (Reed, 1997; Soderberg & Netzen, 2010) see ANT, in particular, as part of a group of approaches sympathetic to the postmodern turn in social analysis which collapse agency and structure into localised or micro-level social practices which emphasis the socially constructed, the contingent, the lack of stability in social systems and denounce ideas about grand narratives, totalising visions and universal truth claims. The relative stability of subjects and structures is deemphasized. For ANT everything is rendered into a seamless flow of change undermining all stable ‘social facts’ by which society could be ordered and explained. Constructivist approaches associated with STS tend to want to abandon the categories of traditional social theory (Feenberg, 2005) and the possibility of what C.W. Mills called a “sociological imagination” which connects the “personal troubles of milieu” with the “public issue of social structure” Mills (1959, pp. 6–8), see Reed (1997).
- 9.
This view of agency means that there is not equivalence between human and non-human actors as ANT insists. I feel no great need to address this argument in detail. As Porpora says “The way rugs act is different from the way people do, and for that matter cats as well” (Porpora, 2015, p. 136). The manner in which ANT scholars attempt to deal with humans and non-humans symmetrically has been described by Dave Elder-Vass as “frankly bizarre” (Elder-Vass, 2008, p. 468).
- 10.
I have dealt with the problems with the traditional approach at greater length elsewhere. See for example Conlon and Zandvoort (2011).
- 11.
The BP Corporate Rap Sheet is rather long and can be viewed here https://www.corp-research.org/BP#:~:text=In%20November%202012%20BP%20agreed,criminal%20restitution%20in%20U.S.%20history
- 12.
Lee and Erdmann (1999) use a similar approach to analyze the Ford Pinto case.
- 13.
In their discussion of the use of “large cases” in the ethics classroom, they suggest, at one point, that students should ask “how should engineer speak out individually or collectively to reform regulatory agencies?” (218).
- 14.
There are many references in their article to the significance of the wider structural context for engineers. Two examples: “the engineering profession’s place within the marketplace and inside large, hierarchical organizations makes the captive nature of the profession an imperative in any analysis of engineering ethics” (207 emphasis added) and “Engineers are rarely free to design technologies apart from cost and schedule pressures imposed by a corporate hierarchy, a government agency concerned with its image, or market pressures” (210).
- 15.
In their analysis of the Pinto case Lee and Erdmann say that some engineers reported that those who had reservations about the safety of the Pinto “believed themselves powerless to challenge the prevailing “acceptable risk‟ definitions” (Lee & Erdmann, 1999).
- 16.
But see Lynch (2015) where he responds to this criticism. See further below.
- 17.
One reason for focusing on Verbeek is that his work has been given wider exposure by being integrated as a chapter in a very useful textbook by Van de Poel and Royakkers (2011)
- 18.
Note the similarity of the more general criticism of ANT: “Among the social facts that have been eschewed we find (class) interest, power (structure), and references to capital/capitalism” (Soderberg & Netzen, 2010, p. 109).
- 19.
- 20.
Lynch (2015) is an important and developed response to some of the criticisms of Lynch and Kline (2000). In this later piece he argus for what Collins calls the third stage of the empirical program of relativism which would link engineering design to wider social and political structures. Thus, his focus is on how engineers can contribute to movements for change to build alternative social and political institutions. This concurs with my own thinking. Feenberg (2009) has suggested that such activities do not feature in the world of some STS thinker such as Latour who avoid posing any questions about the classes and corporations who dominate our lives. He claims “The rarefied air these thinkers breathe is no doubt healthy but it is awfully thin” (p. 228).
- 21.
Berner (2001) makes some suggestions for organizational reforms which, while not directly affecting the profit motives or political interests that lie behind much unethical behavior, “would set new standards, protect critical persons and assist engineers in their day-to-day decisions” (200).
- 22.
Devon and Van De Poel (2004) say of traditional approaches to case studies and the options often provided to students to resolve dilemmas: “Many of these may be viewed as social actions, but none entails permanently changing any social arrangements…and there are no analyses of how the social arrangements for making this decision could be changed in various ways” (463).
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Conlon, E. (2022). Engineering Ethics, Social Theory and How We Might Do Better!. In: Christensen, S.H., Buch, A., Conlon, E., Didier, C., Mitcham, C., Murphy, M. (eds) Engineering, Social Sciences, and the Humanities. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 42. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11601-8_11
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