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Engineering is a unique profession in many ways. It is the oldest professional activities whose practitioners can be held to account for their failures, according to publicly promulgated standards. This is partly because engineering is such a pervasive profession, but also because engineering “failures” are usually highly visible and sometimes spectacular. Engineers go to enormous lengths to avoid...
One of the greatest challenges for engineering is the development of an aspirational ethical foundation in the profession that redresses the present imbalanced prioritisation of technical ingenuity over helping people. This article presents an analysis that seeks to provide a basis for such reprioritisation. It begins with a brief account of ethical analyses that have traditionally been applied to...
Engineering ethics has undergone an evolutionary process from a national perspective to a recognition that global concerns matter in engineering. However, this has been an additive process which is still generally based on an American model of ethical theory as a foundation, with professional ethics as the outcome. Neither of these elements can be expected to be understood or accepted on a worldwide...
Bioethics and business ethics have their international conferences, their networks, their international scientific journals, as well as their schools of thought and their internal disagreement. To the contrary, engineering ethics is a little known area of study which gives rise sometimes to scepticism. First developed in the US, this academic field it is now present in many countries. In this article,...
How must we understand the demand that engineering be morally responsible? Starting from the epistemic aspect of the problem, I distinguish between two approaches to moral responsibility. One ascribes moral responsibility to the self and to others under epistemic conditions of transparency, the other under conditions of opacity. I argue that the first approach is inadequate in the context of contemporary...
Engineers are initially responsible for the artefacts they produce, but at some point, part of the responsibility for the artefact shifts from the engineer to the user. This chapter will analyse how and when this transfer of responsibility takes place. Specifically, it will combine the theory of responsibility and control of Fischer and Ravizza (1998) and the use plan theory of knowledge of artefact...
The intellectual core of engineering is the solution to design problems. Those solutions are embodied in artifacts – software, a bridge, elevators, and so on. An engineer who so designed artifacts as to maximize the harm they bring into the world would be unethical. Ethical considerations are internal to engineering because the introduction of each engineering artifact will produce more or less harm,...
An ethical parallel study has been carried out during the development of a new technology for wastewater treatment. Different aspects of the network involved in this innovation were studied. These include the inventory of the network, the risks in implementation of the technology foreseen by the different actors in the network and the responsibility for ethical issues, in particular the risks of the...
Already for many years the faculty of Aerospace Engineering includes a compulsory course on ethics in its MSc curriculum. The course aims at introducing the students to ethical decision making in an aerospace engineering context and is traditionally terminated with a role play re-enacting the fatal decision making process around the launch of the Challenger. The authors report on the setup and experiences...
This chapter describes the NERD platform: a web-based research instrument designed to support collaborative experimental research in the ethics of technology. Starting with our research group’s goal to study democratic ethics, we sketch the resulting problems of public participation: the need to reconcile cheap large-scale methods with deep ethical engagement. We argue that our combination of scenario-based...
Philosophical inquiries into technology are still rare and most investigations are of a recent nature. This contribution introduces a number of general themes that are investigated in the volume Philosophy and Engineering. It pays attention to the difference between philosophy of technology and philosophy of engineering, discusses possible definitions of engineering and the relation between science,...
This chapter points out some differences between engineers and architects in curriculum, standards of evaluation, and allied fields, provides an historical account of the origins of those differences (emphasizing the last three hundred years), and reflects on the method that makes the differences so clear and alternative methods of study that might make them appear much less so (a focus on discipline,...
Philosophy of engineering, a new branch of philosophy, came into being both in the East and the West at the beginning of the 21st century. Although Chinese and Western scholars in the field of philosophy of engineering worked independently and did not come into immediate contact with each other during the developing process, they synchronized their steps forward unexpectedly. Their efforts made philosophy...
Is there a philosophy of engineering (singular)? My answer is no, though I don’t intend that to discourage anyone who would want to produce one. I use the metaphor of a diamond with many facets to bolster my negative answer, but also to suggest the complexity if anyone were to do so. And this is not just my opinion. I base my view on a variety of discussions of engineering in the literature of the...
This chapter compares six different possible approaches to the philosophy of engineering. One of these, somewhat less well developed than others, is the linguistic approach to the philosophy of engineering. The possibility of a linguistic philosophy of engineering is considered in some detail in order to advance a case for this approach. The conclusion, however, argues for a pluralistic pursuit of...
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