The Ethics Gap in Contemporary Engineering

TWO VIGNETTES

During the night of December 2–3, 1984, one of the worst industrial disasters in history occurred at Union Carbide's plant in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India. Methyl isocyanate (MIC) liquid, an intermediate used in making Sevin, Union Carbide's name for the pesticide carbaryl, came into contact with water, boiled violently, and turned into MIC gas. Unchecked by various safety systems, tons of highly toxic MIC gas escaped from storage tank E610. A cloud of MIC gas descended upon crowded shantytowns just outside the plant, as well as on Bhopal city. Estimates of the death toll from exposure to the gas, immediately or in the first few days afterward, range from 2,000 to 10,000.

In February 1992, I attended a conference on professional ethics at the University of Florida, Gainesville. On the shuttle bus to the conference hotel, the only other passenger turned out to be a chemical engineer. I asked him whether there was any consensus in the chemical engineering community about what had caused the Bhopal disaster. His response was immediate and succinct: "Sabotage." Union Carbide has given the same explanation for three decades and continues to do so on its website.

On January 28, 1986, about 14 months after the Bhopal disaster, the U.S. space shuttle Challenger exploded and disintegrated 73 seconds after launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The entire crew perished: six astronauts and Christa McAuliffe, the first "Teacher in Space."

President Ronald Reagan appointed the late Arthur Walker Jr., at the time a faculty member at Stanford University, to serve on the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident. Reagan charged the commissioners with determining the cause of the accident. In late 1987, after the commission had submitted its final report, I ran into Professor Walker on the Stanford campus and invited him to give a talk about his commission experience to a faculty seminar on technology in society. After his talk, I asked Walker what was the single most important lesson to be learned from the Challenger disaster. He replied, "Hire smarter engineers."

A GAP BETWEEN EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE

The responses quoted in these vignettes are simplistic. The engineering outcomes involved cannot be explained as simply as those succinct replies suggest. The proffered explanations probably reflect the narrow educational backgrounds of those who offered them. Few intending engineers (or scientists) ever take ethics or social science classes that focus on engineering (or science) projects or practices. They are therefore predisposed to attribute the outcomes of destructive engineering episodes to technical failures or clear-cut, nontechnical factors. The latter include individual cognitive shortcomings, such as mediocre intellectual capability on the part of project engineers, and individual political motives, such as vengeful sabotage by a disgruntled employee.

Part of the appeal of such explanations is that they point up problems that can be readily "solved" by making specific changes, for example, hiring smarter engineers, and screening potential employees more rigorously. Engineers who never took ethics or social science classes closely related to engineering endeavor rarely consider the possibility that some harmful engineering episodes may be partly attributable to ethically problematic conduct on the part of engineer-participants. They also rarely consider the possibility that social or technical features of the often-complex contexts involved can help set the stage for and elicit such conduct.

Not only does contemporary engineering practice pose many ethical challenges to engineers, engineers are rarely adequately prepared to grapple with them in a thoughtful manner. There is an ethics gap in contemporary engineering, that is, a mismatch or disconnect between the ethics education of contemporary engineering students and professionals, and the ethics realities of contemporary engineering practice. One purpose of this book is to help narrow that gap.

EVIDENCE

Is there evidence of a gap between engineering ethics education for engineering students and the ethics realities of contemporary engineering practice? If there is, does it suggest that the ethics gap is substantial? Consider the following.

Between 1997 and 2001, the author conducted an informal survey of Stanford undergraduate engineering students and the practicing engineers they contacted about two topics: the study of engineering-related ethical issues in undergraduate engineering education, and the presence of ethical issues in engineering practice.

Of the 516 undergraduate engineering majors who responded and ventured an opinion, about 17 of every 20 (86.1%) indicated they expected to face ethical issues or conflicts in their engineering careers. But how well did respondents believe their education had prepared them to deal "thoughtfully and effectively with such ethical challenges as they might encounter"? About a seventh (14.2%) responded "a good deal" or "a great deal," whereas more than half (54.3%) responded "a little bit" or "not at all."

The undergraduates' responses did yield some encouraging findings. About three-fifths (62.2%) indicated that during their engineering education they had received the message that "there's more to being a good engineering professional in today's society than being a state-of-the-art technical expert." However, that finding was offset by the sobering fact that only 14.9% of the respondents indicated they had learned "anything specific" from their engineering instructors "about what's involved in being an ethically and socially responsible engineering professional in contemporary society."

Thus, while a healthy majority of the respondents had gotten a message that there's more to being a good engineering professional in contemporary society than being technically competent, the message often lacked specifics. Most students learned nothing concrete about the ethical responsibilities of engineers from their engineering instructors. As they left their classrooms and headed for workplaces where most expected to encounter ethical issues, few engineering students took with them specific knowledge of the ethical responsibilities of engineers.

But how likely is it that engineers will actually confront ethical issues in professional practice? Of the 285 practicing engineers who responded and expressed an opinion, 84.2% agreed that current engineering students are "likely to encounter significant ethical issues in their future engineering practice." Indeed, almost two-thirds (65.4%) of the responding engineers indicated they had already been personally "faced with an ethical issue in the course of [their] professional practice." Almost the same...