Transcript Practicing Engineering Ethics

Engineering Ethics 1 –
Ethical Theories &
Thoughts
Engr Prof Dr Sam Man Keong
岑文强
CEng, CMath, CSci, CQP, CEnv.
Email: [email protected] ; HP : 96740515
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Highlights
• Introduction.
• Why study Engineering Ethics?
• Personal vs Professional or Business Ethics
• Ethics and the Law.
• A Brief History of Ethical Thought.
• Ethical Theories.
• Questions & Answers.
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About the Speaker –
Prof Sam Man Keong
• Singapore :
SP/NUS/NTU.
• Australia :
MelbU/RMIT/CQU.
• Chartered Engineer
(UK/Ireland/Australia)
• Chartered Builder (UK)
• Chartered
Mathematician (UK)
• Chartered Scientist (UK)
• Chartered
Environmentalist (UK).
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The
Great
Wall
of
China
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Introduction
• Why study Engineering Ethics?
• Personal vs Professional or Business Ethics
• Ethics and the Law.
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Why Study Engineering
Ethics?
• The work of engineers can affect public
health and safety and can influence business
practices and even politics.
• To sensitize you to important ethical issues
before you have to confront them.
• You will learn techniques for analyzing and
resolving ethical problems when they arize.
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Personal vs Business or
Professional Ethics
• Personal ethics : deals with how we treat
others in our day-to-day lives. Many of
these principles are applicable in business
and engineering.
• Engineering ethics is the rules and
standards governing the conduct of
engineers in their role as professionals.
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Personal vs Business or
Professional Ethics
• Engineering ethics encompasses the more
general definition of ethics, but applied it
more specifically to situations involving
engineers in their professional lives.
• Engineering ethics often involves choices
on an organizational level rather than a
personal level.
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Thus, engineering ethics is a body
of philosophy indicating the ways
that engineers should conduct
themselves in their professional
capacity.
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Ethics and the Law
• The practice of engineering is governed by
many laws.
• Many of these laws are based on ethical
principles, although many are purely of a
practical, rather than a philosophical nature.
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Ethics and the Law
• There is also a distinction between what is
legal and what is ethical.
• Many things that are legal could be
considered unethical. For example,
designing a process that releases a known
toxic, but unregulated, substance into the
environment is probably unethical, although
it is legal.
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A Brief History of
Ethical Thought
• Western : Greek philosophers (e.g.
Socrates, Aristotle,…); Jewish – Torah and
the Old Testament of the Bible (e.g. the Ten
Commandments).
• East : Confucius, Lao Zi….
• Ancient religious thinking and writing :
Christainity, Buddhism, Hindusism,
Islam,……
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The Ten Commandments
[Exodus 20: 2 – 17]
• 2 I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land
of Egypt, out of the house of slavery;
• 3 Do not have any other gods before me.
• 4 You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the
form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the
earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
• 5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I
the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children
for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth
generation of those who reject me.
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The Ten Commandments
[Exodus 20: 2 – 17]
• 12 Honor your father and your mother, so that your days
may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving
you.
• 13 You shall not murder.
• 14 You shall not commit adultery.
• 15 You shall not steal.
• 16 You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
• 17 You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall
not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or
ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.
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A Brief History of
Ethical Thought
• Ethical ideas were continually refined during
the course of history.
• Great thinkers/philosophers (e.g. Locke, Kant,
and Mill) wrote about moral and ethical issues; is
especially important for our study of engineering
ethics since they do not rely on religion to
underpin their moral thinking. Rather, they
acknowledged that moral principles are
universal, regardless of their origin, and are
applicable even in secular settings.
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Ethical conduct is
fundamentally grounded in a
concern for other people. It
is not just about law or
religion.
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Ethical Theories
• What is a Moral Theory?
• A moral theory defines terms in uniform ways that links ideas and
problems together in consistent ways.
• Why having multiple theories?
• Allowing problems to be looked at from different angles, since
each theory stresses different aspects of a problem ( same
solution??)
• FOUR ethical theories:
•
•
•
•
Utilitarianism,
Duty ethics,
Right ethics, and
Virtue ethics.
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Utilitarianism
• Utilitarianism seeks to produce the most utility,
defined as a balance between good and bad
consequences of an action, taking into account the
consequences for everyone affected.
• Cost-Benefit Analysis : an application of
utilitarianism – maximizing the overall good. But
CBA is not really an ethical analysis tool.
• John Stuart Mill (1806 – 1973).
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John Stuart Mill
•
John Stuart Mill (20 May 1806 – 8
May 1873), English philosopher,
political theorist, political economist,
civil servant and Member of
Parliament, was an influential British
Classical liberal thinker of the 19th
century whose works on liberty
justified freedom of the individual in
opposition to unlimited state control.
He was a proponent of utilitarianism, an
ethical theory developed by Jeremy
Bentham, although his conception of it
was very different from Bentham's.
Hoping to remedy the problems found
in an inductive approach to science,
such as confirmation bias, he clearly set
forth the premises of falsification as the
key component in the scientific method.
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Duty Ethics
• Duty ethics contents that there are duties that
should be performed (for example, the duty to
treat others fairly or the duty not to injure others)
regardless of whether these acts lead to the most
good.
• Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804) : moral duties are
fundamental; list of duties – be honest, don’t cause
suffering to other people, be fair to others, etc.
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Immanuel Kant
• Immanuel Kant (German
pronunciation: (22 April 1724 –
12 February 1804) was an 18thcentury German philosopher
from the Prussian city of
Königsberg. Kant was the last
influential philosopher of
modern Europe in the classic
sequence of the theory of
knowledge during the
Enlightenment beginning with
thinkers John Locke, George
Berkeley, and David Hume.
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Right Ethics
• Right ethics emphasizes that we all have
moral rights, and any action that violates
these rights is ethically unacceptable. Like
duty ethics, the ultimate overall good of the
actions is not taken into account.
• John Jocke (1632 – 1704) : humans have
the right to life, liberty, and property.
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John Locke
• John Locke (29 August 1632 –
28 October 1704), widely
known as the Father of
Liberalism, was an English
philosopher and physician
regarded as one of the most
influential of Enlightenment
thinkers.
• Locke's theory of mind is often
cited as the origin of modern
conceptions of identity and the
self, figuring prominently in the
work of later philosophers such
as Hume, Rousseau and Kant.
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Duty Ethics vs Right
Ethics
• Duty ethics and right ethics are really just two
different sides of the same coin.
• Both of these theories achieve the same end :
Individual persons must be respected, and
actions are ethical that maintain this respect for
the individual. In duty ethics, people have duties,
an important one of which is to protect the rights
of others. And in right ethics, people have
fundamental rights that others have duties to
protect.
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Virtue Ethics
• Virtue ethics regards actions as right that manifest
good character traits (virtues) and regards actions
as bad that display bad character traits (vices); this
ethical theory focuses on the type of person we
should strive to be.
• Virtues : responsibility, honesty, competence, and
loyalty; trustworthiness, fairness, caring,
citizenship, and respect.
• Vices : dishonesty, disloyalty, irresponsibility, or
incompetence.
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Virtue Ethics
• Virtue ethics is closely tied to personal
character.
• If a behavior is virtuous in the individual’s
personal life, the behavior is virtuous in his
or her business life as well.
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Virtue Ethics
• To use virtue ethics in an analysis of an ethical
problem, you should first identify the virtues or
vices that are applicable to the situations. Then,
determine what course of action each of these
suggests.
• In using virtue ethics, it is important to ensure that
the traits you identify as virtues are indeed
virtuous and will not lead to negative
consequences.
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Which Theory to Use?
• We can use all of them to analyze a problem
from different angles and see which results
each of the theories give us.
• Frequently, the result will be the same even
though the theories are very different.
• What happens when the different theories
seem to give different answers? ( a
balanced judgment)
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Example 1 – Building of
Dams
• Dams often lead to great benefit to society
providing stable supplies of drinking water,
flood control, and recreational
opportunities. However, these benefits often
come at the expense of people who live in
areas that will be flooded by the dam and
are required to find new homes.
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Example 1 – Building of
Dams
• Some examples of Dams:
•
•
•
•
•
•
China : Three Gorges Dam
India : Narmada Dam
Malaysia : Bakun Dam
Australia : ‘Franklin Dam’ in Tasmania.
Asia : Dams along Mekong River Basin
Africa : Aswan Dam in Egypt
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To build or Not to build?
• People have the right to use their property.
If their land happens to be in the way of a
proposed dam, then right ethics would hold
that this property right is paramount and is
sufficient to stop the dam project. A single
property holder’s objection would require
that the project be terminated.
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To build or Not to build?
• However, there is a need for others living
nearby communities to have a reliable water
supply and to be safe from continual
flooding. Who’s rights are paramount here?
Rights and duty ethics don’t resolve this
conflict very well; hence, the utilitarian
approach of trying to determine the most
good is more useful in this case.
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Example 2 – Ok Tedi Mine
in Papua New Guinea
• The Ok Tedi Mine is located near the headwaters of the
Ok Tedi River, in the Star Mountains Rural LLG of the
North Fly District of the Western Province of Papua New
Guinea.
• The mine is operated by Ok Tedi Mining Limited (OTML)
which is majority owned by the PNG Sustainable
Development Program Limited (PNGSDPL). Prior to
2002, it was majority owned by BHP Billiton—the largest
mining company in the world since a merger in 2001.
• Located in a remote area of PNG, above 2,000 m (6,600 ft)
on Mount Fubilan, in a region of high rainfall and frequent
earthquakes, mine development posed serious challenges.
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Ok Tedi Mine Environmental impact
• In 1999, BHP reported that the project was
the cause of "major environmental damage".
The mine operators discharge 80 million
tons of contaminated tailings, overburden
and mine-induced erosion into the river
system each year.
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Ok Tedi Mine Environmental impact
• The discharge caused widespread and diverse harm, both
environmentally and socially, to the 50,000 people who
live in the 120 villages downstream of the mine.Chemicals
from the tailings killed or contaminated fish, which
subsequently caused harm to all animal species that live in
the area as well as the indigenous people. The dumping
changed the riverbed, causing a relatively deep and slow
river to become shallower and develop rapids thereby
disrupting indigenous transportation routes. Flooding
caused by the raised riverbed left a thick layer of
contaminated mud on the flood plain the plantations of
taro, bananas and sago palm that are the staples of the local
diet.
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Ok Tedi Mine Environmental impact
• About 1300 square kilometers (500 mi²)
were damaged in this way. Although the
concentration of copper in the water is
about 30 times above the standard level, it is
still below the World Health Organization
(WHO) standards.
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Thank You
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Questions & Answers
Thank You
自强不息, 力求上进
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