Chapter 2 Review - Rules of Skill: Ethics in Engineering

This chapter makes an attempt to establish that Ethics is an integral part of Engineering. 

Rules of skills tell us how to achieve a particular end, ie how to bake a cake, how to assemble a bed frame, etc. They exist for every profession. 

When failing to follow the right rules of the skill leads to significant harm, they carry ethical weight. Even the solutions designed through following the rules of skill, at minimum are required to not cause unnecessary harm. This is a moral command and this is where ethics enter into the core of engineering - ie through its standing rules and tools utilized as well as through its design solutions. 

Engineers are ethically obligated to use the right tools, and right rules of skills and provide design solutions that at minimum cause no unnecessary harm. Of course, it be great if we achieve more benefits than harm in any of these cases but the minimum condition still remains - no unnecessary harm. 

Some examples of failing to follow rules of skill causing unnecessary harm in the past. 

• Rules of Skill - Use the same unit of measurement throughout any single project. - Because a subcontractor used imperial units of measurement while NASA used metric units, the Mars Climate Orbiter came into the Martian Atmosphere at the wrong angle and burned up. 

• Rules of the Skill - Take into consideration all the variables. (Not the easiest rule to follow since sometimes it's not clear what all the variables are. Yet sometimes some very obvious variables do get ignored.) - The Hubble Telescope failed to work properly because the engineers forgot to compensate for how zero gravity would affect the curvature of the lens. 

Kant argued that rules of skill have no moral import. The reason he gives is that the rules tell us how to achieve a determinate end without regard to whether the end is good or bad. 

But according to the Author, Kant is wrong here. When the rules of skills are designed to achieve a particular end that is good - for example, the health of patients, the safety of some engineering artifact, defense of an accused - the rules of skills in that case definitely have an ethical import. 

Let's look at the nature of Rules itself. 

Rules give coherence, order as well as constraints. Through constraints, the rules provide the security that comes from knowing that no common problems will arise if we follow the rules. 

If the physician answers the lawyer’s question by saying, “No. I thought I’d try something different,” the lawyer knows that he and the physician have a problem.

Two ways the rules of skills end up becoming the standard practice within the profession are 

1. A rule is honed and perfected by experience
2. A rule is vetted by somebody authorized to examine, assess, test and approve/disapprove.

When we fail to use the correct rule of skill and it ends up harming someone, the intentions are irrelevant. All that is relevant is that the engineer failed to use the rule of skill causing harm. This is not mere incompetence, but also an ethical failure. 

The intellectual core of engineering is providing solutions to design problems of any sort. These solutions are packaged as rules of skill which help achieve the neccessary solution. Hence one could say that the intellectual core of engineering is to create rules of skills that will solve particular problems. 

The creation of these rules are constrained by a lot of norms within the profession but they are also constrainted by a simple ethical principle that says do no unncessary harm. 

Whatever be the solution's criteria for it to be considered a  good solution if it causes unnecessary harm we have to forfeit the claim that it is a good solution.

We need to consider how less than optimal design solutions can raise ethical questions. They do so in at least three ways that I can only briefly sketch here.

• First, an engineer can correctly follow all the rules, but still, come up with design solutions that cause unnecessary harm. For example, a part that is made of recyclable materials may be made in such a way that makes recycling impossible without high expenses. 

• Second, professionals have a moral imperative to strive to be the best that they can be. Yet it is part of the drive of an engineer – one of the animating principles of the profession – to improve things, to ferret out ways to make things work better – more efficiently, simpler, with fewer parts, and so on. Lacking that drive is a character fault, and that criticism carries moral overtones. 

• Third, each profession serves a social purpose or set of purposes; and the state recognizes and regulates a profession to ensure that the purpose or purposes are properly realized, giving those within the profession a monopoly in return. It sets standards for membership in the profession, requires that individuals meet those standards to become a practicing members of the profession, and can, generally, remove professional certification should a member fail in a significant way to meet those standards. Anyone entering into a profession thus comes into a new set of moral relations – to the state and to others in the profession.

So Kant was mistaken. Rules of skill do have ethical weight.