Eugene Schlossberger - The Ethical Engineer: An Ethics Construction Kit Places Engineering in a New Light

The Ethical Engineer

THE ETHICAL ENGINEER

Eugene Schlossberger

TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS

philadelphia

For my brother, Norman

These materials discuss the ethical, not the legal, aspects of engineering and technologically oriented business. These materials must not be used as a substitute for legal advice. Laws change and vary from place to place. Because the engineer and the company both have a duty to obey the law, every recommendation made in these pages should be understood as containing the phrase "provided there is no legal duty to do otherwise."

PART ONE

Introduction

Second, organizations function best when the values implicit in rules and executive decisions are widely understood and discussed within the organization. The best employment situation, both for the employer and for the employees, is a community atmosphere where everyone works together for a common goal in which everyone believes. Companies and firms flourish when their people have common values, a situation impossible to achieve if the rules are bureaucratic mandates handed down from above rather than ways of working toward commonly understood goals. Furthermore, without communication between all levels of an organization, ethical problems may slip between the cracks. Such synergistic effects arise when employees are insensitive to complex ethical dimensions of company operations. It becomes more difficult to overlook ethical problems when each engineer is aware of and sensitive to ethical concerns and potential problems. In general, large decisions are often the resultant of many small decisions made at different levels. Thus, the large decisions reflect the values and ethical aims of the company only when those making the small decisions understand those values and aims and also understand how their decisions fit in with the ethical outlook of the company. In addition, engineers who understand the moral basis of the rules have a greater motivation to obey them, both because they see the rules as morally sound directives rather than as annoying and senseless restrictions and because there is less incentive to make one's own "numbers" look better if the company functions as a community rather than as an arena in which individual''gladiators'' can better their own prospects. Moreover, the single most powerful influence on the operation of a firm or company is its corporate climate. John Fleming notes, "An ethical climate involves the total organization and must pervade and infuse all who work for the company."2 Although the corporate climate is heavily influenced by those at the top, people who advance in the corporation tend to take with them the attitudes they learned before being promoted. And so, Donald Jones advises, "the best time to give ethics training to senior managers is before they become senior executives."3

Third, engineers should be sensitive to ethical questions because engineers who understand the ethical dimension of engineering are better and happier engineers. Engineers will be happier in a company in which every engineer understands the value of community, since a community atmosphere requires everyone's participation and it is more pleasant and rewarding to work in a place with a community atmosphere. Engineers who understand the "engineering way" and the values of engineering as a profession, who see engineering as serving a high social goal, will put more into (and take more satisfaction in) their work than those who view engineering merely as a way of drawing a paycheck.

From the employer's standpoint, employing ethically sensitive engineers has several benefits. First, ethics is good business. Ethical sensitivity often avoids costly situations. Although acting ethically often costs more in the short run, acting unethically usually costs more in the tong run. Engineers and businesspersons are sometimes tempted to act unethically because the benefits of unethical conduct are immediate and highly visible, while the benefits of ethical conduct are often long-term and hard to calculate. For example, an employer can easily show exactly how much money is being saved when the company denies a worker a $2,000 bonus to which he is entitled. What an employer loses by treating employees unfairly, although real, is more difficult to calculate. The financial effects of a community atmosphere, of employee loyalty, of good engineers coming to work for the firm because the firm has a good reputation, and so forth are indirect. While employee motivation certainly affects productivity, it is impossible to point to the particular extra widgets produced by greater motivation. And no one can calculate precisely how many people refrained from buying Fords because of negative publicity surrounding the Pinto. Acting ethically and responsibly may prevent a costly government regulation, but no line in the budget documents the value of regulations that were not passed. No line in the budget shows the money saved by forestalling litigation as a result of good and fruitful communication with environmental groups. So a standard dollars-and-cents analysis will often fail to take account of the hidden but real costs of unethical decisions. Thus, a good understanding of the ethical dimensions of engineering decisions is a business neces sity. Gerald Ottoson contends, "Neglecting to take steps to insure an ethical corporate climate has proven to be an ill-considered risk for many organizations."4