ENGM 604: Social, Legal and Ethical Considerations for Engineering

1. ENGM 604: Social, Legal and Ethical Considerations for Engineering Responding to the Call of Morality: Identifying Relevant Facts, Principles and Solutions.

2. What is Required? • Read Case 41 on p. 332. • What are the facts? • The issues and principles? • How should the situation be resolved?

3. Moral Decisions: A Common Context • Despite the disagreements that even a situation like that detailed in the case can produce, we must always remember that we typically face moral decisions from within a shared context of ethical agreement. • We might disagree if a particular case requires loyalty, but most of us agree that loyalty is a good thing.

4. Common Morality • This common context is what we’ve called in the past Common Morality: the set of moral commitments exhibited by a culture or society. • When we ask ourselves why we seem to share these commitments, we can point to history, cultural forces, or religion, but the extent of the agreement suggests that all of these explanations miss something important.

5. Sources of Common Morality • A more successful answer will look to our shared human condition, for it is there if anywhere that we will find what truly binds us. • Of the characteristics we all share, the following seem particularly important to our common moral commitments: • Vulnerability • Autonomy • Interdependency • Shared Expectations and Traits • Common Moral Traits

6. So What if it is Common? • What is the relevance of these sources of common morality? Haven’t we already emphasized the uniqueness of professional morality? • It is true that common morality must be kept distinct from both personal and professional (role) morality. • However, the latter two are incomprehensible without reference to the first. In particular, common morality plays an important justifying role in professional morality.

7. Appreciating the complexity • In life, things are rarely as simple as we would like them to be. • This is particularly true of our moral experience, which typically confronts us with challenges that defy easy or straightforward resolution. • Acknowledging this requires that we identify the features of moral decisions that produce the complications • These include: Identification of Relevant Facts; Specifying Relevant Principles; Producing Appropriate Resolutions.

8. Just the Facts • Appropriately responding to morally significant situations requires appreciation and sensitivity to the significant facts. • That this is the case is apparent from three features of such situations: • Moral disagreements often boil down to disagreements over the facts; • Resolving factual disagreements is not always straightforward or easy; • Resolving factual disagreements often clarifies non-factual disagreements.

9. What Facts? • The difficulties attendant upon resolving factual disagreements is the most challenging of these features. • You need to attend to the relevant facts, but it may be difficult to agree on just what facts are relevant. • It is also the case that we often don’t have all of the relevant factual information we need. • Disagreement can also arise in the decision on how to weight the relevant factual information.

10. Just the Principles • In addition to the range of factual controversy than can figure in morally controversial situations, there may be disagreement over principles. • This disagreement can occur at a number of levels: • People can disagree about the meaning or significance of ethical concepts. • People can disagree about the ethical framework which should be applied to resolve a particular controversy.

11. What Does it All Mean? • If there is disagreement about the meaning of a term or concept, there are a number of techniques that can be employed to minimize the disagreement. • Minimally, the participants can seek help from standard reference works. • More fruitfully, the participants can work together to develop an understanding of the overlap and differences between their understandings of the terms.

12. Competing Ethical Frameworks • If the disagreement is more fundamental, concerning basic ethical perspectives, the situation is more complex. • There are a number of common ethical frameworks that people reflectively or unreflectively rely on. • For the most part they are mutually consistent, however, there are important differences that being familiar with may be helpful.

13. Consequentialism • Many people would agree that the moral value of an act is somehow connected to the consequences of the act. • Consequentialism is an ethical framework which formalizes this agreement by arguing that the moral status of an action determined by the 'value' of its consequences. • Different species of consequentialism identify different ‘values,’ but they all insist that the rightness or wrongness of an action is determined by its tendency to produce ‘value.’

14. Counting it all Up • Value maximizing theories like consequentialist ones have the apparent advantage of a quantifiable element. • Such theories always require us to compare the ‘value’ of competing choices and such comparison requires calculation. • All such calculations have a few constraints: • Everyone counts and they all count the same; • Overall value is what matters; • Hierarchy of values.

15. Problems with Consequentialism • The apparent virtue of quantification turns out to be a mixed blessing. Consequentialist theories have to deal with a number of what are called “measurement problems.” • They also have a notoriously bad time with the issue of Justice. • Slavery counter-example.

16. Respect for Persons • When we think about the consequences of our actions, we have to admit that in important ways they are out of our control. • This recognition is at the heart of a competing ethical framework that argues that the reasons for acting are what determine the moral status of an act. • The Respect for Persons version of this approach argues that when we act in a way consistent with the moral personhood of others we act rightly; when we don’t, we act wrongly.

17. Respect? • Obviously, the weight of the analysis on this approach is the idea of respect for moral personhood. • Different versions of this theory have emphasized different accounts of personhood. • They converge in the recognition that an appropriate account of personhood is tied to our capacity for morality.

18. Problems for RfP Approaches • Respect for Persons approaches are also open to criticism. • Some forms have been accused of too rigorously or sharply specifying our moral obligations. • Another common criticism is that such theories are insufficiently action guiding.

19. One or the Other? • Consequentialism and the Respect for Persons approach are just two possible ethical frameworks. There are a number of other popular competitors. • One question that becomes important is how to adjudicate the competition. • Happily, for the most part the theories converge on similar answers to tough questions. • When they disagree, we have to make decisions about the theories themselves. • Perhaps the best approach is one which attempts to combine the virtues of a variety of theories.

20. Moving to Resolution • When we’ve addressed issues arising from facts and principles, we are in a position to identify the appropriate resolution to the situation at hand. • When the facts and principles are clear and shared, resolution is typically straightforward. • In more complex circumstances, techniques can be employed to help in the resolution process.

21. Resolution Techniques • Line-Drawing is helpful when the principles in question do not unambiguously speak to the relevant facts. • Middle Way solutions are desirable when there is dispute about the relevance of principles. • Both approaches require flexibility and imagination.