This article draws on the history of automobile safety in the United States to illustrate how technical design has been used to promote or maintain duties, values, and ethics. It examines two specific episodes: the debates over the “crash avoidance” and “crash-worthiness” approaches in the 1960s and the responses to the accusation that air bags were killing dozens of people in the mid-1990s. In each of these debates, certain auto safety advocates promoted the development of technologies designed to circumvent, replace, (...) or compensate for “irresponsible” human actions because they believed that devices and techniques would be considerably more obedient and reliable than the American public. Other organizations, however, contested such reallocations because they also involved a shift in responsibilities throughout the rest of the sociotechnical network of auto safety. This article argues that those who controlled the precise definition of risk in auto safety had the upper hand in constructing both the solution to the problem and the distribution of responsibilities the solution entailed. (shrink)

Introduction to Engineering Ethics provides the background for discussion of the basic issues in engineering ethics. Emphasis is given to the moral problems engineers face in the corporate setting. It places those issues within a philosophical framework, and it seems to exhibit both their social importance and their intellectual challenge. The primary goal is to stimulate critical and responsible reflection on moral issues surrounding engineering practice and to provide the conceptual tools necessary for pursuing those issues. As per new ABET (...) 2000 guidelines, more and more introductory engineering courses cover engineering ethics as part of their instruction. Students preparing to function within the engineering profession need to be introduced to the basic issues in engineering ethics. This book places those issues within a wider philosophical framework than has been customary in the past and aims to stimulate critical and responsible reflection on the moral issues surrounding engineering practice and to provide the conceptual tools necessary for pursuing those issues. (shrink)