Ethics1-Theories & Thoughts 1 Engineering Ethics 1 – Ethical Theories & Thoughts Engr Prof Dr Sam Man Keong 岑文强 CEng, CMath, CSci, CQP, CEnv. Email: [email protected]

Ethics1-Theories & Thoughts 1

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


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.


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).


The Great Wall of China


Introduction

• Why study Engineering Ethics?

• Personal vs Professional or Business Ethics

• Ethics and the Law.


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.


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.


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.


Thus, engineering ethics is a body of philosophy indicating the ways that engineers should conduct themselves in their professional capacity.


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.


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.


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,……


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.


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.


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.


Ethical conduct is fundamentally grounded in a concern for other people. It is not just about law or religion.


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.


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).


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.


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.


Immanuel Kant

• Immanuel Kant (German pronunciation: (22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was an 18th-century 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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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)


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.


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


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.


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.


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.






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.


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.


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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Questions & Answers

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Documents

Ethics1-Theories & Thoughts 1 Engineering Ethics 1 – Ethical Theories & Thoughts Engr Prof Dr Sam Man Keong 岑文强 CEng, CMath, CSci, CQP, CEnv. Email: [email protected]