The Elephant in Ethics Discussions
It’s good to see engineering faculty taking ethics seriously and [to see] the topic covered in Prism (“Game On,” January 2022) and addressed, if less directly, in the online discussion “Does Engineering Education Need a Revolution?” hosted last December by Issues in Science & Technology with a panel featuring ASEE Executive Director Norman Fortenberry, ASEE Past President Sheryl Sorby, and Olin College President Gilda Barabino. But there’s an elephant in the real or virtual ethics classroom, and it’s a big one. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, private organizations employ over 87 percent of the roughly 1.6 million people working as engineers in the United States. Almost all such employers are profit-seeking firms run by managerial hierarchies over which working-level engineers cannot expect to exert much influence. We all know the risks to whistleblowers. And of course to rise to managerial positions themselves, engineers, like anyone else, must at least appear to conform to their employer’s ethos, which will rarely have much to do with social good. (See “greenwashing.”) Or as Milton Friedman put it in the title of his well-known essay: “The Social Responsibility of Business Is To Increase Its Profits.”
The 207,000 engineers employed in the public sector face somewhat different constraints. Many work for state and local highway and public works agencies. These agencies are politicized in various ways. In addition, construction tops the list of industries associated with corrupt and illegal practices, beginning with bribery and bid-rigging (as reported, for instance, in the surveys of global anti-corruption organization Transparency International). In the federal government, the Department of Defense employs more than 70,000 engineers. Nearly all report directly or at a remove to military officers in the middle to upper ranks. Guess who calls the shots? You don’t want to work on killer robots? Someone else will. And your own career might stall.
Engineering is plainly fraught with organizational and ethical conflicts. Indeed, this is everyday news, whether the issue concerns “technology” companies competing for shares of the internet attention market, the Boeing 737 MAX tragedies, or the Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal (which, contrary to the implication in “Game On,” had little or nothing to do with “poor teamwork and bad communication” but was willful, with engineers in the dozens and probably the hundreds dutifully following managerial diktats).
This is not the place for any but the briefest mentions of what might be done in the way of jump-starting reforms to engineering education. My own list would begin with a survey of the rudiments of political economy and governance in first- or second-year introduction to engineering courses. I do not mean idealized supply and demand models, or “civics,” but institutional depictions of how things work in actual socioeconomic interactions, including the labor market for technical occupations, and in actual government bureaucracies. Perhaps this could even become a starting point in turning engineering schools into servants of society rather than the servants of business and industry they have been from the early years—as Edwin Layton long ago explained in The Revolt of the Engineers (published in 1971).
What we all can now see in looking back over the past few decades are the deep historical roots of environmental damage, global heating, and militarism, as well as the discriminatory impacts of health-care delivery, urban redevelopment, and highway construction. Engineers have been complicit in all of this, embedded as we are with the business and political interests underlying these and other social ills. I am not making ungrounded assertions: the empirical basis for such statements is robust, contested in most cases largely at the margins (with exceptions perhaps for militarism). Engineers are nothing if not empiricists, and we have a wide range of new opportunities opening to alter our behavior.
Some faculty, perhaps a majority, would of course be opposed. Yet new cohorts will come along. And here I speak from personal experience, since I was teaching engineering students on one of the many campuses engulfed by opposition to the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and 70s, a tide that left engineering schools, including mine, as isolated, stagnant pools. Let’s do better in the ongoing battles against climate change, racism, sexism, and inequality.
John Alic
Avon, NC