Value Versus Values
Engineers are adept at cost-benefit analyses of projects. They should pay more attention to communities that might suffer.
By Debbie Chachra
I didn’t learn about the Union Carbide disaster in an engineering ethics class.
I learned about it while it was happening, on one long, sleepless night in Toronto in 1984 as my parents frantically dialed and dialed again, trying to get an international call through to any of my aunts and uncles in Bhopal, India, to find out if they were all right.
In my October 2017 column, “Not Always a Force for Good,” I wrote about how we need to ask our students to “begin to consider the larger social and environmental consequences of the technologies that they are devising.” In the January 2018 Prism, my fellow Canadian Claude Laguë, an engineering professor at the University of Ottawa, responded to assert that engineers have been aware of their responsibility to people for many generations. That is true. But for most of those generations, the problem has been who they’ve considered to be people—or rather, who they have not considered to be people.
As a Canadian-educated engineer, I swore a solemn obligation during the Ritual of the Calling of the Engineer. It’s often described as the Hippocratic Oath for engineers and was written by Rudyard Kipling in 1922 at the request of a faculty member at my alma mater, the University of Toronto. When I read the obligation now, I’m struck by how it focuses on being an excellent engineer but mostly leaves unanswered the question: “on whose behalf?” In effect, it conflates doing one’s best as an engineer with doing one’s best for society.
The standard questions of value are “what are the benefits?” and “what are the costs?” The goal of the former exceeds that of the latter. But questions of values include “who benefits?” and “who pays the costs?” Generations of engineers have consistently addressed the question of value, but we’re often satisfied with letting the “new-caught sullen peoples” pay the cost, to use a phrase from Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden.” In the Union Carbide disaster, my family was unaffected by the toxic gas leak because the hardest hit were the very poor who lived in shanty towns near the plant. Even engineering projects that have enormous public benefits, such as hydroelectric dams in Quebec and across the western United States, have asked a high price of some people, such as the indigenous communities that were displaced.
These are not abstract or historical concerns. A recent investigation found that IBM has been using secret data from New York police video surveillance to develop facial recognition technology that can identify people by race. This is, to put it mildly, an uncomfortable reminder of IBM’s involvement in the Holocaust. As detailed in a 2001 book by Edwin Black, that involvement included providing and maintaining punch-card machines used to track prisoners, generating the identification numbers tattooed on their skin.
To effectively “make the world a better place,” engineers must develop the considerable empathy needed to see the world from a perspective different from their own. It requires asking questions—and listening to the answers—about who will be affected by new technologies, and how. It also requires absorbing the lessons of history. Learning to exercise one’s moral imagination isn’t like learning to use contour integrals. It takes exposure and practice, until it becomes a part of how you see the world. Fortunately, we have the opportunity to facilitate this practice. We not only teach our undergraduate engineering students over the course of four years, allowing for progressive development, we also teach many of them at a critical time in their lives, as they develop their adult identity. We can help our students develop a profoundly different understanding of engineering ethics, one rooted in a deeper understanding of our paramount responsibility to all people, not just those who are like us. This is, of course, just the start. As it says in the Talmud, we are not obligated to complete the work, but nor are we free to desist from it.
I still wear my Iron Ring every day. But I do so as a historical reminder to make room for the voices of people we engineers have dismissed or ignored in the past and broaden our definition of what it means to serve the public.
Debbie Chachra is a professor of engineering at Olin College.