Collecting Thoughts, Ethical and Otherwise

The world of publishing is changing rapidly as electronic media such as ebooks open up new distribution channels that allow authors to bypass the traditional gatekeepers of hard-copy publishing houses.  One effect of this is to allow writers with small audiences to consider publishing their own books without having to sink thousands of dollars into a vanity press run of a thousand copies, for example.  Instead, these days you can spend some time learning how various ebook-publishing software and distributors work, and do the whole thing yourself (or at most, with the help of an artist for covers).  That is just what I've done with a collection of many of the most popular articles in this blog, and the result is Ethical and Otherwise: Engineering In the Headlines, the cover of which you can see in the sidebar to the right.

I apologize for taking over the blog this week for self-promotion, but I promise not to do it more than once per book.  So here goes.

Ethical and Otherwise has a total of 46 articles culled from the nearly ten years that I've been writing this blog.  They were selected largely on the basis of page views, and so to that extent you, the reader, have played an essential role in its production. 

It's organized into three broad sections:  "Tragedies Large and Small", "Cautionary Tales", and "The Engineering Profession."

The "Tragedies" section is the largest and describes disasters of various types:  "Earth, Air, Wind, and Fire" (natural or nature-assisted disasters); "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles" (transportation accidents); "Mines, Wells, Oil, and Gas"; and "Construction and Destruction."  In this section you'll find out what really caused the Titanic to sink, what set off the natural-gas explosion that killed three hundred students and others in New London, Texas in 1937, and what caused the submarine theater in the Aquarena Springs amusement park in San Marcos, Texas to flip over, besides many other disasters, both well-known and obscure.  In an interview with an engineering podcast a few years ago, I expressed some regret that so many of my blogs deal with death and mayhem, but that's what grabs the headlines, and it's apparently what people like to read about too. 

The "Cautionary Tales" section deals with engineering and technical-enterprise wrongdoings of various kinds:  cyber attacks, counterfeit electronic components, bribery, corruption, copyright battles, and similar matters.  Following that, the section on the engineering profession takes up questions about licensing, engineering education and employment, and other thoughts about the human enterprise of engineering.  Finally, I had to put in a section called "Engineering Ethics In Movies" because (for reasons that are still not clear), the most popular blog article of all time by far is a review of the Tesla film "The Prestige" I wrote back in 2006, and it didn't fit any of the other categories.

So far, the book is available in two formats:  as an iBook in the iTunes bookstore, and as a Kindle book at Amazon.com.  If demand warrants, I will consider issuing a hard-copy paper version through an on-demand publisher, though I have not explored that option much up to this point. 

The selections are distributed fairly evenly throughout the history of the blog, so if you have started reading this blog only recently, you will encounter pieces in the book that you probably haven't read before.  While it's true that all the articles are out there for the reading without your having to buy the book, there's something to be said for the selection process, as the book represents less than 10% of the total number of articles—the most interesting 10%, I hope.

Those of you who have instructional responsibilities regarding engineering ethics may have found engineering-ethics case studies on the web in various places.  For example, Texas A&M maintains a website with case studies, as does the Illinois Institute of Technology, the National Academy of Engineering's OnlineEthics Center, and the National Society of Professional Engineers.  What the NSPE has is actually summaries of cases brought before their board of review, stripped of identifying information.  While these collections are useful, their scope is sometimes limited to certain types of engineering (e. g. civil), and they can sometimes be on the dry side. 

While I didn't put together Ethical and Otherwise exclusively with the classroom in mind, I hope ethics instructors will find it useful.  All the articles are about the same length (I aim for a thousand words, more or less), and they are all drawn from real-life situations of one kind or another.  While I haven't tried to do a full-dress scholarly bibliography, all the URLs referenced in the book were still working at the time of publication.  So I think it will be a useful and possibly even entertaining resource for those who teach ethics-related technical subjects.

Because most of the articles are independent of the others, it's the kind of book you can pick up and put down almost at random.  To be frank, I don't use a Kindle much myself, but my impression is that the kind of lighter tell-me-a-story reading that Ethical and Otherwise has lots of, is fairly well suited to the ebook format. 

At any rate, that's what the book is about, and so if you're looking for more of a dose of this sort of thing than my weekly posts provide, consider buying Ethical and Otherwise.  As far as sales go, I'll be happy if it earns back the $125 it cost to buy the ISBN number.  If after reading it, you like it, you will earn my undying gratitude by writing a favorable review on Amazon.  But don't let my urging bias your review.  That would be unethical, wouldn't it?

Sources:  Ethical and Otherwise:  Engineering In the Headlines is available in the Kindle format at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B018KQ1K7C.  To find the iBook version in the iTunes store, go all the way to the bottom of the iTunes main page where it says "Explore" and click Books, then in the search box at the upper-right corner type "Ethical and Otherwise."  Texas A&M's collection of civil-engineering ethics cases can be found at http://ethics.tamu.edu/CaseStudies.aspx.  The case collection at the Illinois Institute of Technology is at http://ethics.iit.edu/eelibrary/case-study-collection.  The National Academy of Engineering's Online Ethics Center has case studies and other ethics-related material on its main website at http://www.onlineethics.org.  And the National Society of Professional Engineers keeps their review board cases at http://www.nspe.org/resources/ethics/ethics-resources/board-of-ethical-review-cases.  The phenomenon of a medium (such as a blog) advertising itself is known (at least to me) as Stephan's Law, as described in my blog of Dec. 15, 2014.

Mass Media and Self-Promotion: Stephan's Law

One of the recurring themes in engineering ethics is that power and privilege entail responsibility.  Those in positions of influence over millions of users of a technology should recognize the responsibilities that go along with such influence.  This is especially true of individuals and organizations that control mass media such as newspapers, radio, TV, cable systems, and entities such as Google and Facebook. 

In this connection, I would like to bring to your attention a principle of human nature that I have observed in action on many occasions over the years.  To my (admittedly limited) knowledge, no one has taken the trouble to state this principle succinctly, so I'm going to favor you with such a statement.  And because every good principle needs a name, I will modestly term it Stephan's Law.  It is this:

"Every mass medium eventually advertises its controlling organization."

I will now describe the latest instance in which I observed this principle in action.

At the end of every fall semester, I attend the winter graduation ceremonies of Texas State University for the School of Engineering graduates.  This takes place in a nice indoor coliseum where the basketball games are played, in which a few years ago they installed one of those giant LED TV screens colloquially called Jumbotrons.  This one is mounted on a large blank wall behind the stage, and in past years has been used to show closeups of the speakers and graduates as they cross the stage to receive their diplomas.  In the last couple of years, the video has also been live-streamed to the Internet.  So it's fair to say that when you have a crowd attending graduation, and they watch the Jumbotron, it's a mass medium, because everybody in the coliseum sees more or less the same thing, as well as the Internet viewers.  So far so good.

Up to the graduation I attended last Friday, you saw nothing on the Jumbotron that you couldn't have seen elsewhere in the coliseum:  the band playing, the president speaking, graduates graduating.  But yesterday, something new was added.  Just after the provost introduced himself and the platform guests, he asked us all to give our attention to what followed. 

All of a sudden I flashed back on a Lone Ranger video we watched the other night that was made in 1949—the very early days of U. S. television.  The way that program segued to an ad was to switch from the Lone Ranger shooting at some bad guy, to a peaceful scene of a field of wheat while the narrator intoned a phrase that went something like "And now we ask for your interest and attention."  Why a wheat field?  Turns out that the sponsor of the Lone Ranger program was General Mills.  Wheat—Wheaties—General Mills—get it?  Anyway, you can tell that the producers weren't quite sure how people would take television ads, so they soft-pedaled them and gave the viewers some time to readjust their psychologies away from the Old West before hitting them with the sales pitch.

Sure enough, as I watched the Jumbotron, the provost disappeared and we all watched a three-minute ad for Texas State University.  It was nicely done—a female chorus sang a bouncy holiday tune in the background, we saw familiar landmarks on campus, both still and live action, and it wound up innocuously with best holiday wishes for all.  But here was a new mass medium, and although it had taken a few years, it eventually complied with Stephan's Law—it ended up advertising its controlling organization. 

The first time I noticed an example of this law was when the old National Educational Television (NET) transformed into the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) in the late 1960s.  Back then, there was a sort of unwritten rule observed by educators that the classroom was no place for overt advertising.  So for the first few years of its existence, NET carried no ads of any kind, even for itself, at least none that I recall.  But once educational TV stations realized that they could take some of that valuable air time and run pledge drives for themselves, well, the horse was out of the barn, and now self-promotion is a routine part of the business of PBS.

Note that Stephan's Law makes no moral judgment.  As far as that goes, I do it myself—after all, now and then I have links to my own blogs.  Morality comes into play only when you take other considerations into account.  For example, does the medium present itself as strictly neutral and unbiased?  It's hard to be that way when you're telling people about how great you are.  So in that case, there's the danger of hypocrisy.  And while the amount of time that an external advertising sponsor can buy in a given medium is limited by the sponsor's resources, the organization that operates the medium has no natural limit to its own self-advertisement efforts.  Something close to that limit is approached by a particular cable news channel we watch, Time Warner Cable News.  Although the channel carries ads from external sponsors as well, I think about half of the non-content time on it is devoted to self-promotion.  Of course, I don't have to watch that channel if I don't want to.  But if I choose to, I'm going to see a whole lot of ads for Time Warner Cable in its various guises.

If I knew more of the writings of a communication studies guru like Marshall McLuhan, I would probably find that Stephan's Law was discovered centuries ago after Gutenberg put an ad in his Bible for upcoming new editions, or something along those lines.  (Note to incunabula specialists:  I have no idea whether Gutenberg self-advertised or not, but it wouldn't surprise me.)  But in my state of happy ignorance, I present this principle to you free of charge, and challenge you to watch for the next example of it that comes to your attention.  The more media there are, the more chances there are for Stephan's Law to be verified, and in this media-saturated culture, it's hard to go for very long without seeing an example of it in action.

Sources:  I looked for an example on YouTube of the Lone Ranger-General Mills segue, but for reasons that may have to do with copyright, it doesn't show up there.  However, some DVD collections of old Lone Ranger TV episodes have it, which is where I saw it. The word "Jumbotron" is actually a registered trademark of Sony Corporation, according to Wikipedia, but since Sony quit making those devices in 2003 the word has passed into the language to mean any large electronic display board.

Is Fracking Shaking Up Azle?

Although Texas has had its share of both natural and man-made disasters, earthquakes are not something most Texans worry about much.  The geology of much of Texas is more or less flat limestone layers left over from the time when a giant sea covered much of the state.  We are pretty far away from the edges of tectonic plates, unlike places such as the west coast of the U. S., where earthquakes are a constant threat.  So when the small North Texas town of Azle had an earthquake a year or two ago, it was an unusual event.  It was a small one, but more and more followed.  In the month-long period ending today (Dec. 29), Azle has had ten earthquakes large enough to be noted by the website earthquaketrack.com, whose data comes from the United States Geological Survey.  The smallest was magnitude 2.8 and the largest was 3.6, which is enough to rattle windows and cause minor structural damage. 

This would be simply a matter of scientific curiosity were it not for the possibility that these earthquakes, as well as similar ones in other parts of Texas and the U. S., are related to oil- and gas-drilling activity.  Specifically, the process called "fracking" involves sending lots of water treated with chemicals down a potential oil or gas well, then pulling it out again and disposing of it in underground injection wells that are deep enough so the injected fluids don't mix with groundwater.  At least, that is the intention.

Drillers have done fracking for many years, and according to a website operated by the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, Texas has over 52,000 Class II injection wells, which are typically the type used by fracking operations.  But only in the last five to ten years has fracking become a widespread practice near populated areas of North Texas, where the Barnett Shale formation has become the focus of intense exploration and drilling.  In the interests of full disclosure, my father-in-law received some money for mineral rights related to drilling near his former home in Fort Worth, which he no longer owns.  And my sister lives in Cleburne, some 30 miles south of Fort Worth, which has experienced a few earthquakes of its own in recent months.  Cleburne is near a lot of fracking activity and injection wells too.

Suppose there is a connection between shoving lots of water underground and triggering earthquakes:  what then?  Is this a matter of engineering ethics concern?  I would certainly think so.

The parties most directly involved are (1) the oil and gas drillers, (2) the people living in areas subject to these strange earthquakes, (3) the organizations paying for and benefiting from the drilling, (4) local, state, and federal regulatory authorities, and (5) the general public, which is not directly affected by the earthquakes, but benefits in some way from increased domestic supplies of fossil fuels, and is possibly harmed by the general increased risk of earthquakes in the future.  But identifying the concerned parties is only the first step.

From a legal point of view, the situation is extremely fuzzy.  Although there have not historically been a lot of Texas earthquakes, there were enough for U. T. Austin geology professor Cliff Frolich and his colleague Scott Davis to write a book about them in 2002.  I have read that book, and the impression I got was that Texas is not under any existential threat from a "big one" like California is due for.  Rather, there are lots of little faults here and there, and every so often one of them gets tense enough to snap, like a third-grade teacher the day before Christmas vacation.  Frolich wrote a report back in 2009 on a cluster of earthquakes near Cleburne, where he confirmed that numerous injection wells had been operating.  After installing a special array of seismographs, he detected even more earthquakes than the standard USGS network did, and in the abstract of the report he stated, "A plausible hypothesis to explain these observations is that injection only triggers earthquakes if injected fluids reach and relieve friction on a suitably oriented, nearby fault that is experiencing regional tectonic stress."  What he's saying in ordinary English is something like this:  Earthquake clusters are like doors that have both a lock and a key.  The lock is the local conditions of stress and orientation that make the fault ready to let go, and the key is the water coming in from the injection wells.  When the key fits in the lock, the door opens and in comes an earthquake.

Seismic data on earthquakes is easy to come by; besides the USGS data, there are other online databases and the information is relatively easy to find and read.  The question of where injection wells are and how much fluid is injected is a harder one to answer, although the Texas Railroad Commission (named that for historical reasons), which is the state regulatory agency for oil and gas drilling, has a database on injection wells that will yield such information to diligent inquiry.  I diligently inquired for about five minutes this morning and turned up a bunch of wells across Eagle Mountain Lake from Azle, but nothing right in the town.  But maybe Azle sits on the lock, and the key flowed under the lake from the other side, so to speak.

I'm no geologist, or lawyer either.  If Azaleans (or whatever you call citizens of Azle) get tired of being shaken awake at 2 A. M. and organize a class-action lawsuit, their lawyers would have a rocky road to travel (so to speak) in order to prove to the satisfaction of a civil-trial jury that such-and-such injection wells directly caused so-and-so earthquake.  The only similar legal issue I can think of would be a lawsuit concerning structural damage caused by dynamiting for quarries and similar purposes.  In those types of cases, all the plaintiff has to show is that at Time A before the blast, the damage wasn't there, and right afterward at Time B it was, and usually it's easy to show that because the physics of shock propagation is pretty well known and hard to argue against in court. 

That is far from the case for these earthquake clusters.  In defense of their practices, fracking drillers state correctly that they have been doing fracking for many years in Texas and elsewhere, and nobody much noticed any earthquake clusters back then.  My own guess is that they just happened to be fooling around with keys where there weren't any locks.  But now that the fracking activity is so visible near populated areas such as the Dallas-Fort Worth area, people have begun to notice the clusters and start putting two and two together. 

So far, no one has been seriously injured or killed in a recent Texas earthquake cluster in areas where injection-wells are suspected as the cause.  As long as the damage remains minor, the general good will enjoyed by the oil and gas industry in Texas will probably continue, especially if they keep spreading around those royalty payments of a thousand dollars or so to anyone in the neighborhood of an active well.  But if we get a seriously bad earthquake that results in injuries or deaths near a place where injection wells are operating, watch for the legal and regulatory picture to change fast.  For my sister's sake, as well as the fracking industry, I hope that never happens.

Sources:  The book Texas Earthquakes by Cliff Frolich and Scott Davis was published in 2002 by the University of Texas Press.  An abstract of Prof. Frolich's report on the Cleburne earthquake cluster is accessible at http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/07/30/1207728109.abstract.  The EPA website with statistics on Class II injection wells can be found at

http://water.epa.gov/type/groundwater/uic/wells.cfm. I referred to articles in a Russian news website on the Azle earthquakes, published at

http://rt.com/usa/texas-fracking-earthquakes-azle-445/

and data on the Azle earthquakes from the earthquake website

http://earthquaketrack.com/us-tx-azle/recent.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on Azle.

Engineering, Freedom, and the 28th Amendment

In a talk I gave in Doha, Qatar last fall at an engineering ethics conference, I listed some cultural characteristics that seemed to be necessary for engineering to flourish.  One of the characteristics I listed was “freedom for organizations” to pursue projects in the marketplace of ideas and goods.  Of course, most engineering is done by commercial organizations called corporations, which are legally treated as persons in many ways.  In the U. S., this way of treating corporations goes back at least to the 19th century, and farther if you look into English common law.  But broadly speaking, any group of people doing something as a group can be regarded in the light of a corporation, and so even nonprofit outfits such as Wikipedia, local churches, and (I suppose) even high-school chess clubs could conceivably be regarded as corporations.

What has the nature of corporations got to do with engineering?  A threat to the existence of corporations is, indirectly, a threat to the flourishing of engineering.  And a threat to the freedom, and conceivably the very existence, of corporations has arisen from one Rep. James McGovern of Massachusetts, who used his position in the U. S. House of Representatives last November to introduce a proposed 28th amendment to the Constitution.  Now, amendments to the Constitution are among the most difficult legislative objects to enact, because they require not only the approval of two-thirds of both the House and the Senate, but also three-fourths of the state legislatures.  So in practical terms, the proposed amendment is very likely to fall by the wayside before it could get within hailing distance of actually becoming law.  But even a small danger of a terrible tragedy is worth paying attention to, as students of engineering disasters know.

Why would passage of this amendment be so bad?  Because it revokes all the rights and freedoms reserved in the Constitution for the people, from anything you can conceivably call a “corporation.”  Individual “natural” persons would still have freedom of speech, the press, religion, and so on.  But two or more of them together, as long as such a grouping could be construed as a corporation, would be at the mercy of Congress, which could do anything it liked in terms of regulation:  prohibit any action, tax the entity to death, or even prohibit its very existence.

The alleged rationale for this amendment is the 2010 U. S. Supreme Court decision (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission) that upheld the right of corporations to make political expenditures.  In the view of some, this decision gave too much power to deep-pocketed corporations, which can now buy political ads with impunity.  While there are deep and serious problems with the way political campaigns are funded in the U. S., the cure proposed by Rep. McGovern would be a great deal worse than the disease.

Just to give a specific example, consider this blog you are reading.  It is appearing through the courtesy of one of the largest corporations in the U. S.:  Google.  While I as an individual am venting my opinion on what Rep. McGovern is doing, it is the corporation known as Google which is actually putting my words out there for other people to read.  If the proposed 28th amendment became law and Congress took a dislike to anything—anything at all—that anybody said in any blog that Google puts online, there would be no obstacle whatsoever to stop Congress from passing a law that gave Rep. McGovern’s office censorship rights over everything Google does.  While there is a clause in the amendment that says nothing shall be construed to limit the “people’s” rights, the word “people” is explicitly defined in the previous clause to exclude corporations.  Because posting all those blogs is a corporate act—you can’t find the one individual at Google solely responsible for operating blogspot.com—it is not protected by that construal clause, and out it goes if Congress wills.

This matter came to my attention in a column written by George Will, and he has plenty of other examples of what havoc could result from the proposed amendment.  This proposal is only the latest in a series of unwise and intemperate actions that seem to be getting more frequent in Washington.

Freedom, though vitally important in a democracy, is not an absolute foundational right.  The enjoyment of freedom, for engineers as for everyone else, comes with the obligation to use freedom responsibly.  For engineers, this means thinking about the consequences of actions and projects that affect other people.  For legislators such as Rep. McGovern, it means considering the larger consequences of one’s proposed legislation, and how it could cause problems much worse than the original one it was designed to solve.  We can thank the wise and prudent framers of the original Constitution that they made the amendment process as difficult and cumbersome as it is.  It is hard enough to block ultimately frivolous and inimical proposals such as Rep. McGovern’s, but straightforward enough to allow enactment of changes for which there is sufficient national consensus.  But the fact that even one duly elected member of Congress could be so shortsighted and imprudent as to propose the de-personalizing of all corporations is a bad sign that wisdom and prudence are getting in short supply.

Sources:  George Will’s syndicated column on May 6, 2012 was entitled “Taking a Scythe to the Bill of Rights,” and can be found at many media outlets, for example http://thedailyworld.com/sections/opinion/columnist/george-will-—-taking-scythe-bill-rights.html.  Rep. McGovern’s own explanation of his reasoning can be found at the website http://freespeechforpeople.org/McGovern, which also has a link to the text of the proposed amendment.

Readers Respond to Poll on Real Engineering Ethics Problems

Two weeks ago I asked readers to send me stories about authentic engineering ethics problems they have run into. Numerically, the response was not overwhelming (I think I got three replies), but all of them were worth reading. And one reader in particular (who has requested anonymity) came back with several stories that made the whole effort worthwhile.

One reader in Australia noted the conflict between natural resources and farmland, on the one hand, and the needs of extractive industries such as mining, petroleum, and lumber on the other hand. Australia, with its proximity to the increasing demands of developing Asian countries such as China for raw materials, faces this problem in an especially pointed way, although it is truly a global issue.

Another reader points out that while engineering codes of ethics usually consider the needs of the public at large as well as the client, some clients actively oppose an engineer’s efforts to abide by environmental regulations and other public protections.

But the prize goes to the third response I received from a former engineer who is now in academia. Out of several rather hair-raising stories that he sent in, I will summarize just one.

The engineer in question worked for a large firm with overseas customers. One large project originated in the sales department, progressed through sales engineers, applications engineers, and moved on to the regular engineering staff. One of the engineers there noted that there was a paperwork error in the specifications. If the product was made as specified, it would lead to a hazardous situation and it could kill or maim people horribly. Accordingly, the engineer sent back the project and asked for the error to be corrected. The sales people denied the request, not once but several times. After one more try at getting the error corrected, the firm’s client company overseas sent their project manager (essentially a customer of the firm) to the firm’s offices and they held a meeting with him. The client-manager from overseas closed the conference room door and chewed out the engineers up one side and down the other, reminded them that they’d signed a contract, threatened lawsuits, and said either they should build the unsafe product as is or face a “total company shut-down.” I quote from the email: “At one point, the project manager tried to convince us of the trifling nature of the problem since the only people likely to be hurt were third-world village ‘a--holes’ whose widows would get wonderful government pensions if the worst happened.”

It turned out that the reason the overseas project manager was so insistent on keeping the mistake in the plans, was that he was operating under either national or corporate rules in his country which prohibited the alteration of a single project document once bidding was over. If anything was changed, the whole project would have to be rebid, and things would probably get delayed for years.

After much hair-pulling, the firm’s management decided to deliver all the project documentation without the signature of a single engineer. Instead, all the documents came with letters warning that the product was not safe for use unless a simple change was made, and described the change needed to make the project safe. Since the firm itself wasn’t building the product (the overseas client was), technically the firm wouldn’t be liable for injuries to the same degree, but even with all the warnings, the experience left many of the firm’s engineers with sleepless nights.

This story teaches valuable lessons on several levels. For one thing, it shows how cultural differences are an increasing factor in modern engineering work. The cavalier attitude shown by the overseas project manager toward the people likely to be hurt if the product failed was not shared by the U. S. engineers, to say the least. The conflict between sales staff, who wanted simply to get the sale, and engineering staff, who wanted the product to be safe, is a perennial one, but in my experience simply comes with the territory. The way the firm resolved the situation was perhaps one of the least bad solutions, but when a client refuses to accept the best solution and threatens to ruin your firm, sometimes the best solution simply won’t work. One hopes along with the engineers involved that the client firm took the advice and made the added change to improve product safety. But at some level, all such interactions rest on trust, and all the documents in the world will not prevent an unscrupulous contractor or construction worker from doing something wrong.

You can also question the wisdom of a rule that prevents the slightest alteration in documents after the bidding process is over. Some rules are implemented with ulterior motives. In any complex project, certain changes simply come up when on-the-ground reality collides with the engineering paperwork. And reasonable contract rules and laws recognize this fact. In my very limited experience with U. S. construction practices (limited to sitting in on one construction contracting class), an allowance for after-bid changes is made and rules are set up to implement these changes fairly and with adequate notification for all parties involved. I suspect that the overseas law about no changes in the documents after the bid may have been implemented by a government whose friends in high places wanted a loophole through which to funnel business their way. In the event that any documents are changed after a bidding process, this would allow a corrupt government to keep fiddling with the bids until its buddies got the business, while staying within the letter of the law. That is only speculation on my part, but I can’t imagine any other reason for such a rigid and unrealistic rule.

I thank all the readers for sending in their ideas. The National Institute for Engineering Ethics movie project will probably be ongoing for the next several years, so any time you have ideas along these lines, please send them in, either in a comment on the blog or directly to my email at kdstephan(atsign)txstate.edu.

Engineering Ethics and Natural Law

As anybody who has read this blog for a while knows, I do not view engineering ethics as a narrow, specialized field where only experts can render the right opinions. I believe anyone who has enough moral sense to graduate with an engineering degree has the ability to think ethically, and with a little help and advice can make good ethical judgments about a wide variety of professional concerns. Today I will explain why I think this is true.

If a person can think clearly enough to do engineering, he or she has what I will term a “deep knowledge” of right and wrong. This knowledge is not the same as what we conventionally call “conscience”: it is more like the fundamental principles on which everyone’s conscience is based. Some examples of this deep knowledge are things like:

Being fair is better than being unfair.

Betraying a friend is wrong.

Marital infidelity is wrong.

Evidence for this deep knowledge is to be found on every children’s playground and in the legends, literature, and law of every culture. It is simply an empirical fact that normal human beings have an inborn knowledge of right and wrong at a deep level.

This is not to say that everyone in every culture agrees on every detail of every ethical question. This deep knowledge combines with cultural norms, life experiences, training, and other factors to produce a conscience of which we are consciously aware. Some people manage to suppress their deep knowledge so that even their conscience does not bother them as they go about committing serial murders or turn themselves into suicide bombers. But rest assured the knowledge is there; it has simply been suppressed by other influences. The idea that this deep knowledge of right and wrong exists at some level in every human being is called “natural law.”

A person who has mastered the technical material of an engineering discipline has the intellectual capacity to understand and imagine the ethical consequences of engineering activity. Whether or not they apply their minds to this question is a matter of training and discipline. Up to the twentieth century, most people (including a good many who benefited from college educations) belonged to a religious tradition which encouraged acceptance of the principles of natural law, and legal codes were largely in conformance both with religious tradition and natural law as well. But with the advent of various totalitarian governments and a broad rejection of religion as a serious matter in higher education and elite classes, things changed.

Today you will find little support for the idea that everyone has a deep built-in knowledge of right and wrong which simply needs to be elucidated to become effective. Colleges and universities either avoid the subject altogether or teach ethics in a way that would never work for mathematics or physics. Imagine in your first physics class if the instructor got up and said something like, “There are many physics traditions: some people believe F = ma, while others believe F = m + a and still others believe F = m/a. We will not insist on any one of these, and simply want to tolerate everyone’s opinions on the subject while thinking how to apply these principles to practical situations.” It sounds absurd, and yet many instructors of professional ethics take what amounts to that position with regard to ethical principles. And if you go to experts who base their ethics on elaborately wrought philosophical structures, you can find someone who will justify anything from drug testing using people hired off the streets, to infanticide (the famous Princeton philosopher Peter Singer has said that killing newborns is not the same thing as killing a person).

As natural-law philosopher J. Budziszewski has said, our deep knowledge of right and wrong is still there, but factors such as the atrophy of tradition, the cult of the expert, and the disabling of shock and shame have made it harder for us to connect with that deep knowledge and act on it. Thus it can be that trying to do ethics in accordance with certain complex philosophical approaches can take you to a conclusion that makes logical sense, given your philosophical assumptions, and yet feels wrong. I am here to say that in such a case, you probably ought to go with your feelings.

But not always: “going with your feelings” is one more factor that has landed us in more trouble with regard to natural law. A moment’s thought will reveal how wrong it is to say that one’s feelings must always be followed as a guide to action. Yet for people who have no belief in the deep knowledge of right and wrong, and base their moral decisions on examples from popular culture where following your feelings is a bedrock principle, there may be nothing better to turn to. Feelings are real, and paying attention to your feelings is important, but unless you are some kind of saint, obeying your feelings is not going to lead to the right decision all the time (and even the saints admitted to having wrong feelings from time to time).

But not always: “going with your feelings” is one more factor that has landed us in more trouble with regard to natural law. A moment’s thought will reveal how wrong it is to say that one’s feelings must always be followed as a guide to action. Yet for people who have no belief in the deep knowledge of right and wrong, and base their moral decisions on examples from popular culture where following your feelings is a bedrock principle, there may be nothing better to turn to. Feelings are real, and paying attention to your feelings is important, but unless you are some kind of saint, obeying your feelings is not going to lead to the right decision all the time (and even the saints admitted to having wrong feelings from time to time).

If I had room, I could explore the reasons for believing in this deep knowledge, which ultimately lead back to the idea of a Creator who designed them into us in conformance with the way the world is. But the nice thing about natural law is that even if a person doesn’t believe in God, the deep knowledge is there, and if you can help bring it to the surface, their conscience will guide them to the right decision regardless.

This is why I believe engineering ethics is not just a field for experts. Everyone can do it, but it requires thought as well as feelings, will as well as intelligence, and reliance on something that is ultimately not of our own making.

Sources: I relied on J. Budziszewski’s book What We Can’t Not Know: A Guide (Spence, 2003) for the basic ideas in this blog. It is highly recommended as a readable yet sophisticated and thorough treatment of applied natural law. I last mentioned natural law in my blog of Nov. 23, 2009 (“Ethics: Evolved or Given?”).

Ethics: Evolved or Given?

Every now and then we take a look at ethics in general: what ethics is, how to think about it, and, although you don't have to figure this one out to do engineering ethics, where ethics comes from. Where you say ethics comes from depends on your philosophical presuppositions. People who think the physical universe is all there is will generally say something different about the origins of ethics than those who believe there is something beyond nature, that is, supernaturalists such as myself. But the surprising thing is, even researchers who take no account of supernatural explanations end up with a conclusion about the nature of ethics worldwide, that is surprisingly close to what believers in the supernatural claim.

Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, has developed what he calls Moral Foundations Theory. It is based on data gathered from over 100,000 surveys of people all around the world, so you would have a hard time accusing Haidt of ethnocentrism. What he and his colleagues have found, is that our sense of right and wrong can be traced to one or more foundational principles or ideas that essentially all cultures he studied share in common. These principles are: (1) "Harm/care"—the ability to understand pain and other results of harm in others, and to empathize and care for them; (2) "Fairness/reciprocity"—the kind of thing that makes even three-year-olds scream, "That's not fair!!" in every language; (3) "Ingroup/loyalty"—the ability to identify with and sacrifice for a group one belongs to; (4) "Authority/respect"—the sense that legitimate authority and traditions should be obeyed; and (5) "Purity/sanctity"—the notion of sacred spaces and the purity of the human body. On his website (which contains basically all I know about his theory), Haidt traces each of these traits to an evolutionary root. The trait of purity/sanctity, for instance, which Catholic author Flannery O'Connor called "the most mysterious of the virtues," derives from the evolutionary psychology of "disgust and contamination."

The details of each foundational principle (or should I say foundational/principle?) are not as important as the fact that according to Haidt, they are shared universally among all cultures he has studied. This gives the lie to people who say that ethics is always relative to the specific culture, and what is right in one culture could just as easily, and logically, be wrong in another one. Details differ, of course. What passes for modest apparel in Tahiti would not pass muster in Times Square (not now, anyway), but the remarkable thing is that there really are universally shared moral mechanisms or tendencies at all. One would think that evolution would have come up with a splendid and contradictory variety of ethical notions, just as we see a tremendous variety of colors and shapes among birds or reptiles in different parts of the world.

For supernaturalists, this is no surprise. There is an old, somewhat battered, but nonetheless still vigorous concept called "natural law" which says, in a nutshell, the laws of morality are written on the heart of every person, and the Author is God. According to natural law, there are certain innate principles of morality that people know by nature, even if they later convince themselves otherwise for various, often self-serving, reasons. Just as Haidt has found, natural law says these basic principles are universal, though details can vary according to customs and cultures of different peoples. For example, the Christian tradition says a man can have only one wife at a time. Islam and some other religions allow four or more wives at once. But there is no culture anywhere (Margaret Mead notwithstanding) which says you may simply have any woman you like anytime. This is not to say that some people don't act that way; but if they do, they are going against the morality of their culture.

What difference does this make to engineering ethics? In one sense, very little, and in another sense, everything.

In the sense that engineering ethics deals with practical applications of generally accepted ethical principles to specific problems, the field is not that concerned with where the ethics come from—whether evolution or God. This is why engineering societies composed of people from many religions, or no religion, can nevertheless agree on certain basic codes of ethics to follow worldwide. Although bribery is a widespread practice, nearly everybody agrees that to live in a world without bribery would be better than to live with it. People who take and receive bribes make the excuse that they simply couldn't get things done otherwise. While that may be true in a particular case, it doesn't change the fact that a country or system without bribery is a better thing morally than one where you have to bribe people to get even legitimate things done.

On the other hand, if you ask yourself "Why be moral at all?" the origins of moral principles make all the difference in the world. Engineers often pride themselves on their ability to reason logically. If we are really just products of a blind evolutionary process that came from nowhere and leads nowhere—I don't know about you, but if I believed that, I would have trouble just getting out of bed in the morning, let alone devoting years of study to a profession that will produce only a transient gleam in the eternal void. A common alternative, according to mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal, is to distract oneself from the awful reality of death, and engineering is as good a distraction as any, for a while, anyway. But in this view, it's only a distraction.

Next time we'll examine some specific technical matter with an ethical angle to it, and life will go on. But every now and then, it's good to ask why right and wrong is there at all, and where it comes from.

Sources: I discovered the Moral Foundations Theory website from reading a piece by skeptic Michael Shermer in the December 2009 issue of Scientific American. The website is at www.moralfoundations.org.

Marriage and Engineering Revisited

Back on May 31, I argued here that allowing same-sex marriage in the U. S. could conceivably damage our prospects for raising the next generation of engineers. It elicited several responses, including a remarkably thoughtful and articulate set of counterarguments by Michael Faris, an instructor in business and technical writing at Oregon State University. In the time since, I have read David Blankenhorn's The Future of Marriage (I admitted I had only read the reviews of it earlier). In the May 31 blog, I cited that book to support my arguments that children raised in circumstances other than a two-biological-parent family do not do as well, in a variety of measures, as children who grow up under the care of their own mother and father.

Reading the book has given me a deeper understanding of the complex issues involved, and I would like to explore a few of them briefly here as I respond to some of Mr. Faris's arguments. For those of you who are wondering what this has to do with engineering ethics, the point is that anything which encourages the development of stable, intellectually agile, and dedicated young adults will augur well for the future of engineering education, and without such people, there won't be as many future engineers. Also, there's some interesting ethical reasoning in this issue to be explored on its own.

First, I will concede a couple of points to Mr. Faris.

He claimed that maybe white, male, middle-class students do better in engineering, not because they are "inherently 'superior,'" but because such students receive "unearned privileges" such as living in better school districts than students of poorer single parents, having more relatives and friends who are college graduates, and so on. I will admit that I did not consider these kinds of factors in my original arguments, although they are difficult to disentangle from intrinsic abilities and character.

Second, he said my likening same-sex marriage to flooding the engineering-degree market with bogus degrees from fake institutions was a bad analogy. I admit that the comparison was poorly chosen and rather obscure. But as my reading of Blankenhorn revealed, that analogy turned out to be my intuitive way of groping toward a point that Blankenhorn makes abundantly clear in his book. That point is the "deinstitutionalization" of marriage. What does he mean by that?

Social institutions of any kind—marriage, universities, the legal system, you name it—both grant rights and require responsibilities of those who participate in them. If people claim the rights without following the rules that specify the responsibilities, the institution collapses, and whatever good it was doing disappears along with it. To remove the responsibilities from marriage, or any other institution, is to deinstitutionalize it, which radically reduces its beneficial effects for society.

To oversimplify Blankenhorn's main point, the promotion of same-sex marriage is an attempt to use marriage for a purpose it was not designed to fulfill: the promotion of human dignity for gay people. Blankenhorn is in favor of giving gay people equal recognition as full members of society. But he sees this good thing to be in conflict with another good thing: the right of every child to be cared for by their natural mother and father. He sees the latter good as the primary institutional purpose of marriage, which is why sexual intercourse and the care of children are responsibilities involved in the institution as it has historically stood.

He shows, in more detail than I can outline here, how the legalization of same-sex marriage must change the meaning of marriage for every single person in the country—married, single, with or without children, and for the children themselves. It already has in Canada. Largely because of that nation's implementation of same-sex marriage, the term "natural parent" has been eliminated in Canadian law, and replaced by the term "legal parent." And that isn't just for children of same-sex couples—it's for everybody. In law, there is no longer any such thing as a natural parent in Canada. Parents are now what the law says they are, period. My badly chosen analogy to the debauching of engineering degrees was simply my attempt to show how you can wreck an institution by lowering its standards. Changing marriage from what the U. N. Declaration of Human Rights says it is when it guarantees "the right to marry and to found a family," which is "the natural and fundamental group unit of society. . . entitled to protection by society and the State," to what one judge called "a celebration of a life of commitment to the relationship" lowers the standards of marriage.

Mr. Faris discounted my citation of "objective" social-science research that shows children raised in a two-biological-parent family do better, saying that social science is an "ideology." He implied that if a thing is ideological, then it can't be objective. By "objective," I simply mean that which is the same for me, for you, and for everybody else—that which is public knowledge, as opposed to a subjective feeling or sensation. If Mr. Faris wants to call social science an ideology, that is his privilege. But that does not change the fact that if you look at two different groups of children, one group being raised by their two natural parents and the other some other way, and the natural-parent group drops out of school less, commits suicide less, does drugs less, engages in early sex and has babies in their teenage years less, then those numerical facts are the same facts for everybody, whether you call them ideological or not.

The last point I will address is the one Mr. Faris makes here: "Our current Western model of family didn't arise because it was best for children; it arose because it was best for the continuity of property under a capitalist system." I beg to differ. He says there are societies in which children are raised "communally" or by "large extended families." First, I am unaware of any society, present or past (with two exceptions that Blankenhorn cites) in which the biological mother and father, if available, do not play a lead role in the raising of children, however much the extended family or community or the village raises the child as well. Blankenhorn uses the example of the Trobriand Islanders in the South Pacific as a society in which conventional inheritance of property as we know it in the West is largely unknown (uncles, for example, take on the primary responsibility for providing food), but in which the mother and father play primary roles in the raising of children. This is not to say that property rights are not related to family structure at all. But Mr. Faris is simply wrong when he claims that property rights are the main reason for the near-universal practice of mothers and fathers bearing the main responsibility for raising their children.

I understand from his blog that Mr. Faris will be pursuing a Ph. D. in English rhetoric and composition at Penn State in the fall. I wish him the best in his pursuits, and thank him for his thoughtful and stimulating comments. All the same, it looks like we will have to agree to disagree on this topic, which I will now give a well-deserved rest.

Sources: My original blog on this topic was "California Supreme Court Damages Future of Engineering" on May 31. Mr. Faris's comments can be found below that entry, and his website "A Collage of Citations" is currently at http://oregonstate.edu/~farism/blog/. The quotations from the U. N. Declaration of Human Rights is from p. 182, and the judge's definition of marriage is from p. 147, of David Blankenhorn's The Future of Marriage (Encounter Books, 2007).

Did Morality Evolve? Part 1

Every now and then I like to ruminate on the paradox of engineering ethics. Modern engineering is founded on the principles of objectivity, the scientific method, and the rule of accepting only ideas that can be defended by logical arguments based on observations and measurements. But the foundations of ethics and morality look very different, to say the least. So how can you do engineering ethics without betraying the principles of either engineering or ethics?

The latest stimulus to re-examine this topic came in the form of an article in the Jan. 13 online edition of the New York Times Magazine by Steven Pinker. Pinker holds a chair in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. He is a comparative rarity among academic psychologists in that he writes clearly and actually listens to the arguments of his opponents. In "The Moral Instinct," Pinker surveys the rapidly advancing science of studying moral behavior by using the tools of experimental psychology.

One of the most interesting recent findings is that the brain has a kind of morality switch built into it. Psychologists can study the activity of particular areas of the brain by using a technique called functional MRI, which shows a picture of brain regions that are taking up more oxygen and presumably working harder. A region called the "dorsolateral surface of the frontal lobes" handles rational thinking such as trying to balance your checkbook without a calculator. On the other hand, the medial frontal-lobe regions deal with emotions about other people—a morality switch that gets turned on some times but not other times.

In one study, the researchers posed a series of moral dilemmas to the subjects and asked them to decide what to do. One question—call it the utilitarian question—involved throwing a streetcar-track switch to save five workers' lives by sending a runaway train to run over a sixth worker. Another question—call it the emotional question—was basically the same dilemma, but instead of throwing a switch, the subject had to decide whether to throw a fat man off a bridge. Of the tests that were not spoiled when the subject laughed so hard at the questions that he fell out of the chair and away from the fMRI machine, the researchers found that only the rational part of the brain got involved when the critical act was just throwing a switch. But when the subject had to imagine walking up to a living, breathing man and throwing him to his death, even if it would save five other lives, the emotional part of the brain lit up and got into a fight with the rational part, which also woke up a third part of the brain that acts as a kind of referee between conflicting signals.

The point of this is that psychologists can now use fMRI and other techniques to distinguish between questions and issues that we use mainly rational thinking to answer, and ones which we respond to by appealing to a more basic, non-rational process that Pinker calls the "moral instinct." And Pinker says some very interesting things about this instinct.

For one thing, studies of people from all walks of life and from a variety of cultures all indicate that there may be a core of instinctive moral beliefs that we all have in common. The very fact that Pinker is willing to admit this shows that he is not captive to the "morality-is-subjective" school of thought which has flourished in academia in recent years. Pinker says what he says, not because of any ideological conviction, but because survey and laboratory data from all over the world confirm it. He cites the work of another psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, who says there are basically five categories of moral principles that cover most of the ground for everybody. What are they?

Without going into too much detail, here's the list: (1) Harm—don't hurt other people and help them if you can. (2) Fairness—people in comparable situations should be treated comparably. (3) Group loyalty—other things being equal, take care of your own (family, friends, city, nation) first. (4) Authority—there are rules, rulers, and rulemakers who should be respected and deferred to. (5) Purity—Saintliness, cleanliness, and being without spot or blemish are good things, and grubbiness, filth, and disorder are bad ones.

Pinker says a lot more, but perhaps I will save some of it for next week. I'd like to stop right there and note that what Pinker and his psychological colleagues are doing is searching for experimental validation of something called natural law. And it looks to me like they've found it.

Natural law is the idea that certain principles of morality are not simply agreed upon by mutual consent, but somehow inhere in the nature of things. And not only that, but in some sense these principles of natural law are built into human nature. The idea of natural law goes back at least to St. Thomas Aquinas, who saw it as something God put into all human beings, whether or not they believed in God. It was viewed as a strong basis for human laws until the Enlightenment, when other philosophies of law became more popular. But natural law still has its defenders in the legal profession, political science, and religion.

One of the most articulate defenses of natural law was written in 1947 by C. S. Lewis, the Oxford literary scholar and author. In a small book called The Abolition of Man, Lewis appended a list of what he discerned to be the central principles of what he called the "Tao" or universal laws of morality. Lewis's "Law of General Beneficence" and his "Law of Mercy" look a lot like the moral principle pertaining to Harm above. His "Duties to Parents, Elders, Ancestors" pertain to the principle of Authority, and you can link Lewis's "Duties to Children and Posterity" and his "Law of Special Beneficence" (that is, to family, country, etc.) to the Group Loyalty principle above.

How did Lewis come up with a list that overlaps in so many ways with the product of the latest modern psychological research? By studying the writings of ancient cultures: Babylonia, Egypt, China, and the Norsemen, among others. Pretty good for a guy with no research funding or graduate assistants, way back in the dark ages of 1947.

The point of this little lesson is that ethics and morality, far from being founded on criteria that are purely subjective, and therefore culturally bound and changeable, seems to come from a source that is pretty constant in its basic outlines across time, space, and cultures. And the latest deliverances of modern experimental psychology back up that idea. We will say more about Pinker's article next week, but this point is worth pondering till then.

Sources: Pinker's article appeared at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html. Besides Lewis and his The Abolition of Man, another highly readable proponent of natural law is J. Budziszewski, professor of political science at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Written On the Heart: The Case for Natural Law (1997).