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 Over Time Through Scientific American

In 1970, when I was 17, my grandmother bought me a gift subscription to Scientific American magazine. This was an act of faith on her part as much as anything else, since I suspect teenage boys were not a big item in the magazine’s marketing strategy. But I’ve been a subscriber ever since. I bring this up because this weekend, I boxed up my backfiles of the magazine, almost 500 issues, and prepared to ship them to an outfit in Georgia which offered me a reasonable price for them. It’s not every day someone offers to pay you to clean out your attic, so that’s what I did. It got me to thinking about science, engineering, and the changing status of both as reflected in a journal which has tried to be to the scientific community of America what The New Yorker tries to be to the nation’s arts-and-letters contingent. Exactly what that is can be debated, but it can be summarized as a prestigious forum for the latest and greatest, presented to readers in the upper strata of its chosen group.

Just to make the comparison more vivid, I will look at two sample issues of the magazine spaced widely in time: the March 1957 issue (a beat-up old thing I obtained under dubious circumstances, which I am not sending to Georgia) and my latest current issue, for January 2011. The only thing that is unquestionably the same in the two issues is the masthead logo or whatever you call it, the words “Scientific American” on the cover. Other than that, the differences are vast.

The major articles in the 1957 issue were about evenly divided between the life sciences and the physical sciences. On the biology side, there were pieces on hormones, a famous physician of antiquity named Galen, and a rare genetic disease called porphyria that a researcher had tracked down to a single prolific South African immigrant. On the physical-science side, the interested reader could learn about current techniques of seawater desalinization, recent findings about the Crab Nebula, and frozen free radicals. There were also a couple of articles on psychological matters. I have lost the cover for this particular issue, but if it was like the others of its time, it featured nothing but the magazine’s name, the date, and a single elegantly prepared artwork illustrating one of the articles, with a short subtitle. That was all.

Turning to January 2011, its cover also is dominated by a single image: the male and female symbols used by doctors, made three-dimensional and assembled in what could be described as a suggestive way. The dominant headline (one of several) reads “The Real Sexual Revolution,” and summarizes an article about the evolutionary development of sex. (In case no one has told you, sex sells, at least with magazines.) Three other headlines describe a few more pieces: one on the physical brain substrate of consciousness, one on the development of new flu strains, and one on robot scientists. There is a dominance of biology and the life sciences over the physical sciences, and this trend continues inside. Of nine feature articles listed in the table of contents, only two pertain primarily to physical science. And even those two deal not so much with physics per se as with technology and society: one speculates on what we’ll do if we actually make contact with an interstellar society, and another discusses energy policy.

Another thing to examine is the advertisements, which say a lot about the clientele a magazine hopes to procure. The 1957 issue is full of ads placed by companies wanting to hire scientists and engineers: places like Avco, Northrop, Boeing, RCA, Bell Labs—really an honor roll of the high-tech sector of that time. A tone of desperation even seeps into some of the ads. Clearly it was a seller’s market then, if you had an advanced technical degree in the physical sciences or engineering. The 2011 issue’s ads are softer and less focused, more institutional than purposeful, and many could (and do) appear in any high-prestige slick magazine these days. I saw no ads offering jobs: those have long since retreated into the specialty professional locations where they are more cost-effective. But if I want to buy some software to teach me Chinese, or take a cruise with like-minded Scientific American readers, or be impressed by the high-tech sector of the Czech Republic (the magazine sells special advertising sections to entire countries from time to time), I will find what I’m looking for in this month’s issue.

Another thing that has changed, and in my opinion not for the better, is that the 1957 issue maintains a highly objective and non-political tone throughout, except in a small section called “Science and the Citizen.” Of course, strict objectivity is an illusion, but like good manners, it can be very convenient to employ nonetheless. When longtime publisher Gerard Piel and editor Dennis Flanagan left the magazine’s helm in 1984 to others, the new crew took on an advocacy role in both editor-authored statements and in their choice of articles. In their selection of columnists and direct editorials, the magazine now has an obvious anti-supernatural bias which was hard to detect in its earlier incarnations.

What has all this got to do with engineering, let alone engineering ethics? For one thing, it says engineering is a much more diverse field now than it was in 1957. Back then, an advertiser stood a good chance of addressing the small pool of high-tech American professionals through the pages of a single magazine. Nowadays everything is a lot more complicated: science and technology in general, and the process of finding people who can do what you want, in particular. This little comparison also shows how the physical sciences (and technology based exclusively on them) have shrunk in relative prestige compared to the life sciences. What this means for engineering is not exactly clear, except that engineers themselves must pay more attention to life science than ever before. This explains the growth in programs such as biomedical engineering, and says that too much specialization of any kind may not be a good idea in today’s rapidly changing world.

NOTE on the Readers’ Poll: Last week I asked for suggestions on themes for a new engineering ethics video I will have the opportunity to contribute to. The response was not exactly overwhelming (I think I got two so far), so if you have any ideas along these lines, please see last week’s blog and pass them along. In any event, I will discuss these next week.

Reader’s Poll: Topics for Planned Engineering Ethics Video Wanted

Here’s where I give my readers (both of you!) a chance to participate in an ongoing project that should result in a new video drama for use in teaching engineering ethics at the college level. Over the last two decades, an organization called the National Institute for Engineering Ethics has sponsored the production of three video dramas designed to highlight ethical issues in engineering. (Full disclosure: I am a member of the NIEE board of directors.) These videos have been shown in hundreds of engineering ethics classes over the years, and serve as a springboard for discussion of a wide variety of ethical issues and dilemmas that practicing engineers can encounter on the job.

The three videos are Gilbane Gold (1989), Incident at Morales (2003), and Henry’s Daughters (2010). They are all about a half hour long, with lots of supplementary material for classroom discussions and ethics exercises. (For more information about these videos, see the reference to NIEE in the Sources section below.) If you’ve graduated in the last fifteen years or so from an engineering school which happens to use them, you may have even seen one. If you remember seeing it and it made any kind of impression on you, I’d love to hear from you about it.

But that’s not the main reason for this poll. Many aspects of engineering ethics are perennial, in the sense that human nature doesn’t change that fast and certain kinds of issues keep coming up decade after decade. So to the extent possible, the NIEE tries to address issues in these videos that share that timelessness to insure their wide and continuing usefulness. However, in the nature of things, a video starts to look dated after a while because of hairstyles, dress, vehicles, and even things like the demise of big boxy computer monitors, which happened around the time Incident at Morales was released. So the folks at NIEE are in the early stages of developing the next project, and I would like your help. (By the way, this poll is something I’m doing strictly on my own initiative, and is not an official NIEE activity).

The question I’d like you to address is this: what engineering ethics problems or issues are you either facing right now, or think you’ll be facing in the near future? This is not mainly a technology question, although new technologies can be a part of the answer. What I’m looking for is situations, dilemmas, and types of ethical problems that you have either already encountered on the job, or know about someone else who has run into them. Just to give you an idea of what kinds of things the NIEE videos have dealt with in the past, here are quickie summaries of each one, from the NIEE website:

Gilbane Gold: Gilbane Gold is the name given to dried sludge from the city of Gilbane wastewater treatment plant. It is sold to farmers as a commercial fertilizer. The annual revenue generated saves the average family about $300 per year in taxes. Z CORP, a computer components manufacturer, discharges wastewater containing small amounts of lead and arsenic into the city sewers. By current city test standards, the discharge meets allowable levels. Z CORP environmental engineers know of a newer test which shows that the discharge may still meet the letter of the law, but exceeds the spirit of the law. Protection of the health, safety, and welfare of the public is a concern.

Incident at Morales: Phaust Chemical manufactures Old Stripper, a paint remover that dominates the market. On learning that Phaust’s competitor Chemitoil plans to introduce a new paint remover that may capture the market, executives at Phaust decide to develop a competing product. To save money in manufacturing the product, Phaust decides to construct a new chemical plant in Mexico. To design the new plant, Phaust hires a chemical engineer, Fred Martinez, who had been a consultant to Chemitoil. Fred confronts several engineering decisions in which ethical considerations play a major role. . . . When samples of Chemitoil’s new paint remover EasyStrip become available, it is clear that to be competitive with EasyStrip, Phaust must change the formulation of its new paint remover, requiring higher temperatures and pressures than originally anticipated. These increases in temperatures and pressures cause significant technical and ethical problems, the most serious of which is the fact that the automatic controls no longer work as intended. Thus, the plant manager, Manuel, volunteers to control the process manually. After the plant goes into full operation, an unfortunate accident occurs, resulting in serious consequences. (Spoiler Alert: Namely, Manuel gets killed.)

Henry’s Daughters: Henry is a retired but still well-connected automobile executive and lobbyist. GUIDEME, a client of Henry’s, is involved in an academia-industry-Department of Transportation smart highway design competition called SANSHANDS. The project goal is to develop specifications for automated highways and car control systems so that people won’t have to drive anymore. Laura, Henry’s oldest daughter, is a professional engineer who works at the Department of Transportation. She is the project manager, and responsible for compiling and recommending the specifications for the computer control system. Julie is Henry’s younger daughter. With her father’s finagling, she is an intern with OUTOCAR, a local start-up company recently founded by state university engineers in partnership with the University’s Business Incubator. OUTOCAR is competing with GUIDEME to take the design of SANSHANDS to the next level. The story intertwines the lives of both young women and their father. They are excited to be involved with a project that will impact the future of transportation. While most of their discussions focus on technical and personal challenges, sometimes they unintentionally cross the ethical line by letting proprietary information slip out. Ultimately, Laura’s team recommends OUTOCAR but the final award goes to GUIDEME. OUTOCAR personnel allege that ethical misconduct and possible criminal violations occurred during the project. Consequently, the state senate ethics commission holds a hearing and calls Laura and Henry to testify.

. . . So by now you have an idea of the kinds of things these videos deal with. I’m not looking for complete detailed story ideas at this point. It’s too early in the process for that. Instead, I’m interested in situations and issues (preferably from someone’s real experience) that you think would be helpful to discuss in a college engineering ethics course.

How should you respond? The best way would be to make a comment in the comment section of this blog. That way everybody can see what your idea is right away, including me. The other option is to email me directly (kdstephan@txstate.edu) with your suggestion. I will compile whatever responses I receive in the next week or two and discuss them in an upcoming blog post.

Of course, I cannot make any assurances that what you suggest (or even what I suggest) will make it into the next video, which probably won’t be produced for several more years. But I’d like to give you a chance to contribute your ideas to what we hope will be a helpful and productive educational tool for engineering ethics classes.

Sources: Since the videos are designed for institutional use, they are a little pricey to buy on an individual basis. But you can read descriptions and see more material on them at the NIEE website http://www.niee.org/murdoughCenter/. And since every engineering dean in the U. S. should have received a free copy of Henry’s Daughters in the last year or so, if you want to borrow it you could ask around at the dean’s office.

The Ultimate Cancer Detection Technology: Blessing or Curse?

At least in industrialized countries, the two major causes of death are heart disease and some form of cancer. I don’t know about you, but if I had to choose my poison, I’d prefer heart disease, because cancer is so slow, insidious, and creepy. Besides, my wife is a breast cancer survivor (http://breastcancer.about.com/) and both my parents died of cancer. So when I heard about a research team at Massachusetts General Hospital that has moved a blood-test machine for cancer cells closer to commercialization, I had mixed feelings.

So far, the device is apparently intended only to monitor the condition of patients who are already known to have cancer. It consists of a credit-card-size plate covered with thousands of tiny posts, each one of which has a different kind of molecule that binds to proteins on a specific type of cancer cell. When blood flows over the posts, very small concentrations of cancer cells leave traces on the posts, and you get a number saying how many of what kind of cell is present in the blood. The hope is that this kind of test can supplement or even replace the expensive MRI or CT scans usually employed to monitor progress of chemotherapy by observing the size of macroscopic tumors. Of course, there are many potholes in the road to commercial use, but the researchers have my best wishes for success. I think.

Let’s extrapolate this kind of technology to its ultimate limit. We are told that everybody has some cells that are, if not out-and-out malignant, then highly inclined to develop into cancer. But in healthy people, the immune system is on the lookout for such misbehaviors as a liver cell setting up shop in your biceps muscle, and takes care of misbehaving cells by attacking them as though they were foreign invaders like bacteria. Cancer is not so much the mere occurrence of malignant cells as it is their successful multiplication into a colony whose numbers and size overwhelm the body’s defenses.

So what if we had a blood test for any kind of cancer cell, down to the concentrations that exist in healthy people? Would that be a good thing?

On the face of it, yes. I suppose you could establish some kind of baseline limit as we have done for serum cholesterol. Below the limit you’d be told you were healthy and above the limit, well, you’d be worried, at least. We’d have to go through clinical trials to see what kind of numbers are associated with cancers that are worth fighting. We are already in this situation with regard to the protein-specific antigen (PSA) for prostate cancer. There is a simple blood test that tells you your PSA level, but it turns out that PSA is not an infallible signal that tells you either (a) you’ve got nothing to worry about or (b) make sure your will is in order and you’ve picked out the music you want for your funeral. And even people who have genuine prostate cancer, depending on their age, are sometimes told that not treating it is an option because treatment can sometimes be worse than the disease. But it’s hard to tell when that’s the case.

If we are so tangled in ambiguities about as simple a thing as the PSA test for prostate cancer, imagine what it would be like if we had a blood test, even a reliable one, for most of the common dangerous cancers such as those of the lung, breast, colon, skin (including melanoma), and so on. On the one hand, it’d be nice not to undergo chest X-rays, mammograms, and colonoscopies and instead just provide a blood sample. But on the other hand, I’m sure we would face a world of difficult decisions that would be highly biased by the economics of cancer treatment. When you add the current U. S. health-care law (and its future fate) to the mix, you get quite a brew that could raise as many problems and issues as it solves.

Does this mean we should stop such research? I don’t think so. Knowledge as such, including knowledge of one’s physical condition, is of value, but only if we also consider the context in which such knowledge will be used. It does no good to come up with a cheap test for cancer if we do not also use that new knowledge to work on better and less debilitating treatments that take advantage of the early notice that such a test would give. Otherwise you move toward the ultimate nightmare (which fortunately will never come to pass) of knowing at the outset that for example you, a 23-year-old man, will die at the age of 46 of thus-and-such disease, but there’s nothing anybody can do about it.

My metaphorical hat is off to the MGH researchers, and I hope they succeed in at least their immediate goals of developing better ways of monitoring the progress of cancer treatment. As to the ultimate cancer blood test, if it ever comes to pass, let’s just hope that by then we have come up with a wise way to use it for the benefit of patients as well as the medical industry.

Sources: MIT’s online version of Technology Review carried an article about the MGH research on Jan. 3, 2011 at http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/26218/.

Does Improving Efficiency Really Save Energy?

You might almost say that what health is to doctors or justice is to lawyers, efficiency is to engineers. Making machines more efficient summarizes a good bit of everything that has gone on in technology and engineering over the last couple of hundred years or so. And if you broaden the definition of efficiency to include useful (or desirable) work performed per unit cost (and not just per unit of raw energy input), then everything from airplanes to zippers has gotten more efficient over the years. Increased efficiency in energy-consuming products has been viewed as the no-brainer answer to the problem of rising energy demands around the globe. Instead of building more coal-fired power plants, conservationists say, just replace X million incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents, and you’ve save tons of carbon at virtually no infrastructure cost. This is all very well, but a recent article in The New Yorker calls into question the universally accepted idea that increasing energy efficiency truly leads to less energy consumed.

A nineteenth-century economist named William Stanley Jevons was among the first to point out that improved energy efficiency in manufacturing iron, for example (Jevons’ father was an iron merchant) doesn’t necessarily mean that you will end up using less coal to make iron in the long run. What can happen, especially when the cost of energy is a large portion of the finished product cost, is that when the price goes down due to smaller energy usage, people start using more iron—so much more, in fact, that even with more energy-efficient production, the total amount of iron sold is so much larger that the industry as a whole ends up consuming more energy than before, not less.

Jevons’ idea obviously applies to a lot of things besides iron. Take computers, for example. The first electronic computer occupied a room the size of a small house and consumed about 150 kilowatts of power. Its computing ability was much less than what a tiny 8-pin embedded microprocessor can do today. On a strict efficiency basis, measured by almost any yardstick—energy consumption, cost, space, weight—today’s microprocessor is thousands or millions of times more efficient. But guess what? In 1946 there was exactly one electronic computer of the type I’m describing (ENIAC, installed at the U. S. Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground), and today there are many millions of computers of all sizes, plus giant server farms that tax the power-generating capability of the entire power grid of the Northwest U. S. The total amount of electricity devoted to electronic computing has gone from 150 kW in 1946 to many gigawatts today, if you count all the mobile phones on batteries, the computerized cash registers, and so on.

So what’s an engineer to do? Give up on making things more efficient because people will only use more of them? This is a great example of a case where doing the right thing in a micro-environment (a single company or even industry) may lead to complicated consequences in a macro-environment such as the economy of a country or even the globe. In fact, it goes to the heart of what engineering is all about, and makes one face the question of how to justify energy consumption on a fundamental level.

While this blog is not about global warming, there are those who believe that radical reductions in the world’s carbon footprint are imperative if we are to avoid a gigantic creeping disaster that will flood most of the world’s coastal cities, which means, more or less, many of the world’s cultural and political capitals. Oh, and by the way, millions will die prematurely. Although I do not happen to agree with this premise, let’s grant it for the sake of argument. Given an immediate need to reduce energy consumption by a large fraction, what should we do? Make everything that uses energy more efficient? Jevons’ idea says this simply won’t work. In the broad definition of efficiency we’ve been using, improving efficiency often leads to more energy use, not less.

The unpleasant alternative to what looked like a win-win solution—improved energy efficiency and less energy usage—is some form of rationing: either energy taxes, or simple flat-out restrictions on energy use. Many countries practice this already: it’s called power outages. Power is on only at night, or three hours a day, or not for weeks at a time. It’s arbitrary, unfair, and hits the poorest hardest, but it works. The tax alternative has the advantage that it provides some economic incentive for improving efficiency—but if technology really improves to the point that the tax is compensated for, you’re right back where you started. The only sure-fire way to keep people from using energy as much as they want is to put them under the government’s thumb somehow. Cuba, I understand, has raised this process to an art form—if you consider old cars towed by mules artistic.

Don’t get the idea I think efficiency is bad. If I did, I couldn’t very well call myself an engineer. However, Jevons reminds us that, like many other things in life, energy efficiency can be helpful in limited circumstances. But expecting it to solve all the world’s energy problems is not only unrealistic, but probably counterproductive as well.

Sources: David Owen’s article “The Efficiency Dilemma” appeared in the Dec. 20 & 27, 2010 issue of The New Yorker, pp. 78-85.

A Night to Remember on the Deepwater Horizon

Walter Lord, in his classic nonfiction book A Night To Remember, used dozens of interviews and historical documents to recount the 1912 sinking of the Titanic in vivid and harrowing detail. Now David Barstow, David Rohde, and Stephanie Saul of the New York Times have done something similar for the Deepwater Horizon disaster last April 20. While official investigators will probably take years to complete a final technical reconstruction with all the available information, the story these reporters have pieced together already highlights some of the critical shortcomings that led to the worst deepwater-drilling disaster (and consequential environmental damage) in recent memory.

Their 12-page report makes disturbing reading. They describe how Transocean, the company which owned the rig and operated it for the international oil giant BP, was under time pressure to cap off the completed well and move to the next project. They show something of the complex command-and-control system for the rig that involved all kinds of safety systems (both manual and automatic) as well as dozens of specialists out of the hundred or so engineers, managers, deckhands, drillers, cooks, and cleaning personnel who were on the rig at the time. And they reveal that while the blowout that killed the rig was about the worst that can happen on an offshore platform, there were plenty of ways the disaster could have been minimized or even avoided—at least in theory. But as any engineering student knows, there can be a long and rocky road between theory and practice. I will highlight some of the critical missteps that struck me as common to other disasters that have made headlines over the years.

I think one lesson that will be learned from the Deepwater Horizon tragedy is that current control and safety systems on offshore oil rigs need to be more integrated and simplified. The description of the dozens of buttons, lights, and instrumentation in physically separate locations that went off in response to the detection of high levels of flammable gas during the blowout reminds me of what happened at the Three Mile Island nuclear power reactor in 1979. One of the most critical personnel on the rig was Andrea Fleytas, a 23-year-old bridge officer who was one of the first to witness the huge number of gas alarms going off on her control panel. With less than two years experience on the rig, she had received safety training but had never before experienced an actual rig emergency. She, like everyone else on the rig, faced some crucial decisions in the nine minutes that elapsed between the first signs of the blowout on the rig, and the point where the explosions began. Similarly, at Three Mile Island, investigators found that the operators were confused by the multiplicity of alarms going off during the early stages of the meltdown, and actually took actions that were counterproductive. In the case of the oil-rig disaster, inaction was the problem, but the cause was similar.

Andrea Fleytas or others could have sounded the master alarm, instantly alerting everyone that the rig was in serious trouble. She could have also disabled the engines driving the rig’s generators, which were potent sources of ignition for flammable gas. And the crew could have taken the drastic step of cutting the rig loose from the well, which would have stopped the flow of gas and given them a chance to survive.

But each one of these actions would have exacted a price, ranging from the minor (waking up tired drill workers who were asleep at 11 o’clock at night with a master alarm) to the major (cutting the rig loose from the well meant millions of dollars in expense to recover the well later). And in the event, the confusion of the situation with unprecedented combinations of alarms going off and a lack of coordination among critical personnel in the command structure meant that none of these actions that might have mitigated or avoided the disaster were in fact done.

It is almost too easy to sit in a comfortable chair nine months after the disaster and criticize the actions of those who afterward did courageous and self-sacrificing things while the rig burned and sank. None of what I say is meant as criticism of individuals. The Deepwater Horizon was above all a system, and when systems go wrong, it is pointless to focus on this or that component (human or otherwise) to the exclusion of the overall picture. In fact, a lack of overall big-picture planning appears to be one of the more significant flaws in the way the system was set up. Independent alarms were put in place for specific locations, but there were no overall coordinated automatic systems that would, for example, sound the master alarm if more than a certain number of gas detectors sensed a leak. The master alarm was placed under manual control to avoid waking up people with false alarms. But this meant that in a truly serious situation, human judgment had to enter the loop, and in this case it failed.

Similarly, the natural hesitancy of a person with limited experience to take an action that they know will cost their firm millions of dollars was just too much to overcome. This sort of thing can’t be dealt with in a cursory paragraph in a training manual. Safety officers in organizations have to grow into a peculiar kind of authority that is strictly limited as to scope, but absolute within its proper range. It needs to be the kind of thing that would let a brand-new safety officer in an oil refinery dress down the refinery’s CEO for not wearing a safety helmet. That sort of attitude is not easy to cultivate, but it is vitally necessary if safety personnel are to do their jobs.

Disasters teach engineers more than success, it is said, and I hope that the sad lessons learned from the Deepwater Horizon disaster will lead to positive changes in safety training, drills, and designs for future offshore operations.

Sources: The New York Times article “The Deepwater Horizon’s Final Hours” appeared in the Dec. 25, 2010 online edition at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/us/26spill.html.

Cheaters 1, Plagiarism-Detection Software 0

The Web and computer technology have revolutionized the way students research and write papers. Unfortunately, these technologies have also made it vastly easier to plagiarize material: that is, to lift verbatim chunks of text from published work and pass it off as your own original creation. In response, many universities have promoted the use of commercial plagiarism-detection software, marketed under names such as Turnitin and MyDropBox. Still more unfortunately, in a systematic test of how effective these programs are in detecting blatant, wholesale plagiarism, the software bombed.

Why is plagiarism perceived as getting worse than it used to be? One factor is the physical ease of plagiarism nowadays. Back in the Dark Ages when I did my undergraduate work, it was not quite the quill-pen-by-kerosene-lamp era, but if had ever I decided to plagiarize something, it would have taken a good amount of effort: hauling books from the library, photocopying journal papers, dragging them to my room, and typing them into my paper letter by letter with a manual typewriter. With all that physical work and dead time involved, copying a few paragraphs with the intent of cheating wasn’t much easier than simply thinking up something on your own. The physical labor was the same.

Fast-forward to 2010: there’s Microsoft Word, there’s Google, and if you’re under 22 or so these things have been there for at least half your life. The “copy” and “paste” commands are vastly easier than hunting and pecking out your own words. And you suspect that a good bit of everything out on the Web was copied and pasted from somewhere else anyway. So what is the big deal some professors make about this plagiarism thing? The big deal is this: it’s wrong, because it constitutes theft of another person’s ideas, and fraud in that you give the false impression that you wrote it yourself.

In engineering, essays and library-research reports make up only a small part of what students turn in, so I do not face the mountains of papers that instructors in English or philosophy have to wade through every semester. But with plagiarism being so easy, I do not blame them for resorting to an alleged solution: the use of plagiarism-detection software. Supposedly, this software goes out and compares the work under examination with web-accessible material and if it finds a match, it flags the work with a color code ranging from yellow to red. Work that passes muster gets a green.

In a recent paper in IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, Rebecca Fiedler and Cem Kaner report their tests of how well two popular brands of plagiarism-detection software actually work on papers that were copied word-for-word from academic journals. The journals themselves were not listed in the article, but appear to be the usual type of research journal which requires payment (either from an individual or a library) for online access. There is the key, I think, to why the software failed almost completely to disclose that the entire submission was copied wholesale, in twenty-four trials of different papers. If I interpret their data correctly, only one of the two brands tested was able to figure this out, and even then it was in only in two of the twenty-four cases. Fiedler and Kaner conclude that professors who rely exclusively on such software for catching plagiarism are living with a false sense of security, at least where journal-paper plagiarism is concerned.

I think the results might have been considerably better for the software if the authors had chosen to submit material that is openly accessible on the Web, rather than publications that are sitting behind fee-for-service walls that require downloading particular papers. In my limited experience with doing my own plagiarism detection, I was able simply to Google a suspiciously well-written passage out of an otherwise almost incomprehensible essay, and located the university lab’s website where the writer had found the material he plagiarized. And I didn’t need the help of any detection software to do that.

As difficult as it may seem, the best safeguard against plagiarism (other than honesty on the part of students, which is always encouraged) is the experience of instructors who become familiar with the kind of material that students typically turn in, and even with passages from well-known sources which might be plagiarized. No general-purpose software could approach the sophistication of the individual instructor who deals with this particular class of students about a particular topic.

Of course, if we’re talking about a U. S. History class with 400 students, the personal touch is hard to achieve. Especially at the lower levels, books are more likely to be plagiarized from than research papers, and as Google puts pieces of more and more copyrighted books on the Web, plagiarism detection software will probably take advantage of that to catch more students who try to steal material. It’s like any other form of countermeasure: the easy cheats are easily caught, but the hard-working cheats who go find stuff from harder-to-access places are harder to catch. But it’s not impossible, and one hopes that by the time students get to be seniors, they have adopted enough of their chosen discipline’s professionalism to leave their early cheating ways behind. Sounds like a country-western song. . . .

If any students happen to be reading this, please do not take it as an encouragement to plagiarize, even from obscure sources. The fact that your instructors’ cheating-detection software doesn’t work as well as it should is no reason to take advantage of the situation. Anybody reading a blog on engineering ethics isn’t likely to be thinking about how to plagiarize more effectively, anyway—unless they have to write a paper on engineering ethics. In that case, leave this blog alone!

Sources: The article “Plagiarism Detection Services: How Well Do They Actually Perform?” by Rebecca Fiedler and Cem Kaner appeared in the Winter 2010 (Vol. 28, no. 4) issue of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, pp. 37-43.

The Irony of Technology in “Voyage of the Dawn Treader”

I write so often about bad news involving engineering and technology because engineers usually learn from mistakes more than they learn from success. But not always. A more positive theme in engineering ethics takes exemplary cases of how engineering was done right, and asks why and how things worked out so well. That’s what I’m going to do today with the latest installment of the series of “Chronicles of Narnia” movies, namely “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.”

It is ironic that the most advanced computer-generated imagery (CGI) and computer animation was used to bring to the screen a story by a man who was a self-proclaimed dinosaur, an author who wrote all his manuscripts by hand with a steel pen and never learned how to drive a car. C. S. Lewis, who died in 1963 after achieving fame as one of the greatest imaginative Christian writers of the twentieth century, also wrote one of the most prescient warnings about the damage that applied science and technology could do to society. In The Abolition of Man, Lewis warned that the notion of man’s power over technology was wrongly conceived. The thing that increased scientific and technological abilities really allow, is for those in control of the technology to wield more power over those who are not in control. Of course, he granted that technological progress had also led to great benefits, but that was not his point.

Perhaps the most popular of all his works of fiction is the “Chronicles of Narnia” series, a set of seven interrelated books for children in which he drew upon his vast learning as a scholar of medieval and Renaissance literature to produce one of the most completely realized works of fantasy ever written. I have read all of the stories many times. And like many other readers, I had my doubts that any cinematic version of them would stand a chance to live up to the unique standard posed by the books. For one thing, Lewis’s descriptions of fantastic beings such as minotaurs, centaurs, and fauns are suggestive rather than exhaustive, leaving much to the reader’s imagination, as most good literature does. This throws a great burden upon anyone who attempts to render the stories in a graphic medium. I was saddened to see at the end of the movie the dedication “Pauline Baynes 1922-2008.” Baynes was the artist chosen by both Lewis and his friend J. R. R. Tolkien to provide illustrations for the “Chronicles” and for many of Tolkien’s imaginative works as well. Baynes’s drawings fit in with Lewis’s descriptions so well because they did what book illustrations are supposed to do: namely, they enhanced the reader’s experience without turning the story in a direction not intended by the author.

And that is what the hundreds of IT professionals, artists, technicians, computer scientists, entrepreneurs, and others involved in “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” film have done. As computer graphics has advanced, people engaged in what began as a purely engineering task—to render a realistic image of a natural feature such as the hair on a rat being blown by the breeze atop the mast of a sailing ship—find themselves having not only to deal with the sciences of mechanics and fluid dynamics, but even now and then making fundamental advances in our understanding of how air flows through fibrous surfaces or how light travels through a complex mineral surface. Fortunately for the moviegoing public, none of this needs to be understood in order to watch the movie, the production of which is comparable in today’s terms with the effort needed to build part of a medieval cathedral. But anyone can walk into a cathedral and enjoy the stained-glass windows without understanding how they were made. This connection is not lost on the moviemakers. In fact, the very first scene in the film focuses on a stained-glass window showing the Dawn Treader ship, just before the camera zooms away to reveal a tower in the city of Cambridge, where the story begins.

It is this sensitivity to the spirit of the tales and the style, if you will, of Narnia that makes the movie both an essentially faithful rendition of the book, and an excellent adventure on its own. For cinematic reasons, the screenwriters did some mixing of plot elements and originated a few new ones, but entirely within the spirit of what G. K. Chesterton calls the “ethics of elfland.” Chesterton expresses the ethic this way: “The vision always hangs upon a veto. All the dizzy and colossal things conceded depend upon one small thing withheld.” The chief plot innovation concerns a search for the seven swords of the lost lords of Narnia, which unless I’m mistaken were not in the original story. But until these swords are placed on a certain table, the Narnians cannot triumph over a strong force of evil that threatens to undo them.

What would C. S. Lewis think? Well, those who believe in an afterlife can conclude that he will find out eventually about what has been done with his stories, and perhaps some of us will some day be able to ask the man himself. He may answer, but then again he may view his earthly works in the same light that St. Thomas Aquinas viewed his own magisterial works of philosophy toward the end of his life. According to some reports, Aquinas was celebrating Mass one day when he had a supernatural experience. He never spoke of it or wrote it down, but it caused him to abandon his regular routine of dictation. After his secretary Reginald urged him to get back to work, Aquinas said, “Reginald, I cannot, because all that I have written seems like straw to me.” Once one encounters that joy which, in Lewis’s words, is the “serious business of Heaven,” the fate of a children’s story at the hands of this or that film crew may not seem all that important. But those of us still here in this life can rejoice in a faithful rendition of a spiritually profound work, made possible in no little part by engineers who simply did their jobs well and with sensitivity to the spirit of the project.

Sources: The Chesterton quotation is from chapter 4, “The Ethics of Elfland,” of Chesterton’s 1908 book Orthodoxy. I used material from the Wikipedia article on St. Thomas Aquinas in the preparation of this article.

TSA Has Gone Too Far

It’s not too often that I take an unequivocal stand on a controversial issue. But this time I will. The U. S. Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) is wasting millions of dollars putting thousands of harmless passengers through humiliating, indecent, and probably unconstitutional searches, while failing in its primary mission to catch potential terrorists. I say this as a participant in the invention of one of the two main technologies currently being deployed for whole-body scans at U. S. airports.

Back in 1992 when airport security checks of any kind were a novelty, I was consulting for a small New England company whose visionary president anticipated the future demand for whole-body contraband scans. I helped in the development of a primitive version of the millimeter-wave scanning technology that is now made by L3Comm. The scan took 45 minutes, had very low resolution, but produced recognizable images of non-metallic objects hidden under clothes. As I recall, the main reason the company didn’t pursue the technology further was that it revealed too many details of the human body, and we thought the public would rise up in revolt if some bureaucrat proposed to electronically strip-search all passengers.

Well, here we are eighteen years later, and the TSA is now installing that technology plus a similar (but even more detail-revealing) X-ray technology at dozens of airports across the land. The agency is reluctant to share any information that would cause it problems, but the few images that have gotten into the public media are enough to tell us that Superman’s X-ray vision is indeed here. In the movie of the same name starring the late Christopher Reeve, the X-ray vision thing was played for a joke in his encounter with Lois Lane. But forcing thousands of ordinary, harmless citizens, including elderly folks and young children, none of whom have been charged with a crime, to subject themselves to electronic invasions of privacy, with the potential for abuse that entails, is an outrage.

Not only is it an outrage, but it is unlikely to achieve the purpose which the TSA says it is achieving at this tremendous price: lowering the risk of terrorist acts in the air. So far, airport body scans have caught zero terrorists. None. All the interceptions and near-misses we have had lately have been thwarted either by alert passengers (and incompetent terrorists), by tips from people with knowledge of the plots, or by old-fashioned detective work that doesn’t stop looking when it runs up against a matter of political correctness. The U. S. is nearly unique among all major nations in relying on this inefficient and intrusive blanket of technologically-intensive measures to achieve safe air travel, rather than focusing limited resources on groups and individuals who are the most likely to cause trouble, as the Israelis do.

The current administration is bending over backwards not to offend Muslim sensibilities in this or any other situation. I am all for respecting and allowing religious freedom, but when nearly all crimes of a certain kind are associated with members of an identifiable group, whether they be Muslim, Jewish, Christian, liberal, conservative, red-haired, or whatever, I don’t want those charged with the responsibility of catching them to purposely throw away that information and instead impose punitive and humiliating (and ineffective) searches on every single person who chooses to fly. And I haven’t even gotten to the “enhanced” pat-downs that the TSA offers as alternatives to the whole-body scans. That amounts to asking whether you would rather have your thumb squeezed with a pair of pliers or in a vise.

The public statements of the TSA on this matter have been about what you’d expect from a rogue bureaucracy. Inanities such as saying “if you don’t want to be searched, just don’t fly” are as useful today as saying “if you don’t like risking your life in automobile traffic, get out and walk.” Here is where the best hope of reversing this egregious and unconstitutional overreaching lies: in the boycotting of airports where the new systems are used. If air travel decreases to the point that the airlines notice it, they will become allies to the public in the battle, and there will be at least a chance that Washington will listen to corporations that employ a lot of union workers, rather than the great unwashed masses that have been ignored repeatedly on everything from health care to offshore oil drilling already.

Civilizations can decline either with a bang or by slow degrees. In historian Jacques Barzun’s monumental From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present, we find described as one of the characteristics of modern life a slow encrustation of restrictions on freedom exacted by bureaucracies whose ostensible purpose is to make life better in the progressive fashion. I think Barzun had in mind things like income-tax forms and phone trees, but he lives right down the road in San Antonio, whose airport just installed the new scanning systems. I doubt that he flies much anymore (he turned 103 last month), but if he does, he will be faced with a good example of his own observation: some hun-yock* in a blue uniform will treat the dean of American historians, a man whose family fled World War I to the U. S. and freedom, to the degrading and wholly unnecessary humiliation of being suspected as a terrorist and having his naked body exposed to the eyes of some nosy minion of the government.

To Jacques Barzun and to all the other people who simply want to get from A to B on a plane and have no malevolent intentions regarding their mode of transportation, I apologize on behalf of the engineers and scientists whose work has been misused, among whom I count myself.

Sources: The millimeter-wave technology used for whole-body scans is described well in the Wikipedia article “Millimeter-wave scanner,” and the X-ray system can be read about at http://epic.org/privacy/airtravel/backscatter/#resources. My Jan. 10, 2010 entry in this blog has a reference to my published work on the early version of the millimeter-wave scanner. *The word “hun-yock”, which I find spelled on the Web as “honyock” or “honyocker” was used by my father to indicate a person who did something unwise and publicly irritating. I can think of no better term for the present situation.

Holes in the Web

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the WorldWideWeb, thinks we should worry about several threats to the Web’s continued integrity and usefulness. When someone of this importance says there are things to worry about, we should at least listen to him. I for one think he has some good points, which I will now summarize from a recent article he wrote in Scientific American magazine.

The first threat Berners-Lee points out is the practice of creating what he calls “silos” of information on the otherwise universally accessible Web. Facebook, iTunes, and similar proprietary sites treat information differently than a typical website does. The original intent was that every bit of information on the Web could be accessed through a URL, but as those (such as myself) who have no Facebook page have discovered, there is information inside Facebook that only people who have Facebook pages can gain access to. And the iTunes database of information about songs and so on is accessible only through Apple’s proprietary software of the same name.

The second threat he sees is the potential breaching of the firewall between the Web (which is a software application) and the Internet (which is basically the networking hardware used to run the Web). Again, the original intent was that once you pay for an Internet connection of a certain speed, you are able to access absolutely anything on the Web just as easily as anyone else with the same speed of connection. This is called “net neutrality” and recently it has been under attack by institutions as powerful as Google and Verizon, who as Berners-Lee points out, moved last August to create special rules for Internet connections using mobile phones. They say that the limited spectral bandwidth of mobile phones makes it necessary for companies to discriminate (e. g. charge extra) for certain types of applications, or make it harder for users to access sites that are not part of the institution’s own setup.

One motivation for Berners-Lee’s cautions is an old communications-network principle that dates back to the early days of the telephone. Larger communications networks are more valuable to the users than smaller ones, but the value increases faster than just the number of users. Since each new user can not only gain access to all the others, but all the other users can also access the new user, the usefulness of a network tends to increase as the square of the number of users. That is, a network with 20 users is not twice as useful as one with ten, but four times as useful. Extrapolate this to the billions that apply to the Web, and you see how organizations that persist in walling off information and users may reap some short-term selfish benefits, but at a cost to the usefulness of the Web as a whole.

The last major concerns that Berners-Lee voices are matters of privacy and due process. There is now a way to crack open the individual packets of information that carry Web traffic and associate particular URLs with particular users. He sees this as a major privacy threat, although it isn’t clear how widely it’s being used yet. Another thing that threatens the freedom of people to use the Web is a recent trend by some European governments to cut off Web access to people who are even suspected of illegal downloading of copyrighted material. No trial, no defendant in court, no hearing: just a company’s word that they think you did something wrong. Since access to the Web is now as taken for granted as access to electricity, Berners-Lee sees this as a violation of what in Finland is now regarded as a fundamental human right: the right to access the Web.

These warnings need to be taken seriously. As director of the World Wide Web Consortium, the organization that is formally charged with the continued development of the Web, Berners-Lee is in a good position to do something about them. But he can’t control the actions of private companies or governments, so consumers and voters (at least in countries where votes mean something) will have to go along with his ideas to make a difference.

The Web is a new kind of creature in political, governmental, and economic terms. There has never before been a basically technical artifact which is simultaneously international in scope, beyond the regulatory authority of any single governmental entity, not produced by a single firm or monopolistic group of firms, and fundamentally egalitarian in nature without any controlling hierarchy. Of course, a good deal of the nature of the Web was expressly intended by its founder, who because of his youth at the time he developed it (he was only 35) is still very much with us and able to give helpful suggestions on this, the twentieth anniversary of the Web. (For those who care, Berners-Lee got the first Web client-server connection running on Christmas Day, 1990.)

What actually happens with the Web in the future, therefore, depends in a peculiar way on what its own users decide, and to much less of a degree what private companies or governments choose to do. There is probably much good in that way of doing things, since it prevents anything from happening that violently opposes the will or desires of the majority of users. But it also builds in a lot of immunity from what you might call reform efforts that go against common but less than salutary desires: the need to reduce Web pornography traffic, for instance.

For better or worse, Sir Timothy (he was knighted by his native England in 2004) has impressed a good deal of his open-source, egalitarian philosophy on his brainchild the Web, which has grown vastly beyond his initial expectations. As any good father does, he wants his child to grow and prosper and be a good citizen. Now that you have heard some of Berners-Lee’s cautionary words, you can do your part, however minor, to see that this happens.

Sources: The December 2010 issue of Scientific American carried Berners-Lee’s article “Long Live the Web” on pp. 80-85. It can also be accessed (without charge!) at the Scientific American website http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=long-live-the-web.

An Open Letter In Response to Stephen H. Unger’s Essay “Unwanted Newborns: A Painful Problem”

Dear Steve,

Your “Ends and Means” essays are always worth reading, and I appreciate being on your email list. I value the experience of being on the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology board with you for a time, and it has been a privilege to know one of the founding fathers of engineering ethics. It is with that same sense of collegiality and fair discussion which we shared in SSIT board meetings that I undertake to disagree with you regarding your latest essay, “Unwanted Newborns: A Painful Problem.”

I will first try to restate your argument as accurately as I can. Your analysis is basically an exercise in utilitarian ethics, and its underlying premise is that actions are to be judged according to whether they accrue to the greater happiness of people, and by the same token, whether they result in less unhappiness. Another premise is your definition of who counts as a person. In previous essays you have put forward the idea that murder is wrong mainly because it makes people afraid of being murdered, which is, among other things, a type of unhappiness. You draw upon this notion to examine the case of newborn babies who for various reasons (handicaps, disabilities, the unfitness or unwillingness of the mother) are not desired by their parents and are a potential burden on society. Because newborn babies give no evidence of fearing or even understanding death, you conclude that they cannot be subject to such fear. They are therefore exempt from the main reason you have previously put forward to justify society’s no-murder rule. You conclude that the government (or society) should defer to the persons most concerned—namely, the parents—in the case of unwanted newborns, and if the parents decide to kill the child (either actively by execution or passively by withholding treatment, medication, or food), your ethical reasoning tells you that such an act is not wrong, as difficult as it might be for all concerned.

Steve, if I agreed with your premises, I would have to agree with your conclusion because it follows logically from your premises. But your premises are mistaken. Here is how.

Your major misstep is to exclude newborn babies from the category of those with a right to life for the reason that they cannot (apparently) conceive of or fear death. This is in contrast to the approach favored by many right-to-life groups and individuals (including myself), which is to confer the right to life upon any biological entity that can be shown to be a human being at any stage of development or consequent stage of life. The latter criterion includes everyone from a just-fertilized human ovum all the way to a 100-year-old man in a persistent vegetative state.

There are important differences between these two criteria.

Your criterion is based on a behavior, or rather, the lack of a specific insight on the part of the baby which we deduce from the baby’s behavior: namely, the knowledge and fear of death. My criterion is based on physical evidence that can be easily and scientifically verified, e. g. by a DNA test to show whether the being in question is a member of the species Homo sapiens. This criterion essentially says, “If it is alive, and if it is human, then it qualifies as a person.” I think you will admit that applying my criterion is a fairly simple and straightforward matter that in most cases can be done by inspection.

But what about your criterion? Exactly when does a baby reach the age at which it can understand and fear death? Moreover, does this fear have to be active, or merely a potential fear? And how do you know whether it is present or not in any given individual? Must we develop an “awareness-of-death inventory” and administer it before legitimately taking a newborn child’s life? We are talking about an extremely serious matter here—the qualifications for membership in the rights-endowed human race—and it will not do to make unverified assumptions or generalizations. I hope you will not accuse me of undue levity if I say that I have known some teenagers who, at least by their behavior, showed no evidence whatever of the fear of death. Should they therefore be disqualified from membership in the category of humans, allowing us to kill them at will? Handicapped infants are not the only beings who can become a burden to their parents.

I find it ironic that you, who make no secret of your Jewish heritage, nevertheless contrast your position with that of the Nazi regime, which engaged in the killing of innocent human beings on a mass-production scale. I disagree when you say that adopting your idea to exclude newborns from the right to life will not lead to a slippery slope downward toward another Holocaust. Both you and the Nazi regime have already taken the first step: namely, the act of dehumanizing someone who most people would normally regard as a person.

If you study the memoirs of former concentration-camp guards, you will find that their need to view the prisoners as cattle, vermin, raw material for soap—anything other than a fellow human being—was critical to the guards’ ability to continue the heinous work in which they were engaged. Once they admitted to themselves that the naked, trembling body before them embodied a soul just like theirs, the game was over, and there was nothing left to them but suicide, desertion, or insanity.

Once you make membership in the human race dependent on any manifested ability and not on objective physical facts, you have crossed a critical line, and the rest is merely details. Whether you specify the ability to fear death, or to say “Heil Hitler” or “Hail, Caesar,” or integrate sin(x) dx, or anything else, you have fundamentally changed the category of qualification from that of physical nature to that of performance or behavior. To qualify as human, one must not simply be human, one must do something that is regarded as characteristic of humans. Exactly what activity is used as a criterion is secondary.

Even if you and I were to agree that a performance-based qualification for human rights should be adopted, the one you choose is problematic in the extreme. You cannot prove that babies do not fear death in the same way that I can prove by a DNA test that a baby is human. The idea that babies do not fear death is a speculative conclusion based on the lack of evidence to the contrary. And as most scientists would agree, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. While newborn babies cannot talk and therefore cannot communicate the essence of their experiences to us, no one except newborns has any idea of what it is like to be a newborn, any more than I have an idea of exactly what it is like to be a wombat or a gerbil. Who knows but what any unpleasant experience, from hunger to the sight of an unfamiliar face, is more terrifying to an infant than facing a firing squad is for an adult? Certainly some babies scream as though it is.

Your failure to follow out some of the implications of your logic leads you to make some unguarded statements that, on examination, turn out to be little more than hopeful wishes rather than reasonable bases upon which to erect a system of ethics. For example, in discussing your principle that murder is to be avoided because it causes the fear of death in others, you write, “Nobody should have valid cause to worry that they might at some time in the immediate, or even remote, future be deprived of their lives.” You probably had in mind an unwritten supporting clause, namely, “deprived, that is, by the intentional actions of others.” But Steve, every one of us has valid cause to worry that we might at some time in the future be deprived of our lives. So far, the death rate among humans is 100%. The art of living consists largely in resisting the despair that continued contemplation of our deaths will induce. And there are two main ways to fight this despair.

One way is to philosophize. And philosophizing is anything but an exact science. One reason that different philosophers reach such a variety of conclusions about any given moral issue is that they begin with different assumptions. And while many given philosophical systems can be made internally consistent, each must begin from assumptions that can only be granted or denied, not argued about logically unless the participants share a deeper basis of assumptions on which their argument is based.

There are many moral philosophies that deny it is permissible to kill newborns. The fact that your particular line of reasoning concludes the opposite simply expresses the fact that you have chosen a different set of assumptions than other moral philosophers have. But having chosen those assumptions, you can go on about the business of life knowing that you have at least made an effort to be logically consistent. And until death puts an end to all philosophizing, your philosophy can provide you with a guide to moral action.

The other way humanity has found to combat the despair of the contemplation of death is through religion. You mention religion, or rather “religions” toward the end of your essay, but after admitting that most world religions do not condone “neonaticide,” you say that because we in the U. S. live in a pluralistic society, religious scruples about killing newborns should not be imposed on those who do not subscribe to them. So your ultimate response to religious arguments against killing newborns is to claim political immunity from such proscriptions.

How did it come about that you live in a society which respects your right to dissent from the beliefs of a religious majority? The founders of the United States wisely saw that a coerced religion is really no religion at all. They valued religion too much to make it compulsory. They left citizens responsible only to God, or their own consciences, with regard to religious belief, and prohibited the governmental establishment of religion, as well as any law preventing the free exercise thereof. Why they did so is a matter of some historical complexity, but an important contributing factor was the then relatively new idea in Protestant Christianity that faith in God was a matter for individual inquiry and decision, rather than a government-imposed requirement.

By contrast, history shows that governments based on an explicitly atheistic philosophy have no compunction about defining humanity in almost arbitrary ways, and in terminating those whose right to life has been revoked by their failure to meet certain requirements for behavior, or descent, or income level, or almost anything else you care to name. In adopting a policy such as the one you urge, the U. S. government would be endorsing the idea that personhood depends on an aspect of intellectual capacity, not on the simple fact of being human. Of course, the Roe v. Wade decision arbitrarily deprived millions of unborn children of the right to life, but the fact that opposition to that decision and its consequences is as strong now as it was thirty years ago shows that many U. S. citizens disagree with the arbitrary removal of the right to life simply because the life in question is inconvenient or painful for others.

Steve, I value my memories of the many times that you spoke your mind regardless of the consequences, and made a positive difference in the way engineering ethics is discussed, debated, and practiced. It saddens me to see you apply your great abilities to a moral problem and come out on the wrong side. While I do not have much hope that my words will persuade you to change your position, I would like to think that my respectful opposition to it is in the same honorable tradition that you yourself have established.

Yours sincerely,

Karl Stephan

Sources: Stephen H. Unger, Professor Emeritus of computer science and electrical engineering at Columbia University and author of Controlling Technology (1982), one of the earliest engineering ethics textbooks, posts his “Ends and Means” essays at http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~unger/myBlog/endsandmeansblog.html, where his latest essay “Unwanted Babies: A Painful Problem” can be found.