Credit for research contributions is assigned in three principal ways in research publications: by authorship (of the research being published), citation (of previously published or formally presented work), and via a written acknowledgment (of some contribution to the present research).

Good research practice also requires fulfilling responsibilities. As was discussed in the introduction, fulfilling responsibilities typically requires both creativity and more exercise of judgment than do fulfilling obligations, respecting others’ rights, or following rules of the form “Do X” or “Do not do Y.” Responsible authorship requires the concept of forward-looking responsibility. Forward-looking responsibility specifies the end (i.e., the good result) that is to be achieved, such as “the responsibility for the integrity of the research record.” To fulfill a responsibility one must figure out what to do or avoid doing to achieve the specified ends.

The “End-Use Problem”

When people speak of the “end-use problem” in engineering ethics, they are speaking about the question of whether or to what extent engineers are responsible for what others do with the technologies that the engineers have helped to design, manufacture, or maintain.

In Chapter 4, we examined an argument that engineers, at least those who worked on medical life-support technology, bear guilt because of the harm resulting from the overuse of life-support technology. That was a stringent argument that engineers are accountable for the end use of their work. I argued that it was too demanding because engineers are not in a position to foresee that the technology would be so misused and in fact there are other interventions, such as the requirement that health care facilities respect living wills and other so-called advance care directives, that directly address the problem of misuse and allow life-support technology to continue to benefit patients with whom it is appropriately used.

Roger Boisjoly's Attempts to Avert theDisaster

What do safety problems look like to the engineer who encounters them? How do they develop over time? What are good ways of responding to such problems at each stage of their development? Much can be learned from the attempts of Roger Boisjoly, an engineer at Morton Thiokol, to avert the Challenger disaster of January 1986. His care and diligence in coping with the uncertainties about the nature and extent of the threat to the shuttle flights and his courageous persistence in raising issues exemplify responsible behavior.

Like others who have spent time with Roger Boisjoly, I have been impressed with his sincerity and forthrightness. These are matters of moral character over and above the particular acts he performed. Boisjoly's integrity and openness make his personal account of events especially illuminating, but at this point in our investigation we are concerned with his actions, what he did at various points in the unfolding story of the Challenger disaster, rather than with his character.

As we saw in Chapter 3, it is in everyone's interest that engineers be heeded when they recognize risks and threats to the public welfare. It is in a client or employer's interest to see that engineers’ concerns are heard within their organization, so that no dangers or defects will be overlooked. Those organizations that disregard their engineers or even try to silence them, leaving them no alternative to “blowing the whistle” (i.e., going outside their organization to get attention to their concerns), lose the benefit of their engineers’ expertise and the respect of the public.

In prior chapters, we have focused on the moral skills that enable engineers to fulfill their responsibilities both in responsive and unresponsive organizations. In countries like the United States where employee engineers usually have no written employment contracts that protect engineers against retaliatory discharge, less reputable companies may retaliate against engineers for pursuing ethical concerns that clash with the company's short-term business objectives. Therefore, creating a workplace that is relatively free of the risk of such retaliation is a much larger ethical issue for engineering in a country like the United States than in countries where employee contracts are the norm.