What Is Different about Digital Systems and Digital Information?

Digital systems and digital information have some special characteristics that influence the morally significant problems faced by engineers (IT professionals) who work with them, the engineering profession, and society in general. In Chapter 1 (the discussion of the engineering profession's criteria for responsible practice), we noted NAE past president Bill Wulf's observation that because digital systems are not continuous, a small change in a digital system (such as one bit in the memory of a computer) can produce a radical change in the behavior of the system. As a result, some devastating effects of computer “bugs” are due not to human error or negligence but to unpredictable new characteristics of the system (“emergent properties”). As Wulf also argues, the lack of continuity in a digital system also creates insurmountable problems for testing such systems, for example, computers.

These special characteristics of digital systems give rise to the question of criteria for responsible engineering of software when one knows in advance that some behaviors of the resulting system will be unpredictable. Wulf sees this question as one for the engineering profession, rather than the individual engineer, to answer. (We will examine such “macro problems” further in Chapter 10.)

We have examined many aspects of professional responsibility for engineers and scientists. Many aspects of moral life lie outside considerations of professional responsibility. Family responsibility and general civic responsibility are two other major areas of moral responsibility that clearly lie outside the scope of considerations of this book. What about the choice of work in engineering and science? Such decisions are made within the context of many other decisions, including family obligations. For example, family obligations may restrict the geographical region in which you seek work. Practical considerations such as the need to pay back education loans also influence job choices. The choice of work is more intimately connected to professional ethics, because it significantly influences the opportunities for expressing one's values in one's work. Work that fulfills one's aspirations as well as ambitions and need for income is a major element in a meaningful life. How does one find opportunities to do such work? This is a problem, indeed a design problem, that a person addresses many times in a life, if at all. (I say “If at all,” because many people in the world today and throughout human history have had little opportunity to pursue many aspirations in their work life beyond providing subsistence to themselves and their families.)

The current range of possibilities for a young adult with talent in engineering or science may itself be daunting, and it would only add to that burden to attempt to catalog the value dimensions of work choice. In any case, I am reluctant to do so, because I have too often seen humanists and social scientists much more ready to instruct engineers and scientists about the goals they should pursue than to consider the social implications of their own work in humanities and social science.

The Centrality of Responsibility in Professional Ethics

In today's era of specialized knowledge, we all must depend on professionals for our safety, health, and well-being. What a person needs from an engineer, a health care provider, or any other professional is more than that the professional obey simple rules of practice and ethics. What each of us needs of professionals is that they exercise their professional judgment to devise a plan for securing us a good outcome in our specific situation. Exercising professional judgmenttypically requires more than following simple rules. It requires taking into account a range of factors, marshaling relevant parts of the body of knowledge specific to one's profession, and devising a course of action that achieves a good (or even ???the best???) outcome in the circumstances. Because exercising judgment (rather than simply following a rule) requires higher cognitive functions and some intellectual maturity, the subject of professional judgment and the moral responsibility that goes with it has been left for this and later sections of this book, sections that are addressed to juniors, seniors, and graduate students.

People confronted with ethical problems must do more than simply evaluate alternatives; they must also come up with those alternative responses: they must figure out what to do and devise a plan of action.

Ethical evaluations do have a role in devising responses to ethical problems, of course. These evaluations come in many forms, from ???What is being proposed is morally wrong??? to ???This margin of safety is sufficient for the circumstances in which this device will operate.??? This book is concerned with devising good responses, which includes, but is not confined to, making ethical evaluations. Suppose my supervisor tells me to dispose of some regulated toxic substance by dumping it down the drain. In this case, part of my problem is that what I have been ordered to do is potentially injurious to human health and illegal. Assuming my supervisor knows that the substance is a regulated toxic substance ??? an assumption I should verify ??? thenmy supervisor is knowingly ordering me to act illegally. This evaluative judgment is one that I make in describing the situation.

Ethics, Values, and Reason

This book will help you answer those questions. To answer them requires an understanding of values and value judgments in general and ethical values and ethical judgments in particular.

Societies, especially technologically developed democracies, place trust in professions and the members of professions, such as engineers (including computer professionals). In this book, we will examine what is entrusted to engineers (and computer professionals), together with the factors that created and continue to mold the expectations ingredient in that trust, and what is necessary for engineers and computer scientists to be worthy of that trust. We will consider morally significant problems that arise in engineering and computer fields, and what constitutes fulfilling the trust placed in those professionals. We will also examine the features of work environments that support the fulfillment of that trust.

Ethics in Engineering Practice and Research is about professional responsibilities of engineers and applied scientists. It is about professional responsibilities: the character of problem situations in which those responsibilities must be fulfilled and the moral skills for fulfilling them. Interspersed throughout the text are open-ended scenarios that present ethically significant situations of the sort engineers and applied scientists commonly encounter. These have been set apart in centered boxes to aid the use of them in group discussion and for homework assignments. Also set apart from the text, in boxes, are fine points, which may enhance the reader's understanding but are not essential to the main argument. Most of these fine points concern philosophical issues.

Individual Credit and the Ownership of Innovation

The best-known philosophical argument for the existence of property rights is that of John Locke, mentioned in Section 4 of the introduction. Locke argued that people have some rights that are “natural” in the sense that they exist prior to any contracts or agreements; among these are certain property rights. The basic right for which Locke argues is the right to the fruits of one's labor. Locke assumes the right to one's own body and argues that if one performs work or mixes one's labor with some freely available material, one owns the product. Locke gives the example of gathering acorns leading to one's ownership of the resulting accumulation of acorns. (Acorns are nourishing although bitter tasting. They were plentiful in England, and sometimes people had subsisted on them.) Locke recognized that people might make trades and other agreements that lead to the acquisition of property rights other than those that are the direct fruits of one's labor.

By extension (and assuming one has a right to one's own mind or intellect parallel to one's right to one's body), one may argue that intellectual labor involved in the creation of research, artistic, and technological works provides the basis of property rights. If the creators of the product in question are paid for producing the product, then arguably the product and any resulting trademarks, patents, copyrights, or other property rights belong to the employer or client who paid them (although the creators still deserve credit as authors or inventors of those patented or copyrighted creations). Saying that patents and copyrights are “property rights” and therefore alienable allows that they may not reside with the creators of the items patented or copyrighted.

I want to die proud of having been an engineer. Since that can happen only if we engineers behave ethically, and since I see a connection between this book and gracious professionalism, I am very enthusiastic about Dr. Whitbeck's effort to help us think effectively and somewhat pragmatically about professional ethics. Everyone, professionals in particular, must expect ethically complex situations to arise. When that happens, each of us badly needs a self-image that includes conviction that our intellect and heart can help make choices that will dramatically affect the course of events. That point of view will not materialize out of the ether. It must be nurtured and encouraged. This book will help seasoned professionals clarify their approach to their own behaviors, and this book can profoundly affect those who face a messy situation for the first time.

Professions and Norms of Professional Conduct

Professions are those occupations that both require advanced study and mastery of a specialized body of knowledge, and undertake to promote, ensure, or safeguard some aspect of others??? well-being. This chapter examines the norms and standards of good conduct in professional practice. Ethical (and sometimes legal) requirements also exist for nonprofessionals when their work immediately affects the public good. For example, food handlers are bound by sanitary rules. Arguably, many moral rules apply equally in all work contexts. All should be honest, for example. What is distinctive about the ethical demands professions make on their practitioners is the combination of the responsibility for some aspect of others??? well-being and the complexity of the knowledge and information that they must integrate in acting to promote that well-being.