Responsibility in
Engineering
What is Responsibility?
Responsibility refers to taking action towards the things you
need to do, and whether good or bad, accepting the consequences
of the actions or inactions you failed to take.
A consequence is the outcome or results of our choices. In other
words, if you do the right thing, you will experience good
consequences, if you do the wrong thing, you will experience bad
consequences.
What is Blame?
Blame is the opposite of responsibility; it is attributing your
misfortune to something or someone else to avoid taking
responsibility for your actions
Responsibility in Engineering
Forms of Responsibility
• Obligation Responsibility: ( ) اﻻلتزام بالمسئولية
the need for engineers to use their specialized knowledge and skill in a
way that benefits clients and the public. A key issue for engineers are the
concepts of reasonable care and balanced care.
• Blame Responsibility:
the identification of those to whom blame can be attributed for wrongdoing.
• Role of Responsibility:
the person who occupies a position or role of supervision takes on some level
of both obligation and blame responsibility.
Responsibility in Engineering
• Impediments (weaknesses) to Responsible Action
• Self interest: “looking out for number one”, placing corporate and managerial
issues above technical and safety issues
• Fear: fear of retaliation, losing our job, fear of our mistakes being publicized,
fear of punishment
• Self Deception (cheating): Rationalization, Seeing what we want to see,
looking at the data through a bias, not admitting errors, “Everyone takes
shortcuts once in a while…”, “I could have done it myself – it was just faster
to copy the other persons work”
• Ignorance: Making decisions without needed knowledge
• Microscopic Vision: Making decisions without a view to the bigger picture
implications.
• Uncritical Acceptance of Authority: “I did what I was told to do.”
• Group Think: peer pressure to conform, self-censorship ( ) الرقابة الذاتية,
illusion of unanimity ( everybody doing it)
Responsibility in Engineering
• Forms of Dishonesty
• Lying, generally considered to incorporate three aspects (i)
something that is believed to be false or seriously misleading, (ii)
is normally stated in words, (iii) is made with the intention to
deceive.
• Deliberate Deception ( dishonesty ) , generally includes mis-
representations such as one’s own expertise or the value of
certain products or designs.
• Withholding Information, is generally a form of dishonesty
of omission if one (i) fails to convey information the audience
would normally expect not to be omitted, and (ii) the intent of
the omission is to deceive.
• Failure to Seek out the Truth, is generally a form of
dishonesty if one uses results of tests, analysis, etc as provided,
without fulfilling their responsibility to investigate their accuracy.
Responsibility to clients
Principle 1 – Integrity: Provide professional
services with integrity (honesty).
Principle 2 – Objectivity Provide professional
services objectively ( Based on facts and not on
personal believes)
Principle 3 – Competence: Maintain the
knowledge and skill necessary to provide
professional services competently.
Responsibility to clients
Principle 4 – Fairness: Be fair and reasonable
in all professional relationships. Disclose
conflicts of interest.
Principle 5 – Confidentiality: Protect the
confidentiality of all client information.
Principle 6 – Professionalism: Act in a
manner that demonstrates exemplary
professional conduct.
Principle 7 – Diligence (جديه:) Provide
professional services diligently.
Where the ethical issues can arise
• Conceptualization, Design, Testing, Manufacturing, Sales, Service
Project Teams
• Project timelines and budgets
• Expectations, opinions, or judgments
• Products: Unsafe or Less than Useful
• Designed for obsolescence
• Inferior materials or components
• Unexpected harmful effects to society
Impacts of an engineer’s ethical decisions:
• The Products & Services (safety and utility)
• The Company and its Stockholders
• The Public and Society (benefits to the people)
• Environment (Earth and beyond)
• The Profession (how the public views it)
• The Law (how legislation affects the profession and industry)
• Personal Position (job, internal moral conflict)
• No matter how competent or how
successful you are as an engineer,
your professional life is over, once
you get involved in an ethical
scandal
EXAMPLE
• You have an Engineering Ethics class at 9 in the morning. Your
friend is also taking this course. But he wants to stay at home and
sleep. He is asking you to sign the attendance sheet for him.
• What would you do?
• A. Sign the attendance sheet and notify the instructor about the
signature.
• B. Sign the attendance sheet. The instructor will not look at the
attendance sheet.
• C. Do not care. Its not your job.
• D. Tell your friend that you can not sign the sheet for anyone.
• ANSWER?
EXAMPLE
• Samy, a Project Manager, is supervising construction of a medium-sized part
assembly workshop. He submits a report to his boss indicating the cost
breakdown of the foundation and framing work based on the soil analysis and
loading specifications for the building. The total came to BD 15,000. His boss
then told him to do whatever it takes to get that figure down to BD 12,000.
• Samy should:
A) Adjust the analysis and specifications figures somewhat in order to cut costs.
B) Redo the soil tests to try to get better figures.
C) Notify the inspection authorities that his boss was trying to get him to behave
dishonestly.
D) Try to revise the framing design to minimize material costs while meeting the
design specifications.
E) Both (b) and (d) are appropriate.
• Answer (a) is obviously dishonest.
• Answer (c) would be correct if Samy was sure his boss intended that he
behave dishonestly; this, however, is jumping to conclusions.
• Answer (b) is a good solution since soil testing is not an exact science
and better results could be obtained.
• Answer (d) is also quite acceptable.
• Remember that you can rarely cut costs by looking at only one
alternative; it often takes a combination of different revisions. So (e) is
correct.
Case Studies in Engineering Ethics
• If you Designed a system that required a gasketed connection and you
did not have sufficient data to predict performance across a spectrum
of conditions?
• THE CHALLENGER DISASTER
• Pressure from Management leads to:
• Poor Engineering Judgment
• Entire crew lost
• Space program set back years
• Lost public confidence
Case Studies in Engineering Ethics
• If you Designed an automobile component that later proved to fail
under certain conditions and could be replaced for $11 under a
recall?
Case 27
• THE FORD PINTO GAS TANK -corporate decision based on a
Benefit/Cost analysis
• BENEFIT ANALYSIS
• 180 deaths, 180 serious injuries, 2,100 burned vehicles
• At a cost of $49.15 million
• COST ANALYSIS
• $11 per vehicle to recall
• Total cost of $137 million
*How appropriate is it to use figures like this?
*If not appropriate, what are other options?
Case Studies in Engineering Ethics
• If you were asked to sign off on a set of shop drawings that had come
from a reliable vendor with whom you had a very good working
relationship?
Case 17
• THE HYATT REGENCY WALKWAY (Kansas City, 1981)
• Support system was changed in the shop drawings by the steel
fabricator
• Engineer failed to review the shop drawings and therefore did not
discover the change
• The change doubled the load on the supports
• 32 ton walkways collapsed
• 114 deaths
• 200 injuries
• Engineers prosecuted