Ethics

Galles 1
Will Galles
CprE 394
4/30/22
Ethics in Engineering
Ethics in engineering is a very important topic and provides a path to designing and
creating things that benefit humanity without also doing harm in the process. There are many
items that go into making an ethical decision and determining how to best approach a problem
for the benefit of all. These decisions can be based on analyzing past issues and using that
information to inform decisions going forward. From much time and development, there has
been many different virtues of ethics that have been assembled to help make better decisions
when confronted with ethical issues.
One of the most important and useful items to determining proper action in ethical issues
are different Codes of Ethics that are applicable to the issue area. These Codes of Ethics provide
a framework to make good decisions that respect the ethics of problem. They also provide a way
to critique and learn from issues that have occurred in the past and better inform the decisions of
the future. Having a concrete ethical framework that different Codes of Ethics provide, also can
give individuals confidence in their decisions when they follow the corresponding Code of
Ethics. This can give them confidence that they made the best decision with will refrain from
harming people and bring about the best solution possible. Having set Codes of Ethics creates a
much cleaner and easier way to make decisions when solving ethical issues.
Ethical issues are something that come up quite frequently. I have had to face multiple
ethical issues even in my short time working in the engineering industry. One of the issues that I
faced was during my co-op during the summer of 2021. The issue that I faced was that while
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working on some test equipment for one of the products that I was tasked with overseeing I
discovered a potential flaw with the test stand. After finding this issue I was stuck with the
decision to inform my mentor about the possible failure of the test station and the possibly faulty
parts that we were selling or to leave the test stand as is because everything still seemed to but
passing all the other tests just fine. I had to make a decision that would require days’ worth of
product to be put on hold and retested or to let possible faulty products that could endanger the
lives of airline passengers. In the end I decided that the best course of information was to relay
the information about the broken test station to my mentor. This then set in motion the holding
and retesting of product. In the end each of the products passed the tests again after the station
was repaired, but I believe that I had still made the right decision from an ethical standpoint.
There are also other major ethical issues that have surfaced and made know to the wider
public and we had the opportunity to look at some of these as a group analyze what went wrong.
One of the cases that I took a good look at was that of the Ford Pinto. It was revealed that Ford
released a car that they knew would have serious issues if rear-ended at any reasonable speed.
We examined how they had run their own internal tests and determined that this was an unsafe
issue but in the name of time and money that they would ignore the issue. This then led to many
people loosing their lives due to the very issue that they ignored. This issue provided a lot of
great discussion between my group and myself. For this issue I brought up the idea that Fords
push to put the car into production as fast as possible was the driving factor behind many
different people going again the ethical choice in halting and redesigning the car. My groupmates
had great input on the issue such as how this issue was not only one made by the engineers
working on the project but all they way us the hierarchy to the executives who were responsible
for the project that broke many ethical rules and created a very dangerous product. We all came
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together and unanimously decided that this was a terrible breakdown of ethical standards, and the
best decision would have been to put a hold on the pinto until it could be redesigned to be safer
for the masses.
The Virtues of Ethics were a large part in how our group came up with the proper
decisions that should have been made to avoid this issue. The first and most prevalent one was
that of Integrity. We examined about how many of the people that were working on the project
did not show integrity when they decided to not act on the dangerous testing results. Each of
them did not show the integrity to stand up for the safety of the end users of their product and in
the end many people lost their lives because of this. The next virtue that was lacking in the
project was that of Honesty. There was a distinct lack of honesty in the lie of omission with the
test results. None of the dangerous test’s results were reported to the governing bodies and
instead were hidden. This showed a great lack of honesty that again contributed to the downward
spiral of the project. Lastly this issue shows a great lack of Fidelity. No one in the project had the
public good in mind when they were making decisions on the production of this vehicle. They
placed many people in danger with their actions. Overall, these three virtues allowed my group
and I to determine the correct choices that should have been made to follow the ethical standards.
Overall Ethics are a very important to how an engineer goes about making decisions
while working on projects. There are many resources that exist to help engineers make informed
decisions on ethical issues such as different Codes of Ethics and Virtues of Ethics. This was an
overall great experience being able to look back at some of the ethical decision that I have been
put in a position to make along with examining other ethical issues from throughout history.

Ethics

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Galles 1

when confronted with ethical issues.

for the masses.

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