The Ethics of Engineering Ethics
Fool me once, fool me four times
In 2016, disaster struck. Triumph preceded it: Jeff Henry and John Schooley achieved their dream of a record-toppingly-tall waterslide. The Verrückt waterslide in Schlitterbahn Water Park, Kansas City, stood, at 169 feet, as a monument to folk engineering and ordinary-American gumption. Henry and Schooley had not a qualification between them and had refined their ride in a spirit of true empiricism, sending sandbags down to confirm the trajectory before, after taking the plunge themselves, proclaiming the ride safe to the public. They had worked out most of the kinks, except when it came to riders a good deal lighter than a sandbag, for instance ten-year-old Caleb Schwab. In an accident that can only be described as freak, Schwab’s raft flew off the slide and his head hit a metal pole, decapitating him.
In assessing the pair’s legal liability, engineers were called in to file a report. They confirmed, indeed, that the slide should have been properly engineered in the first place. (Henry and Shooley ultimately had charges against them dismissed.) Engineering, as a profession, is morally important. It is also, correspondingly, morally fraught: engineers can and have acted quite badly (fill in any number of catastrophes). It makes sense then that educators of engineers should care about ensuring not only the technical competence but the moral character of engineers.
The Argument for Engineering Ethics
The means engineering colleges within universities have chosen (at least, speaking for the university I am currently employed at) for this end has been the creation and mandate of Engineering Ethics courses to their students, typically outsourced to the philosophy department. This program, given what we have just said, seems justified according to a simple argument.
Engineers should be taught how to behave morally.
Teaching Engineering Ethics is the best available means for ensuring this.
Philosophers, given they know about ethics, are best qualified to teach Engineering Ethics.
Therefore, philosophers should teach engineering students engineering ethics.
A fine enough argument, one might think, and one that seems to have convinced the engineering department to insist on their students taking these courses. The only problem with this argument is that it sucks.
Engineering Ethics Will Not Save Us
This defense of Engineering Ethics depends on a particular understanding of engineering misbehavior. For any instance of a person acting as they ought not, we may offer one of the three following explanations.
Lack of moral motivation. The criminal did not care to, or did not care enough to, behave as they ought.
Lack of moral expertise. The wrongdoer, even if they wanted to do well, did not know how to because of moral ignorance.
Lack of factual expertise. The wrongdoer’s attempts to do well proved unsuccessful out of some ignorance of the facts on the ground.
Of course, in different cases different lacks may be, pardon the expression, present. Indeed, multiple may be at once. Note, however, that moral philosophy, the thing that philosophers teach in engineering ethics, can at most address the second lack. Moral philosophers themselves have sometimes owned that one cannot reason a man to moral motivation. (Think of Hume and his knave.) Even if this is wrong, and one has rationally compelling arguments to show that one ought (prudentially? rationally? morally??) to care about morality, it is doubtful that such arguments would be rhetorically effective. Why think the moral knave is not also a rational knave?
Similarly, if the problem is a want of factual expertise (perhaps the engineers do not know enough about how to implement safety protocols, or the best ways to avoid or navigate dysfunctional organizations), the remedy should not be entrusted to philosophers. It is, after all, much better left to professional engineers to instruct their students in professional behavior and safety standards, who might have some first-hand experience of these things, than philosophers, who tend to be bored by and disregard empirical facts except when treated in the most simple-minded and stylized way. Nor should the philosopher be blamed for this; she does not have any training in these things (the dysfunctions of the philosophy department exist at lower stakes if no lesser intensity) and nor is she provided much by way of time or incentive to educate herself. Insofar as she concerns herself with the engineering profession it is only to draw it into relation to abstract, theoretical concerns that are her natural province.
So if Engineering Ethics taught through a philosophy department is to do any noticeable good, we have to hope that the problem with engineers really is a lack of moral expertise. (And I do mean hope here; I have seen no evidence in support of this claim, nor is it the sort of question that even engineering ethics textbooks attend to.) Here comes the crucial question: can philosophers instill moral expertise? I think the answer must be negative, for two reasons. First, we should not expect philosophers to have any significant, relative advantage over the average engineer in moral expertise. Second, whatever advantage we might suppose is not readily transferable.
Are moral philosophers moral experts? A passing familiarity with moral philosophy indicates that there really is a question here. Consider by contrast scientific expertise. Physicists have a high degree of consensus around claims considered to be true or, at least, highly truth-like. There are, of course, areas of disagreement (interpretations of quantum mechanics), but a student can take a series of physics courses and thereby become an expert on physics. Moral philosophy is marked by a much greater degree of dissensus, from basic questions (are rights just nonsense on stilts) to specific issues (are we morally required to donate most of our income to charity). Moral philosophers may be somewhat superior to the ordinary individual — their moral beliefs are likely more consistent, backed by much more sophisticated justifications, and more likely to contain certain important moral truths (egalitarianism, veganism) — but not in a way that translates to a reliable set of doctrines which may be imparted. Rather, moral philosophers are experts on moral philosophy rather than morality.
Should one dispute this dismissive evaluation of moral philosophy, granting philosophers an (undeserved) moral expertise, we should question whether this expertise may be transfered to students in a way that matters. There are doubts that come within moral philosophy itself. Take Aristotle’s claim that figuring out how one ought to behave in specific, novel situations requires not the mechanical application of some moral theory (either because morality cannot be captured by a mechanically applicable theory or epistemic, cognitive, or practical limitations make such application unworkable) but rather in the exercise of a virtue he called practical wisdom. Given this description, we obviously cannot develop practical wisdom by learning by heart some set of rules. Rather, it can be developed only through reinforced practice governed by those who already possess the virtue. (In the same way that we teach a baby to recognize colors not by reading them Hemholtz but by reinforced practice.)
There is an ineliminably practical side of moral expertise that a series of lecture in moral philosophy, or even applied moral philosophy, cannot convey. (And the solution is not just to replace the lecture with hands-on pedagogy. As Aristotle stresses, moral training starts early and takes a village; if students have missed the boat, it is more than any one class will fix.) One last problem, if all these difficulties are not sufficient. Suppose there were some set of facts the teaching of which would, in fact, suffice to improve the behavior of engineers. Could you get students to learn them? No. You can’t get students to learn anything, not for longer than they’ll be tested on it. (This is a slight overstatement of the depressing reality of pedagogy revealed by Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education.) Moreover, teachers of Engineering Ethics face no incentives to discover what those facts are and to ensure that students remember them.
Why, Then, Is Engineering Ethics Taught?
The case for Engineering Ethics is built on exceedingly shaky foundations. The assumptions underpinning the present approach are so obviously wrong that one can scarcely believe anyone would accept them. That such courses exist as more than a curio represents a combination of unthinking acceptance of the status quo and that peculiar quixotic idiocy infecting even accomplished academics. And that is being generous; the whole truth is likely a good deal more cynical.
I take my explanatory mold from Jason Brennan and Phillip Magness’s account (in Cracks in the Ivory Tower) of the rise of composition classes. Universities face an embarrassing situation: they frequently graduate students who cannot write a single, comprehensible sentence, much less a number of them in a row. The treatment? Mandate composition classes to be taught, natch, by the English department. Does the treatment work? For those treated, no, but, like any good alternative medicine, the interest of the doctor must come first. English departments were exceedingly glad to have the enrollment boost provided by mandatory composition classes. Administrators were happy to be able to say that they were taking responsible steps to produce halfway passable writers.
The same dynamic has given us mandatory diversity training and, of much smaller but more personal stakes, Engineering Ethics. The philosophy department is happy to supplement its typically meager rank of majors and minors (read, students genuinely interested in philosophy) with students who have no choice or no good choice but to take philosophy classes. (The whole subfield of logic, I suspect, is made possible by the fact that logic classes typically count for a math credit and are therefore attractive to dysnumerate freshmen.) These departments then are happy to foist Engineering Ethics on engineering students, even if doing so is to no obvious benefit. Engineering colleges are, for their party, happy to accept the impression of moral responsibility.
The students are the losers here, obviously, but not so much that they will rebel. Rather, this is just a bucket of bullshit to cap a veritable mountain universities are asking them to swallow. If the buckets fall equally across universities, it does not even make one more attractive than another. Besides, given that there’s likely a decent job on the other end, one might as well sidle up and start shoveling.
Teaching Engineering Ethics is correspondingly a bullshit job. (In David Graeber’s sense; specifically in his taxonomy such teachers are box-checkers.) I’ve done it four times and have at last come to my senses. (I think I might try being an engineer for a change.) I will grant that the experience is not harmful for students. At best it is a semi-interesting diversion — I have had a few students report being turned on to philosophy by the course — at worst a boring slog. I am sure many more students have been completely turned off, but they have the grace not to report it to me. Lest this be taken the report of a poor quality, disgruntled teacher, by the criterion that the university system has decided matters (student evaluations) I am fully average, and prefer this to most other jobs. Engineering Ethics is not especially bad, but it is a sad example of the perverse incentives plaguing the university system at play.