SH 502 - SORIYA

Corrigé

1) a. Engineers are obliged to use their skills and knowledge in ways that do not injure, harm, or endanger the welfare and
safety of the public, their clients, or employers.
b. Engineers are obliged to be honest, fair, and loyal in all their dealings.
c. Engineers are expected to practice their profession with the dignity and honor befitting their special status as
professionals, respecting the moral integrity of all those with whom they deal.

2) Flores first addresses what codes of ethics are and what they do: engineering codes of ethics a) restrict engineering practice
to morally acceptable areas, and therefore b) limit engineers’ freedom. He differentiates causes from reasons for adopting
professional codes of ethics. Some causes for adoption of professional codes are fear of disapproval, the desire to enhance
reputation, rewards, or the avoidance of responsibility of decision making. Causes are not reasons (justification) to adopt
professional codes of ethics. Flores is interested in two main reasons for adopting a moral code of conduct in moral philosophy.
The first is the consequentialist approach, Mill’s principle of utility, following which beneficial consequences flow from following
a moral code, i.e. it is socially beneficial to respect freedom to pursue interests as long as they cause no harm to others.
According to the consequentialist approach, actions are right in proportion to their promotion happiness (well-being) and wrong
in proportion to their promotion of unhappiness. Every individual’s duty is the promotion of the greatest good for the greatest
number of people. The second is the deontological approach, Kant’s moral theory (the Golden Rule), based on principles of
obligation or rules expressing duties, i.e. duty lies in the nature of the act, not the beneficial consequences of the act. According
to the deontological approach, an act’s rightness or wrongness is defined in terms of duty; an act’s moral quality is independent
of its effectiveness to bring about desired ends or the special interests of those who perform it; morality is rational and universal:
circumstances do not dictate rightness or wrongness for any rational individual; an action must be capable of being willed as
a universal law of morality for everyone (the test of rational consistency). After explaining that codes of ethics define standards
of ethical performance expected by engineers and indicating the duties based on these ethical principles that are common to
all engineers (see response for exam question #1), Flores asks whether the moral principles in engineering codes are justified
deontologically and consequentially, i.e. whether they conform with our duty as moral agents and whether following a code of
ethics promotes the greatest balance of happiness/good over unhappiness/evil. Flores concludes that both the deontological
and consequentialist approaches ground the duties in codes of ethics. Nonetheless, he states that following a code of ethics
does not make an engineer’s actions always rationally or morally justifiable, nor will it enable an engineer to know what to do
in specific cases. He believes, however, that understanding philosophical grounding for codes of ethical behavior helps
engineers deal more effectively with problems of conflicting demands.
Students’ responses will vary for the second part of the question.

3) Shrader-Frechette puts forward different arguments for rights of future people: a) intergenerational reciprocity based on
obtaining a greater degree of happiness and self-actualization in recognizing the rights of future people, based on the fact that
our forebears have benefitted us and thus we have the same obligation, and based on the Japanese concept of on: we repay
our debts to our ancestors by making things better for those in the future; b) the idea of no necessity of explicit reciprocity
based on the Golden Rule (walking in another’s shoes), and based on the “original position” which assumes we seek to protect
our interests and we don’t know our place in society and thus if everyone were in the “original position,” we would want to have
equal rights; and the model of a parent-child relationship; and c) the idea of conception of life: even if we cannot conceive of
future generations’ interests, beliefs and conditions, they will surely have an interest in living space, fertile soil, fresh air, good
health and welfare.
In the 1987 Brundtland Report sustainable development was defined in the following way: “Humanity has the ability to make
development sustainable to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations
to meet their own needs.
Students can give examples of different SDGs to demonstrate how sustainable development presupposes the notion of a
shared moral community or a social contract with future generations.

4) According to Friedman, in order to examine clearly the doctrine of the social responsibility of business, on must ask precisely
what it implies and for whom. As only people can be responsible, the people in question in the realm of business are either
individual proprietors or corporate executives. Because the discussion of social responsibility is directed at corporations,
Friedman’s focus is primarily on corporate executives, whom he defines as agents of the individuals who own the corporation
or establish the eleemosynary institution, and thus the corporate executive’s primary responsibility is to the corporate owners.
As an individual who is a person in his own right, the corporate executive can be said to have responsibilities, but these are
social responsibilities of individuals (e.g., devoting one’s money to a specific cause, working or not working for certain
corporations, etc., not of business. Friedman asks, “What does it mean to say that the corporate executive has a "social
responsibility" in his capacity as businessman? If this statement is not pure rhetoric, it must mean that he is to act in some way
that is not in the interest of his employers.” He gives examples of social and environmental objectives such as not increasing
prices despite this being beneficial for the corporation so as to contribute to preventing inflation, hiring “‘hardcore’ unemployed”
rather than better qualified workers to reduce poverty, or spending more than is required by law on reducing pollution. In all
cases deemed to conform to the social responsibility of business, Friedman argues that the corporate executive is spending
his/her employer’s money. He asserts that the corporate executive “is in effect imposing taxes, on the one hand, and deciding
how the tax proceeds shall be spent, on the other” (and how does he know how to spend the money and on what?) potentially
spending the money of the shareholders, the customers, and the employees, depending on the action in question.
Friedman elucidates his taxation analogy by distinguishing between governmental and business functions, reminding the
reader that “‘taxation without representation’ was one of the battle cries of the American Revolution.” When the corporate
executive takes on all governmental functions (i.e., that of legislator, executive and jurist), he/she becomes a civil servant yet
has not been elected through the political process, leading Friedman to contend that “the doctrine of ‘social responsibility’
involves the acceptance of the socialist view that political mechanisms, not market mechanisms, are the appropriate way to
determine the allocation of scarce resources to alternative uses.” He maintains that “the difficulty of exercising ‘social
responsibility’ illustrates, of course, the great virtue of private competitive enterprise – it forces people to be responsible for
their own actions and makes it difficult for them to ‘exploit’ other people for either selfish or unselfish purposes. They can do
good – but only at their own expense.”
Nonetheless, Friedman acknowledges the arguments of those who claim that social and environmental problems are too
critical and the course of political processes too slow, making the exercise of social responsibility by businesspeople a faster
and surer way to address present problems. However, he rejects the argument on grounds of principle: “What it amounts to
is an assertion that those who favor the taxes and expenditures in question have failed to persuade a majority of their fellow
citizens to be of like mind and that they are seeking to attain by undemocratic procedures what they cannot attain by democratic
procedures.”
After briefly treating the case of the individual proprietor spending only his own money if his actions reduce the returns of his
company and stating that the effects of such a proprietor are minor in comparison with those of a large corporation, Friedman
returns to what he sees to be the real goal of corporations who claim to exercise the doctrine of social responsibility. He deems
this doctrine “a cloak for actions that are justified on other grounds rather than a reason for those actions” that enable “a
corporation to generate goodwill as a by-product of expenditures that are entirely justified on its own self-interest,” especially
when faced with anti-capitalist sentiment against the profit-seeking “‘soulless corporation.’” Hearkening back to the title of his
text, Friedman will not muster the indignation to call on such executive to refrain from the “hypocritical window-dressing” that
he finds the use of the cloak of social responsibility to be, but he asserts that it “does clearly harm the foundations of a free
society.” Hammering his point home, Friedman states that “the doctrine of ‘social responsibility’ taken seriously would extend
the scope of the political mechanism to every human activity. It does not differ in philosophy from the most explicitly collective
doctrine. It differs only by professing to believe that collectivist ends can be attained without collectivist means. That is why, in
my book Capitalism and Freedom, I have called it a ‘fundamentally subversive doctrine’ in a free society, and have said that
in such a society, ‘there is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities
designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free
competition without deception or fraud.’”
Students responses will vary for the second part of the question.

5) In order to assess the ethical issues involved in the development of Tesla’s automated, electric car, the students will need
to present the specific stakeholders involved in this case ranging from Elon Musk, Tesla, employees, engineers to investors,
producers of lithium, governments, manufacturers to present/future generations and the environment. The students will assess
the conflicts creating ethical issues on social, environmental, economic and geopolitical levels and analyze the action creating
the issue deontologically, consequentially and with respect to future generations. After giving their assessments, student will
answer independently to the final part of the question.

6) In order to assess the ethical issues involved in the different cases each class is asked to treat, the students will need to
present the specific stakeholders which obviously vary according to the case. The students will assess the conflicts creating
ethical issues on social, environmental, economic and geopolitical levels, where applicable, and analyze the action creating
the issue deontologically, consequentially and with respect to future generations. After giving their assessments, student will
answer independently to the final part of the question.