Deontological Ethical Theories.

• The word "deontology" comes from two Greek words, "deon (duty) and "logos" (account of or study of). Literally, then, deontology is the ethical theory that provides an account of duty. Deontology has different versions based on the different possible foundations for duty, including moral autonomy (Kant), a hypothetical social contract (Hobbes, Locke, Rawls), or natural law.
• Deontology differs from consequentialism. For consequentialism, the moral value of an action lies in its results or consequences. Deontology evaluates actions independently of their consequences; it places the moral value of an action on its formal characteristics. These include universalizability, reversibility, and autonomy.
• Universalizability: Actions that take on the form of duty are universalizable. Because they apply equally to all people at all times, they do not allow individuals to make themselves exceptions to the universal rule. Kant provides different tests to determine if an action exhibits the formal characteristics of duty. If the rule expressed by the action (its 'maxim') can be converted into a universal law without defeating itself, then it is a rule of moral duty. Truth telling expresses a rule that can be universalized. Telling lies does not. (Imagine a possible world in which everybody lied. If telling lies were universalized, then communication would become impossible. When universalized, the rule of telling lies is self-defeating.)
• Reversibility: Moral actions are also reversible. Here, duty functions more or less according to the Golden Rule. You treat others as you would have them treat you. The action, acceptable from the agent's perspective (the perspective of the doer), is also acceptable when viewed from the receiving end (the perspective of those under its impact).
• Respect for Autonomy: Rules of duty recognize and respect autonomy both in those suffering the impact of the action and in the agent. Kant expresses this last point in his formula of the end: Treat humanity (yourself included) always as ends and never merely as means. Treating individuals as ends implies recognizing that they, like you, have the capacity for autonomy, that is, they can formulate life plans and then organize and discipline themselves to carry them out; treating others as ends entails recognizing and respecting this autonomy. Treating someone merely as a means involves actions that circumvent autonomy through force, deception, manipulation, or fraud. Treating someone as a means (distinguished from treating them merely as a means), for example, hiring an individual to work for you as an employee, is morally permissible provided the relation is formed freely and knowingly.

Self-Defeating test applied to copying an exam

• Consider another example.
• Suppose you are tempted to copy the answers for your exam from your neighbor's paper.
• What is the maxim?
• Universalize the maxim.
• Is it self-defeating when universalized?
• Hint: Think of the world in which copying is universalized as a room where everybody sits at desks arranged in a circle. You copy from your neighbor, your neighbor from her neighbor, and so on. Now, given this arrangement, is it is self-defeating?

These basic tenants of Deontology make it possible to understand basic rights and duties as measures taken to recognize and respect autonomy.

1. Definition: A right is an essential capacity of action that others are obliged to recognize and respect. "Essential" here is understood as necessary for the exercise of autonomy.
2. A right claim is legitimate if it protects a capacity of action that is (a) essential to autonomy, (b) vulnerable to a standard threat, and that (c) it's recognition and respect does not deprive others of something essential (feasible).
3. A duty is a principle or rule that obliges individuals to recognize and respect one another's rights.
4. Duties sort themselves out into three levels: (a) the most basic duties are those not to deprive others of their rights; (b) intermediate duties create obligations to prevent right deprivations; (c) the highest duty level lies in the obligation (most often social rather than individual) to aid those who have been deprived of their rights.
5. Rights and duties are correlative. This means that my rights impose on others the correlative duties to recognize and respect them. And I have correlative duties to recognize and respect the rights of others. The extent of the correlative duties we impose on ourselves and others is limited by feasibility; your rights claims over me do not extend to the point where they deprive me of something essential.

The following rights claims have been asserted by engineers against the business organizations for which they work. (These claims quoted directly from Bill Baker, Engineering Ethics: An Overview. Claims form a "Bill of Rights" set forth by Murray A. Muspratt of Chisholm Institute of Technology, Victoria, Australia (American society of Civil Engineers' Journal of Professional Issues in Engineering, October 1985)

1. "The right to act in according to ethical conscience and to decline assignments where a variance of moral opinion exists.
2. The right to express professional judgment, and to make public pronouncements that are consistent with corporate constraints on proprietary information.
3. The right to corporate loyalty and freedom from being made a scapegoat for natural catastrophes, administrative ineptitude or other forces beyond the engineer's control.
4. The right to seek self-improvement by further education and involvement in professional associations.
5. The right to participate in political party activities outside of working hours.
6. The right to apply for superior positions with other companies without being blacklisted.
7. The right to due process and freedom from arbitrary penalties or dismissal.
8. The right to appeal for ethical review by a professional association, ombudsman or independent arbitrator.

Consequentialism and Utilitarianism

• In consequentialism, the moral value of an action lies in the consequences or results it produces.
• The range of consequences that factor into a moral evaluation determines the form of consequentialism. If one seeks only to maximize good for oneself, then one is an egoist. Utilitarians, on the other hand, try to maximize the good for all of those who are affected by the action.
• Utilitarianism is based on a principle of utility: Choose that action or policy that maximizes utility, that is, brings about the greatest good for the greatest number.
• Utility is maximized by producing the greatest quantity of good things in conjunction with the smallest quantity of bad things. So hedonists seek to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. Other utilitarians seek to maximize things of intrinsic value (happiness, truth, beauty, friendship, knowledge) while minimizing things of negative value. Individual preference utilitarians seek to produce conditions where the maximum number of people can satisfy their preferences while minimizing conditions that frustrate the satisfaction of these individual preferences.
• A utilitarian-based decision requires going through several steps: (1) Determine the likely results of your action; (2)Determine the magnitude and range of these results by looking at how severe the impact are and how many people would be affected; (3) Sort these results into positive (goods/values/preferences/benefits) and negative (bads/lack of value/frustrated preferences/harms) categories; (4) Do this for all the available alternatives; (5)Determine which maximizes positives and minimizes negatives, i.e., determine which is utility maximizing.

Utilitarianism and Decision Making

1. Determine the likely results of your action.
2. Estimate the magnitude and range of these results. Magnitude is the severity of the impact. Does it lead to catastrophic harms? Uncertain but potentially great benefits? Are the impacts negligible in terms of their severity? Range focuses on the numbers of groups and individuals who feel the action's impacts. Are the impacts distributed over many people and groups or just a few? Considering the range and magnitude helps to identify the most important consequences and to set aside those least important.
3. Sort out the likely results with significant magnitudes and ranges into positive and negative categories. Positive consequences includes goods, values, preferences, and benefits. They also extended to rights protected or promoted. Negative consequences include bads, disvalues, frustrated preferences, and harms.
4. Repeat steps one through three for several courses of action. Come up with a rough calculation of positive and negative results factoring in the magnitude and range of these.
5. Determine which solution maximizes positive results and minimizes negative results. This will give you the utility-maximizing solution

Calculating Utility Using Markets (Based on Sagoff (1986)

• Your neighborhood has a vacant lot. After several years of disuse, different local special interest groups contend over how it should be used.
• A nation-wide department store chain wants to build a large store on this lot. The store would be surrounded by a parking lot. This would provide you and your neighbors with cheap goods. It would provide employment but would also seriously undermine some of the more traditional stores in your area.
• A local environmental group has petitioned the state to set aside this area as a nature preserve or park. It could serve as a buffer that would help contain pollution from the city. It would also provide recreation opportunities for you and your neighbors.
• Preference utilitarianism would create hypothetical markets to measure the value of these different use options. The utility maximizing solution would turn the land over to the most highly valued use.
• Willingness to pay: One way to find out how intensely you and your neighbors value turning the land over to recreation and park use would be to survey you all on whether and by how much would you be willing to have your taxes raised to buy this land and set it aside for park recreation use. If this willingness to pay higher taxes expressed by you and your neighbors exceeds the price the department store chain is willing to pay, then this would indicate that your preferences are more intense and utility would be maximized by satisfying them.
• But many object to the use of willingness to pay as a measure of preference intensity. Willingness to pay, they claim, is limited by ability to pay and while the national store chain may prefer it less, they may have more disposable income. A better measure of how the community values this land and the uses it may be put to, is to assume they own it and then ask how much they would be willing to accept from those who want to purchase it and use it to build a department store. Willingness to sell is less dependent on disposable income and therefore a better measure of how a commodity or utility is valued.
• Which measure do you think best records utility, willingness to pay or willingness to sell? Why?
• Could hypothetical markets be used to determine how much you value keeping your personal information private? Can we convert privacy to intellectual property and then calculate its value in terms of willingness to pay or willingness to sell? Or is privacy a distinct right whose value is intrinsic and cannot be subjected to actual or hypothetical markets?

Are you a Deontologist or a Utilitarian?

• Would you walk away from Omelas?
• Ursula LeGuin wrote a fascinating short story entitled, “The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas.” It describes a city in which almost everything is perfect. Almost all the inhabitants are happy and prosperous. Everything seems perfect until the visitor to the city discovers that all the happiness and prosperity of the city are purchased by inflicting unimaginable suffering on one innocent young girl. She is kept alone in a dark room, denied kindness and human interaction, and forced to live in appalling material conditions. At the end of her story, LeGuin poses for us a choice: Would you choose to live in a city where the happiness of the many (including you) is purchased by channeling all unhappiness onto one unfortunate innocent victim?
• Would a Deontologist walk away from Omelas? Why or why not?
• Would a Utilitarian walk away from Omelas? Why or why not?

Virtue Ethics

• Virtue ethics differs from deontology and consequentialism.
• First, rather than focusing on the action it focuses on the agent. The action eminates from the character of the agent; hence, evaluate the action in terms of what it says about the agent.
• Second, it raises the bar in moral analysis. Instead of focusing on harm minimalization or on the moral minimum, virtue ethics is really about moral excellence. Virtue translates the Greek word, "arete" which can also be translated by excellence. Thus, virtues are excellences and moral virtues are moral excellences.
• Finally, virtues point, not just to the individual, but to the community. They represent habits of action performed by individuals that bring about the goods that sustain the social surroundings. Professional virtues are patterns of action performed by professionals that keep the profession healthy and vibrant.

Aristotle's definitions of Virtue or Arete

• "a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean, i.e., the mean relative to us, this being determikned by a rational principle and by that principle by which [a person] of practical wisdom would determine it." (Ross's translation in Nicomachean Ethics, 1106b, 36.
• Virtues are excellences of character. Aristotle finds them in the mean lying betweentwo extremes which are termed "vices." Invices of excess, we have too much of a good thing. So recklessness is too much courage. In vices of defect, we have too little of a good thing. So cowardice is the vice of too little courage.
• Cardinal Virtues: temperance, courage, wisdom, and justice. The last represents the ordering of temperance and courage under wisdom and insight into the nature of good.

MacIntyre's definition of virtue (MacIntyre 2007)

• "A virtue is an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods.
• Goods internal to engineering would include such things as (1) the health, safety, and welfare of the public which is served by the virtue of holding this good paramount in engineering design, (2) remaining loyal to the legitimate interests of the client which is displayed by the virtue of avoiding conflicts of interest, keeping client concerns confidential and exercising due care in engineering design, (3) upholding the honor and integrity of the profession which is upheld in displaying excellences in expert witnessing, superising the preparation of engineering plans, and upholding and advancing standards of excellent engineering practice, and (4) collegiality which is advanced through the excellence of treating peers respectfully, giving them credit, and working with them to advance engineering knowledge and practice.

Responsibility as a Virtue (Fingarette 1974)

• Herbert Fingarette, in Criminal Insanity, characterizes reponsibility as "responsiveness to essential relevance." (186) This implies, through perceptual, intellectual, and emotional sensitivities, the ability to recognize and respond appropriately to the (morally) relevant personal, moral, legal, and physical aspects of the situation. For example, engineers have the knowledge and skill to recognize threat to safety in situations that the rest of us might overlook. Thus, the civil engineer could spot weaknessness in a bridge that could lead to its collapse and would then be able to recommend fixes for this weakness based on engineering skill and knowledge.
• Part of this responding is the ability to attribute an action to an agent for the purpose of praising or blaming. We can praise or blame an individual for an action if that individual satisfy (1) an identity/causal condition in the sense that the agent caused the action and the agent's identity persists over time, (2) an agent has moral sense, that is, has general moral capabilitite that allow for the perception of moral relevance, and (3) that the agent owns the action in the sense that the action stems from situational knowledge and was not forced, manipulated, or compelled. This is a reactive sense of responsibility that focuses on the past.
• In responsibility as a virtue, we (1) diffuse blame avoidance strategies, (2) design role responsibilities that overlap, (3) extend the scope of depth of knowledge, (4) extend our powers and control in a situation, and (5) adopt a proactive, problem solving preventive approach.

1. Baker, B. W., "Engineering Ethics: An Overview, in Smith," J. and Harper, P. M., eds. (2004) Engineering Ethics: Concepts, Viewpoints, Cases and Codes. National Institute for Engineering Ethics: 121-22.
2. MacIntyre, A. (2007, 1982) After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd Edition. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press: 191.
3. Sagoff, M. (1986) The Economy of the Earth: Philosophy, Law, and the Environment. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press: 24-49.
4. Fingarette, H. (1972, 1974) The Meaning of Criminal Insanity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press: 186.
5. Harris, C.E., Pritchard, M.S., Rabins, M. J. (1995) Engineering Ethics: Concepts and Cases, 1st Edition. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company: 29-33.

Engineering Ethics in Puerto Rico and Latin America

1. Lugo, E. (1985) Etica Profesional Para La Ingenieria. Mayaguez, Puerto Rico: Libreria Universal.
2. Munoz-Roman, W. (1997) Etica en la Practica Profesional de la Ingenieria: Aspectos Filosoficos, Historicos y Procesales. San Juan, PR: Universidad Politecnica de Puerto Rico (Co-sponsored by the Universidad Politecnica de Puerto Rico.
3. Mitcham, C. and Garcia de la Huerta, M. (2001) La Etica En La Profesion de Ingeniero: Ingenieria y Ciudadania. Santiago, Chile: EDEH. Universidad de Chile.