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Engineering is a profession that is ethically underscrutinized, perhaps because engineers do not normally harm people directly. The negative impact that they may cause to people and their environment is usually mediated. The technology that they research is produced by workers, the weapons are used by soldiers, and the decisions are made by the corporate or political management on different levels. Thus, the responsibility is shifted towards those who are either associated with the application of the finite products, or with those making the executive decisions. It is amazing how little ethical responsibility engineers bear, as compared to the impact they have on our planet and its inhabitants.
Fichtelberg (2006, p. 685) notes that given the close relationship between the modern arms industry and the military, engineers and other professionals who work in the arms industry should be held accountable to the principles of just war theory. He argues that they are morally responsible both for choosing the companies that employ them as well as what types of arms they develop.
He also points out that despite their close financial and political connection, the moral connection between the arms industry and the military has been largely overlooked. Engineers, system designers, computer scientists and their managers are as essential to the conduct of modern warfare as are soldiers on the battlefield. However, as a vast number of these engineers are employed in the private sector and are, formally at least, civilians, it is not immediately obvious how their professional work relates to the ethics of warfare.
Fichtenberger (ibid., p. 698) concludes that the liability that engineers have towards the use or misuse of their weapons cannot be perfectly strict, but there should not be a complete disconnect between the design of weapons and their use either.
Within the strictly civilian context, engineers also do not see themselves as a party, responsible for the harm caused by their innovations, apart from their professional duties to provide quality service and quality products (Vesilind and Gunn, 2011).
The following famous dilemma by Bernard Williams (1973, pp. 97-98) is for some reason overlooked within the context of engineering ethics, though it addresses the very issue of engineers’ responsibilities:
George, who has just taken his Ph.D. in chemistry, finds it extremely difficult to get a job. He is not very robust in health, which cuts down the number of jobs he might be able to do satisfactorily. His wife has to go out to work to keep them, which itself causes a great deal of strain, since they have small children and there are severe problems about looking after them. The results of all this, especially on the children, are damaging. An older chemist, who knows about this situation, says that he can get George a decently paid job in a certain laboratory, which pursues research into chemical and biological warfare. George says that he cannot accept this, since he is opposed to chemical and biological warfare. The older man replies that he is not too keen on it himself, come to that, but after all George’s refusal is not going to make the job or the laboratory go away; what is more, he happens to know that if George refuses the job, it will certainly go to a contemporary of George’s who is not inhibited by any such scruples and is likely if appointed to push along the research with greater zeal than George would. Indeed, it is not merely concern for George and his family, but (to speak frankly and in confidence) some alarm about this other man’s excess of zeal, which has led the older man to offer to use his influence to get George the job… George’s wife, to whom he is deeply attached, has views (the details of which need not concern us) from which it follows that at least there is nothing particularly wrong with research into CBW. What should he do?