Protecting & Promoting the Public Welfare
Engineers have a special concern for safety. This is one nice way of quickly stating what is unique about “thinking like an engineer”: Whereas managers may have a special concern for the (financial) welfare of the company, engineers have a special concern for the safety of the products and projects they are working on.
This concern for safety can also be found in the various Codes of Ethics for technology professionals. According to the NSPE, for instance, engineers are required to “hold paramount the health, safety, and welfare of the public”.
More generally, technology has traditionally been aimed at improving human (and sometimes non-human animal) welfare. The plow made agriculture easier while also increasing crop yields and thus improving nutrition; the printing press allowed for improvements in education and knowledge for a far greater number of people than was previously possible; and water treatment plants greatly improved the quality of drinking water, staving off disease and improving human health.
Understanding the impacts, positive and negative, that technology can have on human welfare is foundational to being a responsible technology professional. Thus, in the chapters contained in this part of the book, we will explore the idea of welfare (or “well-being”) and its related values (such as health and safety). Further, we will focus in on two core responsibilities of technology professionals, as captured in the ethical principles of Beneficence and Non-Maleficence.
Chapter 4 introduces and details the principles of beneficence and non-maleficence, drawing connections between the principles and some of the responsibilities outlined in professional codes of ethics.
Chapter 5 introduces the Stakeholder Analysis, a tool from Value Sensitive Design, as a means of analyzing a technology product or project to identify who and what will be impacted and how. The stakeholder analysis is core to all ethical design, and additional elements will be added to it in later chapters. For our initial purposes, however, we will focus on welfare-based values and consequences.
Chapter 6 ends our initial exploration of public welfare with the introduction of a few welfare-focused evaluative tools. While, as we will see, these tools can be used beyond welfare considerations, they are most centrally linked with the principles of beneficence and non-maleficence and provide us various competing ways to think about how to weigh and balance competing risks and benefits.
