By Margaret Quan
EE Times

News of corporate scandals and insider trading, and the recent fraud perpetrated by a New York Times reporter who was found to have invented stories out of whole cloth, have put professional ethics on the front burner. A philosopher who teaches engineering ethics thinks engineers need to do some soul-searching too, now that genetic engineering, nanotechnology and other futuristic technologies are closing in on commercial use.

Many ethical questions surround "the incredibly powerful technologies that exist, and the fact [is] that most of the general public doesn't understand the technologies and the risks involved," said Deborah G. Johnson, professor of applied ethics in the department of technology, culture and communications at the University of Virginia and the author of Ethical Issues in Engineering (1991).

As a society, "we are enormously dependent on engineers" to tell us about the risks involved in developments such as genetically modified plants, nanotechnology and other new and emerging inventions, said Johnson, who was part of a committee on engineering ethics convened at the request of the National Academy of Engineering a year and a half ago.

Indeed, academy president William A. Wulf has called for a new look at engineering ethics by the NAE, a nonprofit, nongovernmental think tank on engineering and technology. The academy, which is planning a fall symposium on ethics, is putting together plans for how it will approach the new ethical questions in engineering, a spokesman said. The honorary-membership organization doesn't expect to establish a code of ethics related to engineering practice, but it does want to weigh in on issues involving new technologies, engineering and society, the spokesman said.

Indeed, Johnson believes the big ethical questions for engineers are broader than professional codes of conduct and bigger even than managing relationships with employers, customers and other engineers.

Rather, the issue now centers on the power that engineers have over society. The ability to understand the risks and consequences of new technologies, and to evaluate them accordingly, demands a different approach to engineering ethics, she said. Johnson believes that the biggest ethical problems for individual engineers will arise as a result of the dual role they play, upholding a responsibility to protect the public while at the same time working for corporations to which they owe loyalty.

One of the myths surrounding new technology and ethics that Johnson plans to tackle in her upcoming work, an anthology in science and technology studies, is that technology is "neutral." While society has typically "tended to separate out material inventions from the organizations that create and sustain them," that's almost impossible today, she said. In addition, society has left the development of technology to proceed independently from political or moral evaluation, and Johnson questions whether this is wise.

For example, she noted that the Internet is often considered a "democratic technology," because small interest groups can have a voice online. But Johnson pointed out that the interest groups with the fanciest Web sites, best search engines and liveliest content usually get the most traffic, and they tend to be the ones that already enjoy more influence in the wider world, and more political and financial clout.

Johnson has taught ethics to engineers and scientists for more than 20 years at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Georgia Tech and now the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. She has written or edited four books, published more than 40 papers in a variety of journals and taught courses on ethical theory; information technology, ethics and policy; engineering ethics; and values and policy.

Besides her work with the National Academy of Engineering, Johnson also is an adviser to the Online Ethics Center for Engineering and Science at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. The center provides engineers, scientists, students and faculty with resources for understanding ethically significant problems that arise in their work.

Johnson's first anthology, Ethical Issues in Engineering, dealt with the relationships that engineers form and how they manage those relationships. At the time, the space shuttle Challenger disaster of 1986 was much on the minds of engineers, she said, and the profession was preoccupied by questions of whistle blowing. Today, she said, the emphasis has changed. The engineering profession must now tackle the larger questions of what technologies to develop and why, and the potential effects of those technologies on the public.

In her day job, Johnson teaches mostly senior engineering students, many of whom are unaware that their profession has a code of ethics until they take her course. It's a required course, but she said that engineering students seem "more interested than ever" in the ethical issues of engineering and technology and their impact on society. In their work lives, these students will be involved in such emerging technologies as genetic engineering, cloning, the advent of human machines created by nanotechnology, the Internet and all the privacy issues it raises, she said.

"We don't know if [the course] is going to make them more ethical," said Johnson, "but at least if they go to work for a sleazy company, they'll realize that there's something peculiar going on."

While engineering may be considered among the most ethical professions since it deals with building inventions that are designed to improve the human condition, the intersection of technologies such as genetic engineering, biotech, information technology and nanotechnology raise new ethical challenges. Professional societies are among those taking a hard look at some of these.

Wulf at the National Academy of Engineering, for example, has been discussing the matter since October 2000, when he urged the formation of an ethics program in a speech at the NAE's annual meeting. "Engineering is changing, and it is changing in ways that raise new ethical issues," Wulf said.

Wulf categorized the new issues as "macroethical," different in kind from the "microethical" issues dealt with in codes of conduct like those created by the National Society of Professional Engineers, the IEEE and other professional organizations.

Wulf suggested that the macroethical issues of the 21st century would involve not just individual engineers but the profession as a whole. They include evaluating the ethics surrounding "the complexity arising from the use of information technology and biotechnology in an increasing number of products or engineered systems" that, because of the inherent complexity, "have the potential for behaviors that are impossible to predict in advance," he said.

Wulf pointed to an article published in Wired magazine in 2000, in which Bill Joy, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems Inc., theorized that the interaction of information technology, nanotechnology and biotechnology would lead to self-replicating systems that would supplant human beings. Joy then raised the question of whether society should stop research on some or all of the mentioned technologies.

Copyright EE Times, used with permission.