We all make mistakes.
In life and engineering, you’re not always
going to succeed.
What’s important is that you learn from
your screw-ups and incorporate those lessons
into what you do next.
Because when you don’t, the consequences
can be bad. Even deadly.
To help keep us on track, we need something
that will provide a sense of morality and a set of
best practices for doing good in the world.
We need ethics.
Specifically, we need engineering ethics.
[Theme Music]
Engineering is a broad, ever-changing field.
With so many different branches, it’s good
to have some common ground –
a general set of guidelines or ideas for how
the engineers of the world should go about
solving problems.
One of these is safety, which we’ll talk
about more next time.
The other is ethics.
In general, ethics is a moral philosophy that tries
to deal with what’s right, what’s wrong, and what
your duty is to do good – and not do bad.
Engineering ethics is essentially this same
mindset, just applied to the field of engineering.
It’s the study of values, issues, and decisions
that are involved with the work of engineers.
Ethics has a particular importance for
engineers because people’s lives are so
often going to be in your hands.
It’s not just about remembering your manners
or being nice to your neighbor.
What you create as an engineer could save
a person’s life or take it away.
When you swallow a pill at the hospital, you
need to be able to trust that the people that came
up with it had your best interests in mind.
When you drive over a bridge, you need to
know that the civil engineers who designed it took
the time to make it as sturdy as possible.
The foods you eat – the cars you drive – the
wires in your home they all need to be designed
with ethics in mind.
If you want to see how bad an engineering
failure can be, look no further than the Kansas
City Hyatt-Regency Collapse.
In July of 1980, the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City,
Missouri was showing off its new multi-story atrium,
decked out with two levels of suspended walkways.
These walkways were supported by beams, which
were supposed to be held up by long rods hanging
from the ceiling.
To even the load and reduce the stress on
each beam, the walkways were supposed to have
a single rod extending all the way through them.
But something happened between the initial
design stage and the actual building of the atrium.
When the builders had some difficulty putting it
together, the system was modified to have 2 separate,
shorter rods instead of a single longer one.
This design change meant that the upper rod had to not
only support the weight of the walkway that it held up,
but also the one below it – essentially doubling the load.
During a party about a year after the atrium opened,
these beams failed and the two walkways collapsed,
killing 114 people and injuring 216 others.
In terms of lost lives, it was one of the most
devastating structural failures in U.S. history.
A lot went wrong, much of it caused by poor
oversight and bad communication.
A formal review of the changed design never
happened, strength calculations were never
performed, work was subcontracted out,
and the engineer on record put their seal on the
design without personally checking everything.
It all could’ve been prevented, if only
they’d followed the engineer’s Code of Ethics.
There are a couple of different ones out there,
but today we’ll use the Code of Ethics from the
American Society of Civil Engineers, or ASCE.
Their Code of Ethics has eight distinct principles,
the first being: “Hold Safety Paramount”.
This means that your chief concern as an engineer
needs to be the health and welfare of the public.
The rule goes on to say that you should only
approve designs that are determined to be safe and
that conform with accepted engineering standards.
The fact that there weren’t any calculations
done on the design changes to the walkway,
and that the engineer on duty approved the
designs without properly checking them clearly
goes against this principle.
That’s why the Committee of Professional Conduct that reviewed the case ruled that the engineer had violated their code and suspended them from the Society for three years.
If you take a look at the rest of the Code,
you can see some other useful rules about how
engineers should approach a problem.
The second rule is to “Service With Competence”,
which means that you should only work in areas
that you’re skilled in.
If you’re not an electrical engineer, you
shouldn’t be messing with the wires in a
building.
The third states that you should always “Issue
True Statements”.
Basically, don’t lie.
Then comes the need to “Act As A Faithful
Agent” for each of your employers or clients
and avoid conflicts of interest.
One of your jobs shouldn’t cause you to
sabotage another.
There’s also the rule of “Reputation By Merit”,
which means your reputation is built up by the work
that you do and not by unfair means.
That goes hand-in-hand with the requirement
to “Uphold Professional Honor”,
where you act with integrity and have a zero tolerance
policy for bribery, fraud, or any sort of corruption.
The 7th rule is to “Continue Professional Development,”
and it’s one of the most important for the long-term
growth of society and the engineering field.
You need to not only foster your own development
as an engineer, but that of other engineers as well.
You always need to report what happens, no
matter the consequences.
And finally, the eighth rule is to “Treat
All Persons Fairly”, which is really just
a good mantra for life.
Now, codes are great, but they’re not perfect.
People can, and do, break the rules.
And codes can’t always address every situation.
They may need to be updated as society and
technology advance.
So it all comes down to this: what are the
highest priorities?
If engineers are trying to create good for
the public, you need to ask “what is good”
|and “how can we prioritize good’?
It can’t just be consequentialism – having
the end justify the means – or you leave the door
open for some pretty big ethical gray areas.
No, we need better ethics than that.
One of the most influential ethical theories
to engineering has been utilitarianism.
This is the belief that actions are right if
they are useful or beneficial to the majority
of people.
You should try and maximize the overall good
that you can do, taking into account all of those
that will be affected by your actions.
Rights ethics is also very important.
Simply put, you should do your best to respect
the rights of others.
Acts of respect aren’t just ideal, but
necessary, regardless of whether or not they
always maximize the overall good.
In that way, you can see how ethical theories
can stack on each other.
There’s also duty ethics, which is all about
respecting another person’s autonomy.
This builds on rights ethics, but puts the
spotlight on your duties, rather than another
person’s rights.
If you have a right to live, then I have a
duty to not market a misleading product
that could kill you.
Or sign off on a new walkway design that I
haven’t checked.
Applying engineering ethics is all about trying
to balance these ethical theories with whatever
situation you’re put in.
It’s not always easy – or simple – but as
an engineer, you have a duty to try your best.
We improve, individually and as a community,
with practice and learning from the past.
Remember that Citicorp building we talked
about last episode?
The one whose pillars were in the middle of
its sides rather than at the corners?
Wind from the wrong angle could cause the entire
structure to fall, and no one realized until a student
pointed out the problem after it was already built.
After those discoveries were made and they started
immediate repairs, did they have an obligation to
inform everyone in the building?
How about the church that was underneath it?
What about the people in the surrounding area?
Or the media?
Or the local government?
What was the proper protocol that they should
have followed?
If you pick apart this incident, you can zero in
on the ethics surrounding several of these points.
To start, you need to analyze those wind loads.
You need to check all of your calculations
and not simply rely on building codes,
which only set minimum requirements and aren't always
what a specific project needs.
Then you should address the design changes,
which in this case was a switch from welded
connections to bolted ones.
Those changes need to be considered in the
overall design and checked by everyone involved.
It can’t just be a hasty decision.
You also have your professional responsibility
to follow the codes of conduct for every chartered
institution that applies to what you’re doing.
Public statements are absolutely necessary
in a situation like this.
The public has a right to know what’s going
on so they can plan accordingly.
If you don’t release a public statement or,
like Citicorp, put out one that’s misleading,
you’re denying people their right to ensure
their own safety and make their own educated
decisions.
Finally, no matter what happens, you need
to share and contribute to the advancement
of professional knowledge.
Concealing the Citicorp problem for over 20
years robbed everyone of decades of ethical
and engineering learning.
That’s why even when tragedies happen, it’s
important to treat them as case-studies
on what you might learn to do differently in
the future when approaching other problems.
Like if you’re going to try and go into space,
you need to know about the Space Shuttle
Challenger disaster.
In 1986, a leak in one of its solid rocket
boosters ignited the main liquid fuel tank,
resulting in the loss of the vehicle and the
death of the crew.
NASA found the cause of the disaster to be the
failure of an "O-ring" seal in the solid-fuel rocket,
and while there were many factors that contributed
to this disaster, it was fundamentally an ethics problem.
Sufficient testing hadn’t been done on the O-rings and NASA management didn’t listen to the concerns of some engineers, all so they could stay on their launch schedule.
Who knows what would’ve happened if a better
ethical code was followed?
It could’ve still gone wrong, but maybe
it wouldn’t have.
All we can do is try.
And with a strong code of ethics at our side,
and the knowledge of the past at our backs,
we can make the best, most informed decisions
to ensure our designs have the best possible impact.
There’s no better way to do it.
Today we talked about ethics and how it can
be applied to engineering.
We learned what a Code of Ethics is and how
it can apply to a situation like the Kansas City
Hyatt-Regency collapse.
Then we learned about engineering ethics and
the ethical theories of utilitarianism, rights
ethics, and duty ethics.
Finally, we brought it all together by going
back to the situation with Citicorp and analyzing
it from an ethical perspective.
I’ll see you next time, when we’ll talk
all about safety.
Crash Course Engineering is produced in association
with PBS Digital Studios,
which also produces Origin of Everything,
a show that explores the history behind stuff
in our everyday life,
from the words we use, the pop culture we
love, the technology that get us through the day,
or the identities we give ourselves.
Check it out at the link in the description.
Crash Course is a Complexly production and this
episode was filmed in the Doctor Cheryl C. Kinney
Studio with the help of these wonderful people.
And our amazing graphics team is Thought Cafe.
