Engineers Face Ethical Dilemmas

摘要

I am pleased to become a regular contributor of engineering ethics topics to the readers of Leadership and Management in Engineering. I first formally encountered engineering ethics topics about 25 years ago, when I was an undergraduate civil engineering student at the Missouri University of Science & Technology (S&T; formerly University of Missouri—Rolla). Dr. Paul Munger taught a course on engineering ethics that I found life changing (although I didn't realize it fully at the time). The Hyatt Regency disaster in Kansas City had recently happened (Wikipedia 2012), and Dr. Munger was involved with investigating what role the engineers had in causing the disaster. Remember the situation? On July 17, 1981, there was a big tea dance party, and the hotel had a very elaborate skywalk that hundreds of people stood on to observe the party. The skywalk collapsed because the connections had been improperly designed. Communications between the engineers and the steel manufacturing vendor had also been poor; the steel manufacturer thought some design drawings were final when in fact they were preliminary. Also, the design engineers did not thoroughly check requested changes by the steel manufacturer before the changes were approved and constructed. There were more than 100 fatalities, and more than 200 additional people were injured (Wikipedia 2012).