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What would you call the process by which the defense sector designs and builds weapons? This cannot be "engineering" by your definition, as the people involved

What would you call the process by which the defense sector designs and builds weapons? This cannot be "engineering" by your definition, as the people involved are not consulted on the foreign policy objectives their work will serve, but it's probably what others in the thread think the word means. Even in bridge building, the balancing of human civilization's advantages against its environmental cost is a matter of public policy. Engineers may be consulted to assess environmental impact or to provide lower-impact options, but "should we have a bridge here or not" is ultimately a question for political leaders, not engineers.

na85 7y ago
I believe if you go back and read my comment you'll find I said engineers need to consider the ethical ramifications of their work. I neither prescribed a particular ethical conclusion nor required consultation for my definition. There are lots of people who choose not to work in Defense because of the ethical considerations. There are others whose personal senses of ethics are not offended by the idea of making weapons, or at least are assuaged by the money. I would argue the same interplay between ethics and compensation is at work in e.g. Facebook and other surveillance firms. Quite obviously some people don't mind working for Facebook, even though I personally would find that repugnant. What I'm not saying is that someone who works for Facebook "isn't an engineer" because I happen to disagree with their ethical choices. I'm saying that if you call yourself an engineer and you don't consider/ignore the ethical consequences of your work then you are an impostor. The link to the topic at hand/reason I brought this up is that the 737 MAX issue (or the MCAS issue) isn't a technological problem so much as an ethical problem. Considering the technical faults in isolation ("putting the moralism and ethics in their own paragraph") is deliberately blinding one's self to the crux of the issue.
- closeparen 7y ago
  The aircraft doesn't do what it's specified to do. That's a technical problem. If the aircraft misbehaved but the people involved were really scrupulous about it, it would still be an engineering failure and their strong ethics would not mitigate that.
  - na85 7y ago
    >The aircraft doesn't do what it's specified to do. That's a technical problem. The root cause, the reasons why it doesn't do what it's specified to do stem from an ethical problem.

na85 7y ago

I believe if you go back and read my comment you'll find I said engineers need to consider the ethical ramifications of their work. I neither prescribed a particular ethical conclusion nor required consultation for my definition. There are lots of people who choose not to work in Defense because of the ethical considerations. There are others whose personal senses of ethics are not offended by the idea of making weapons, or at least are assuaged by the money. I would argue the same interplay between ethics and compensation is at work in e.g. Facebook and other surveillance firms. Quite obviously some people don't mind working for Facebook, even though I personally would find that repugnant. What I'm not saying is that someone who works for Facebook "isn't an engineer" because I happen to disagree with their ethical choices. I'm saying that if you call yourself an engineer and you don't consider/ignore the ethical consequences of your work then you are an impostor. The link to the topic at hand/reason I brought this up is that the 737 MAX issue (or the MCAS issue) isn't a technological problem so much as an ethical problem. Considering the technical faults in isolation ("putting the moralism and ethics in their own paragraph") is deliberately blinding one's self to the crux of the issue.

closeparen 7y ago
The aircraft doesn't do what it's specified to do. That's a technical problem. If the aircraft misbehaved but the people involved were really scrupulous about it, it would still be an engineering failure and their strong ethics would not mitigate that.
- na85 7y ago
  >The aircraft doesn't do what it's specified to do. That's a technical problem. The root cause, the reasons why it doesn't do what it's specified to do stem from an ethical problem.