The Engineering Project: Its Nature, Ethics, and Promise

EIGHT Material Ethics

In this chapter I will look at an ethics of products brought forth into the world by the practicing engineer. A given product, as I indicated in the last chapter, may be equitably distributed, totally safe, and environmentally benign, yet it may still deaden or disengage us. Truly focal products contribute to the good and open up rather than close down the world. In this chapter I will make these ideas more explicit by employing a type of ethics called material ethics, which stems from the work of Albert Borgmann . Material ethics seeks to assess the focal-ness of products that aim to augment our shared lifeworld. The speciWc values I associate with the material ethics assessment are engagement, enlivenment, and resonance. Focal products are not the same as products that have undergone human factors engineering. Kim Vincente deWnes human factors engineering as “the unique area of engineering that tailors the design of technology to people, rather than expecting people to adapt to technology.”1 There is a huge and important literature in the human factors area. Part of that area is taken up by the hci (human-computer-interface) discipline, which is of growing concern in light of the proliferation of computers. Generally speaking, the physical and psychological sides of the human person are major concerns of the human factors engineer. One of the things these engineers do is document the psychological aspects of people and the design techniques that can be used to create a Wt with those aspects.2 So, we expect that the human factors engineers will make sure the relationship of the end-user with the end-product is seamless to ensure that the user Wnds the product absorbing. But the focal product aims to eight material ethics 1. Kim Vincente, The Human Factor (New York: Routledge, 2004), 1. 2. Ibid., 90. be engaging rather than absorbing. Absorption with my family sedan, for example, means I can drive the car without needing to explicitly think about it. But engagement with my sports car is a different story. To drive it properly, I need to be fully present with it. Absorption is a kind of disburdenment . I know that the aim of much of our engineered technology is to disburden us from onerous tasks, but Borgmann’s point, again, is that a life of total disburdenment is a life of total disengagement. Focal engineering aims to engineer products that will be disburdening but at the same time engaging, enlivening, and resonant. Human factors engineering takes into account only part of the relationship between user and product . Focal engineering takes into account every aspect of the three-way relationship of user, product, and lifeworld. How do we make lifeworld more explicitly a part of our deliberations regarding the ethical assessment of a product? World or lifeworld is context , and focal engineering looks at every particular product as being embedded in its contexts Wrst by asking about its orgins—its formal, material, and efWcient causes—and second by asking about its Wnal cause, its goal, its telos. These questions about causes and purposes, if kept on the table, animate the lifeworld and keep it alive in our ethical assessments. A clear, honest, noncoercive, public discourse—a conversation of the lifeworld—will be required to assess the focally engineered product. A major roadblock to that discourse is that public policy orientations these days tend to favor a rather limited cost, risk, beneWt analysis that downplays the role of ethics. Engineers, to distinguish themselves as focal engineers acting in concert with other lifeworld deliberators, must extend their purview beyond the merely pragmatic and efWcient. They must develop a better appreciation of their role as informed citizens who through their works of engineering can contribute to an enhanced lifeworld. In this chapter, I will discuss a methodology for assessing the focality of an engineered product. Material ethics assumes that the virtue ethics assessments associated with the personal ethics of the engineer and the process ethics assessments associated with the professional ethics of the engineering process have been made with positive results. Yet, virtue ethics and process ethics assessments are necessary but not sufWcient. Material ethics, which is a kind of public policy ethics, is a different kind of engineering ethics. Unlike virtue ethics of the individual engineer and conceptual ethics of the professional engineer, material ethics requires the contributions not only of engineers, focal engineers, but also of a variety of other citizens. 180 part iii: the focal engineering venture [3...