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echnology and Society – Ethical Dimensions

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echnology and Society – Ethical Dimensions

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society and technology are closely connected, and engineers decide how much technology affects society. New technologies can improve communication, transportation, healthcare, etc.. but they can also raise ethical questions. For example, ai taking jobs. engineers should also have in mind about the downsides like e waste and energy consumption. Also most of the times new technology is mostly used and affects wealth people this means that engineers should try to target a the whole society not just a group.

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The launch went ahead even though engineers warned that the O-rings could fail in the cold weather. NASA and company leaders ignored these safety concerns and chose speed and schedule over protecting astronaut lives.

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Hunter Russell Space Shuttle Challenger explosion

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Hunter Russell Space Shuttle Challenger explosion

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The Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986 right after launch killing everyone on board. Engineers had been warned that the O-rings could fail in cold weather causing fuel to leak and cause an explosion , but their concerns were ignored because of pressure to meet deadlines. This shows how not putting safety first led to a tragic disaster.

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Bribes are a problem that allow engineers to take poor quality materials or worse projects. this is bad because it compromises peoples safety and are a violation of the engineer code.

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The ethical dilemma in civil enginerring is choosing between

saftey,and public apporval

and conflict of intrest from higher places

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The ethical dilemma in nuclear power is between choosing low risk carbon immitions or long term safety issues due to radiation . Nuclear waste still does not have a proper way of disposal therefore it is challenging expanding due the gain of more nuclear waste and potential accident that could happen.

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Confidentiality breaches ethical in engineering

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Confidentiality breaches ethical in engineering

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Confidentiality breaches in engineering are generally considered unethical because they violate professional obligations to protect sensitive information shared by clients or employers. Such breaches can lead to legal repercussions, reputational damage, and erosion of trust in the engineering profession.

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The ethical dilemma is that the architect had to choose between telling the buyer the truth about the building’s renovation difficulties, which could harm her friend’s deal, or staying silent to protect her friend but withholding important information from the buyer.

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An Architect’s Ethical Dilemma | Studio ST Architects

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I was recently confronted with an ethical dilemma that I did not know how to address. Yes, it was one of those small, somewhat privileged dilemmas, but nevertheless, I would really like to hear your thoughts on this question (join the conversation on Facebook).

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Chevrolet Corvair Ethical Dilemma Evan Reynolds

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Chevrolet Corvair Ethical Dilemma Evan Reynolds

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Chevrolet engineers designed a rear-engined vehicle in the early 60s that lacked proper suspension to prevent rollovers and other dangerous and unpredictable handling maneuvers. Cost cutting to make the vehicle cheap lead to a lack of anti-roll bars and weak suspension would cause the rear wheels to fold under the back of the car during hard cornering, causing the car to be labelled "unsafe at any speed".

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An engineer has a major role in keeping people safe while they choose their entertainment, such as roller coasters. Engineers have to be extra careful when trying to make something that's included with roller coasters because Roller Coasters are very dangerous and you don't know how things can end. The dilemma put at hand when an engineer decides to do this is- "Can I make equipment strong/goo enough to make people safe and make sure they have a great experience, or I could mess something up and put a multitude of lives in danger." When engineers are working on these kinds of things, they have to make sure they've done everything right and tested the equipment as well before people's lives get put at stake.

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The Challenger Space Shuttle Disaster. Jacob Rangel

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The Challenger Space Shuttle Disaster. Jacob Rangel

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Engineers at Morton Thiokol, the contractor for the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters, had concerns about the O-ring seals. They knew cold temperatures could make the O-rings brittle, increasing the risk of failure, on the night before the launch Florida temperatures were forecast to drop below freezing. They were recommended to delay the launch but the engineers wanting to avoid conflict with NASA's management still decided to let it launch. On the day of the launch one of the two solid rocket boosters started leaking and ignited the main liquid fuel tank. The dilemma was that the engineers had to weigh out the options of whether to tell NASA's management that they had to delay the launch or public safety. Choosing public safety would have saved those astronauts lives.

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The ethical dilemma in nuclear power is between choosing low risk carbon immitions or long term safety issues due to radiation . Nuclear waste still does not have a proper way of disposal therefore it is challenging expanding due the gain of more nuclear waste and potential accident that could happen.

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Violation: A social media company collected users personal data without explicit consent and shared it with third-party advertisers What was done wrong: Users were not informed about how their data would be used, which violated their right to privacy and autonomy. The company prioritized profit over ethical responsibility

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Its good for the community to get information on what's going on in the world around them, but some medias and journalism gives fabrication and or completely false news to the community which can bring issues causing distrust, violence, and disruption of peace.

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A person a team which decides when new products will be shipped to distributors for sale. since they are on a limited timeframe the person has to decide whether or not to release the product, knowing that there is a possibility that the product might be defective.

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Rachel works as a Quality Assurance Engineer at a large electronics company. She is responsible for the final testing of her company's servers and is part of a team which decides when new products will be shipped to distributors for sale.

Rachel's company has a contract with another company which makes the chips which are incorporated into the servers Rachel's company makes. The business model for this product is to release a new generation server approximately every six months, meaning Rachel has a limited timeframe to conduct her Quality Control tests.

Because there is such a short amount of time between the release of each next new product, the Quality and Assurance department cannot perform every possible test on the servers to ensure they are defect free. Rachel will not ship a product if there is any possibility that the server could malfunction and cause physical harm to the customer. However, she will ship a product that has a higher likelihood of failure resulting in data loss for the customer, because she knows that if she doesn't, her company's competitor will.

Is this an ethical way to conduct business? How should she determine when to ship a product with known defects?
Clare Bartlett was a 2014-2015 Hackworth Fellow in Engineering Ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University.
August 2015

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A quality assurance engineer must decide whether or not to ship products that might be defective.

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At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, there weren’t enough vaccines for everyone, so governments had to decide who should get them first. They had to choose between essential workers, older adults, and people with health conditions who were most at risk.

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Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

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The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices’ Interim...

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This report describes updated interim vaccine allocation…

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This is the final report of a tragedy in the gulf coast where a oil drilling well in the gulf of Mexico exploded, killing 11 people and spilling millions of gallons of crude oil into the surrounding ecosystem. Causing irreversible damage to the surrounding ecosystem. This report proves the disaster was completely avoidable and was caused by a series of mistakes made my the corporation. The company had to pay billions in reparations. Ultimately they did not take into account the risks of their actions and what was at stake.

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a person has to decide between being truthful about problems in the project maintaining loyalty to their team or leaders both are which ethically inportant, they both are directly conflict , making the decision complex and challenging

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Ethical responsibilities of a project manager as defined in the PMI guidelines focus a lot on "black and white" issues, such as conflict of interest. While all that is very well, a trained and certified project manager is also duty bound to do whatever is in the best interest of the project at all times. Every too often, we find project managers who are otherwise on the correct side of the guidelines display one or more of the following symptoms:

- Not pulling their weight on projects, allowing them to drift, abdicating all responsibility to the sponsors and senior managers.

- Accepting their brief as doing only coordination and clerical work, not really driving projects.

- Being too willing to accept whims and fancies of the most influential or most vocal stakeholders allowing them to hijack projects.

- Failing to report the true picture to all stakeholders.

This paper talks about a number of scenarios when a project manager's judgment about what is right or wrong is called into question. In so doing, we shall try to extend the definition of professional responsibility of a project manager.

The "Correct" Project Reports

Even within the parameters of being factually correct, project status or progress reports could be any of the following:

- Pessimistic: Being conservative in recognizing progress, much like revenue and expense recognition in accounting.

- Optimistic: Very common, as all project managers like to give the impression of being on top of things and keep everybody in good cheer.

- Factual: Just present plain facts and figures and leave judgment and interpretations to the reader. This is most tempting, but really an "escape mechanism" because I believe the project manager is shirking responsibility here.

Then there is the issue about how much of the truth should be revealed. Should the customer be informed about a week's delay in an intermediate milestone? Should the team be informed about an impending paradigm shift in project objectives as soon as it becomes apparent? I once had a boss who always want to brush some risks under the carpet for fear of annoying customers or sponsors. He always assured me that he would address the issue and that it will all come together. Would I have been right to listen to him or should I have gone ahead and report what I knew was the truth?

Projects have a significant impact on the fortunes of companies and project reports are often as important as accounting statements that depict the financial health of an organization. Just as there are standards like the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), shouldn't there be guidelines for how project reports should be created? I believe the project manager's professional responsibility should include the following:

- Establish the standards and parameters of reporting and let everybody know in advance. For instance, a 10% schedule slippage means a project status automatically becomes RED. This is not just a "best practice" but an ethical responsibility. How else would stakeholders know how to interpret reports?

- Strive to be as accurate as possible in reporting figures. If approximations are used, it should be clearly stated.

- Do no succumb to pressures to suppress facts or stating falsehoods and half-truths, even if it comes from your boss.

- Within limits of reason and materiality, always try to provide early visibility of issues and risks and provide mitigation plans. Things do not go away just by ignoring them.

Protect the Interests of "All" Stakeholders

Paraphrasing a famous quote, "all stakeholders are equal, but some are more equal than the others"! Stakeholder management calls for the project manager to master the art of diplomacy. For instance, can the interests of a "project-affected" person be as important as that of your boss? Is the customer really "always right" even if he or she is demanding that your team work 60-hour weeks to meet an unreasonable deadline? If there is a conflict of views, who do you go with?

It is very tempting for project managers to take the easy way out and listen to the most influential stakeholders-be it customers, your superiors, or the sponsors. But if you have been trained to assess stakeholder needs and handle conflicts, really a project manager should play a more "proactive" role. I believe a project manager's professional responsibility should include the following:

- Establish and document each stakeholder's interest in a project and set trade-offs and boundary conditions in advance if possible.

- Ensure transparency and honesty in determining the impact of key decisions on all stakeholders.

- Try to use negotiation and conflict resolution techniques to reach the optimum decision involving all stakeholders (never let decisions get taken by "default" assuming the other side would never know).

Remaining "Objective"

In a typical project, a project manager has to deal with teams and individuals whose jobs are adversarial by nature. For example the "development" team in a software development project, whose job it is to write error-free code and the "test" team, whose job is to find defects in code. Project managers often knowingly or unknowingly become "biased" toward one team over the other. To carry the above example further, a project manager who has been a developer in the past would tend to favour developers over testers. This can potentially lead to bad decisions and cause incalculable harm to the project.

It is easy enough to comprehend in theory, but often very difficult to implement in practice, when factors like past experiences, personal relationships, long-held beliefs, etc. come into play.

I believe the professional responsibility of a project manager should include the following:

- Not "taking sides" in technical discussions. Once you are an "insider" it is very difficult to regain your objectivity.

- It is important not just to be objective but to also appear to be so, just as Caesar's wife must be above suspicion. Something as simple as hanging out with one group all the time can give the impression that the project manager is biased. So protocol is important in the life of a project manager.

Get Leaders to "Act" for the Project's Benefit

By "leaders" we mean senior management, superiors, or sponsors, or all of these. Project managers need their support to be successful. But leaders are often too busy or simply not equipped to understand what the project needs from them. Especially in times of crises and key decision points, project managers must make sure they provide leaders with the right information and motivation to act in the best interest of the projects.

Here are some examples of when a project manager must engage the leaders actively and get them to act.

- When unreasonable demands are made of the project team by the business or the customer or other stakeholders. It is the leader's responsibility to ensure that the goals of a project are "feasible." Project managers often kill themselves and their teams chasing goals that are not realistic in the first place.

- When important stakeholders are refusing to play along. It is the leadership's responsibility to ensure that the project manager gets the necessary cooperation from everybody. Project managers should employ various means to secure this cooperation, but it is not his responsibility alone.

- When changes threaten to overwhelm the project goals. A project manager is responsible for "managing" change, but needs help from leadership to protect it from "unnecessary" change.

- All projects depend upon somebody to provide for the necessary infrastructure and help overcome roadblocks in setting this up. A project manager is responsible for managing the dependencies, but there will always be situations when somebody you are depending upon does not have your task at the top of his or her priority list. Project managers are often made to run around in circles and left to fend for themselves. One must know when to blow the whistle and ask for help.

Too many project managers feel it is a failure on their part to escalate things to the leaders. It is not so. A certified Project Management Professional (PMP) knows better than most other project managers that he or she must be "proactive" and not escalate unnecessarily. That does not mean he or she has to do everything alone. If there are some things that the leaders must do-a project manager must tell them that-often in a "no-nonsense" fashion. If project managers don't get leaders to "act" for their projects, he or she will have failed in protecting professional responsibility toward the projects.

Get the Right Level of Authority

A project manager is responsible and accountable for the success of the projects. But responsibility without authority calls for super-human qualities from the project manager and is unfair. It is a project manager's professional duty to ensure that he or she is empowered enough to carry out all duties. If this is not automatically bestowed upon him or her, he or she must ask for it.

Here are some examples of empowerment a project manager absolutely must have:

- The authority to insist upon a clear charter and to seek clarifications from time to time.

- The authority to refuse a change without a compromise on either the cost, scope, time, or quality variables.

- The signing authority to procure the required resources for a project within the approved budget. This includes the authority to select the project team.

- Authority to ask for detailed project plans from all contributing teams and to be able to influence the plans.

- The authority to ask for the metrics necessary to keep projects on track from the project team and functional managers.

- Access to senior management of the project for any escalations.

A project led by a dummy project manager or a project manager just doing coordination work is doomed to fail. I therefore believe that a project manager is ethically bound to ask for such authority before signing up for a project.

Accepting and Assigning Responsibility

A project manager is ethically bound to accept responsibility for a project's success or failure. It does not mean that he or she "alone" is responsible. To be accountable and to be able to hold others accountable is a very important aspect of influencing project outcomes and learning from them and it is the project manager's job to assign responsibility where necessary.

A project manager has the responsibility to look for the real root causes and try to resolve them. This requires open, frank and honest communication and a project manager must promote that culture. He or she must accept responsibility as well as be prepared to assign responsibility without fear or favour. For example, if senior management or sponsors needed to do something differently, they must be told so as clearly as possible.

Project progress or closure meetings often beat around the bush without ever getting to the point. Nobody wants to end the project on a sour note, so the discussions will be sugar-coated and covered in a nostalgic hue. It is unfortunate, and a loss of a valuable learning opportunity.

Use the "Right" Process

I often come across project managers; even PMPs who say that what they learn is fine in theory, but never works in practice. Not only do I believe it can work in practice, it is indeed the project manager's responsibility to the profession to make it work.

For example, if the risk management practices in a project are missing or inadequate, the project manager must insist on bringing in the best process. If change management is weak, he or she must bring his or her knowledge to bear in introducing this to the team.

There will always be resistance to change. "We have always done it this way," "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" are some comments that you will encounter. But if you are committed to the success of your project and you think you know something that will make things better, you should show the courage of conviction to bring about the change. It might require you to ruffle feathers, appear like a lone crusader at times, but if you have changed something for the better in the end, it will all be worth it. And you may very well end up with a halo around your head as the pioneer who brought good things to your organization.

Not pulling their weight putting good processes in place is tantamount to shirking responsibility. I consider it as a project manager not doing his or her job.

Help Other Project Managers

This is indeed one of the responsibilities mentioned in the PMI code of ethics. Unfortunately for most people, this is often confined to "gathering the requisite number of PDUs."

Project management is an important occupation that contributes to building organizations, communities, and nations. Helping the profession is not just a noble cause that must be done in spare time, but an ethical responsibility that a project manager must strongly identify with.

Here are some ways a project manager can help fellow project managers:

- Be a mentor to budding project managers by doing any or all of the following:

○ Going "out-of-the-way" to help them acquire the skills and the methods that they need in their profession.

○ Explaining to them the importance of certification, studying and "networking‥

○ Acting as a consultant when they face problems and need advice.

- Participate in voluntary activities involving practicing or budding project managers.

- Help espouse the cause of project management in their organizations in any or all of the following ways.

○ Building good job profiles and career progression tracks for project managers.

○ Selling the value of project management in whatever way they can.

Helping the profession grow will help you grow in stature as well. If you haven't done it yet, try it-you may be surprised at the return on investment (ROI).

Conclusions

Some of the specific recommendations stated here may be up for debate. But it is my belief that they represent ethical dilemmas as much as they do management trade-offs. A project manager true to his or her profession has to be capable of making the "right" choices in these situations, rather than simply plump for the most "convenient" or non-controversial option. And the right choice has to be dictated by the professional knowledge that the project manager has acquired.

If the project managershirks this responsibility, it would be a disservice to the profession and the project management fraternity. Giving more specific guidance about project management best practices and trying to make it a part of a project manager's DNA is very important.

© 2008, Sandeep Shouche
Originally published as a part of 2008 PMI Global Congress Proceedings - Sydney, Australia

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8 Types of Ethical Dilemmas in Project Management

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Project management professionals are expected to always act in the best interests of their projects. But because managing projects is not a black-and-white endeavor, project managers are constantly faced with making ethical decisions about their projects. This paper examines some of the ethical dilemmas that project managers commonly encounter.

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An example of an ethical dilemma is the Ford Pinto case, where Ford discovered a design flaw that could cause the fuel tank to explode in rear-end collisions. Fixing it would cost about $11 per car, but the company chose not to in order to save money, leading to fatal accidents. This dilemma shows the conflict between protecting public safety and reducing corporate costs.

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One evening in the mid-1960s, Arjay Miller was driving home from his office in Dearborn, Michigan, in the four-door Lincoln Continental that went with his job as president of the Ford Motor Company. On a crowded highway, another car struck his from the rear. The Continental spun around and burst into flames. Because he was wearing a shoulder-strap seat belt, Miller was unharmed by the crash, and because his doors didn't jam he escaped the gasoline-drenched, flaming wreck. But the accident made a vivid impression on him. Several months later, on July 15, 1965, he recounted it to a U.S. Senate subcommittee that was hearing testimony on auto safety legislation. "I still have burning in my mind the image of that gas tank on fire," Miller said. He went on to express an almost passionate interest in controlling fuel-fed fires in cars that crash or roll over. He spoke with excitement about the fabric gas tank Ford was testing at that very moment. "If it proves out," he promised the senators, it will be a feature you will see in our standard cars."

Almost seven years after Miller's testimony, a woman, whom for legal reasons we will call Sandra Gillespie, pulled onto a Minneapolis highway in her new Ford Pinto. Riding with her was a young boy, whom we'll call Robbie Carlton. As she entered a merge lane, Sandra Gillespie's car stalled. Another car rear-ended hers at an impact speed of 28 miles per hour. The Pinto's gas tank ruptured. Vapors from it mixed quickly with the air in the passenger compartment. A spark ignited the mixture and the car exploded in a ball of fire. Sandra died in agony a few hours later in an emergency hospital. Her passenger, 13-year-old Robbie Carlton, is still alive; he has just come home from another futile operation aimed at grafting a new ear and nose from skin on the few unscarred portions of his badly burned body. (This accident is real; the details are from police reports.)

Why did Sandra Gillespie's Ford Pinto catch fire so easily, seven years after Ford's Arjay Miller made his apparently sincere pronouncements-the same seven years that brought more safety improvements to cars than any other period in automotive history? An extensive investigation by Mother Jones over the past six months has found these answers:

Fighting strong competition from Volkswagen for the lucrative small-car market, the Ford Motor Company rushed the Pinto into production in much less than the usual time.

Ford engineers discovered in pre-production crash tests that rear-end collisions would rupture the Pinto's fuel system extremely easily.

Because assembly-line machinery was already tooled when engineers found this defect, top Ford officials decided to manufacture the car anyway-exploding gas tank and all-even though Ford owned the patent on a much safer gas tank.

For more than eight years afterwards, Ford successfully lobbied, with extraordinary vigor and some blatant lies, against a key government safety standard that would have forced the company to change the Pinto's fire-prone gas tank.
By conservative estimates Pinto crashes have caused 500 burn deaths to people who would not have been seriously injured if the car had not burst into flames. The figure could be as high as 900. Burning Pintos have become such an embarrassment to Ford that its advertising agency, J. Walter Thompson, dropped a line from the end of a radio spot that read "Pinto leaves you with that warm feeling."

Ford knows the Pinto is a firetrap, yet it has paid out millions to settle damage suits out of court, and it is prepared to spend millions more lobbying against safety standards. With a half million cars rolling off the assembly lines each year, Pinto is the biggest-selling subcompact in America, and the company's operating profit on the car is fantastic. Finally, in 1977, new Pinto models have incorporated a few minor alterations necessary to meet that federal standard Ford managed to hold off for eight years. Why did the company delay so long in making these minimal, inexpensive improvements?

Ford waited eight years because its internal "cost-benefit analysis," which places a dollar value on human life, said it wasn't profitable to make the changes sooner.
Before we get to the question of how much Ford thinks your life is worth, let's trace the history of the death trap itself. Although this particular story is about the Pinto, the way in which Ford made its decision is typical of the U.S. auto industry generally. There are plenty of similar stories about other cars made by other companies. But this case is the worst of them all.

The next time you drive behind a Pinto (with over two million of them on the road, you shouldn't have much trouble finding one), take a look at the rear end. That long silvery object hanging down under the bumper is the gas tank. The tank begins about six inches forward of the bumper. In late models the bumper is designed to withstand a collision of only about five miles per hour. Earlier bumpers may as well not have been on the car for all the protection they offered the gas tank.

Mother Jones has studied hundreds of reports and documents on rear-end collisions involving Pintos. These reports conclusively reveal that if you ran into that Pinto you were following at over 30 miles per hour, the rear end of the car would buckle like an accordion, right up to the back seat. The tube leading to the gas-tank cap would be ripped away from the tank itself, and gas would immediately begin sloshing onto the road around the car. The buckled gas tank would be jammed up against the differential housing (that big bulge in the middle of your rear axle), which contains four sharp, protruding bolts likely to gash holes in the tank and spill still more gas. Now all you need is a spark from a cigarette, ignition, or scraping metal, and both cars would be engulfed in flames. If you gave that Pinto a really good whack-say, at 40 mph-chances are excellent that its doors would jam and you would have to stand by and watch its trapped passengers burn to death.

This scenario is no news to Ford. Internal company documents in our possession show that Ford has crash-tested the Pinto at a top-secret site more than 40 times and that every test made at over 25 mph without special structural alteration of the car has resulted in a ruptured fuel tank. Despite this, Ford officials denied under oath having crash-tested the Pinto.

Eleven of these tests, averaging a 31-mph impact speed, came before Pintos started rolling out of the factories. Only three cars passed the test with unbroken fuel tanks. In one of them an inexpensive light-weight plastic baffle was placed between the front of the gas tank and the differential housing, so those four bolts would not perforate the tank. (Don't forget about that little piece of plastic, which costs one dollar and weighs one pound. It plays an important role in our story later on.) In another successful test, a piece of steel was placed between the tank and the bumper. In the third test car the gas tank was lined with a rubber bladder. But none of these protective alterations was used in the mass-produced Pinto.

In pre-production planning, engineers seriously considered using in the Pinto the same kind of gas tank Ford uses in the Capri. The Capri tank rides over the rear axle and differential housing. It has been so successful in over 50 crash tests that Ford used it in its Experimental Safety Vehicle, which withstood rear-end impacts of 60 mph. So why wasn't the Capri tank used in the Pinto? Or, why wasn't that plastic baffle placed between the tank and the axle-something that would have saved the life of Sandra Gillespie and hundreds like her? Why was a car known to be a serious fire hazard deliberately released to production in August of 1970?

Whether Ford should manufacture subcompacts at all was the subject of a bitter two-year debate at the company's Dearborn headquarters. The principals in this corporate struggle were the then-president Semon "Bunky" Knudsen, whom Henry Ford II had hired away from General Motors, and Lee Iacocca, a spunky Young Turk who had risen fast within the company on the enormous success of the Mustang. Iacocca argued forcefully that Volkswagen and the Japanese were going to capture the entire American subcompact market unless Ford put out its own alternative to the VW Beetle. Bunky Knudsen said, in effect: let them have the small-car market; Ford makes good money on medium and large models. But he lost the battle and later resigned. Iacocca became president and almost immediately began a rush program to produce the Pinto.

Like the Mustang, the Pinto became known in the company as "Lee's car." Lee Iococca wanted that little car in the showrooms of America with the 1971 models. So he ordered his engineering vice president, Bob Alexander, to oversee what was probably the shortest production planning period in modern automotive history. The normal time span from conception to production of a new car model is about 43 months. The Pinto schedule was set at just under 25.

A quick glance at the bar chart below will show you what that speed-up meant. Design, styling, product planning,advance engineering and quality assurance all have flexible time frames, and engineers can pretty much carry these on simultaneously. Tooling, on the other hand, has a fixed time frame of about 18 months. Normally, an auto company doesn't begin tooling until the other processes are almost over: you don't want to make the machines that stamp and press and grind metal into the shape of car parts until you know all those parts will work well together. But Iacocca's speed-up meant Pinto tooling went on at the same time as product development. So when crash tests revealed a serious defect in the gas tank, it was too late. The tooling was well under way.

When it was discovered the gas tank was unsafe, did anyone go to Iacocca and tell him? "Hell no," replied an engineer who worked on the Pinto, a high company official for many years, who, unlike several others at Ford, maintains a necessarily clandestine concern for safety. "That person would have been fired. Safety wasn't a popular subject around Ford in those days. With Lee it was taboo. Whenever a problem was raised that meant a delay on the Pinto, Lee would chomp on his cigar, look out the window and say 'Read the product objectives and get back to work.'"

The product objectives are clearly stated in the Pinto "green book." This is a thick, top-secret manual in green covers containing a step-by-step production plan for the model, detailing the metallurgy, weight, strength and quality of every part in the car. The product objectives for the Pinto are repeated in an article by Ford executive F.G. Olsen published by the Society of Automotive Engineers. He lists these product objectives as follows:

1. TRUE SUBCOMPACT

Size

Weight
2. LOW COST OF OWNERSHIP

Initial price

Fuel consumption

Reliability

Serviceability
3. CLEAR PRODUCT SUPERIORITY

Appearance

Comfort

Features

Ride and Handling

Performance
Safety, you will notice, is not there. It is not mentioned in the entire article. As Lee Iacocca was fond of saying, "Safety doesn't sell."

Heightening the anti-safety pressure on Pinto engineers was an important goal set by Iacocca known as "the limits of 2,000." The Pinto was not to weigh an ounce over 2,000 pounds and not to cost a cent over $2,000. "Iacocca enforced these limits with an iron hand," recalls the engineer quoted earlier. So, even when a crash test showed that that one-pound, one-dollar piece of plastic stopped the puncture of the gas tank, it was thrown out as extra cost and extra weight.

People shopping for subcompacts are watching every dollar. "You have to keep in mind," the engineer explained, "that the price elasticity on these subcompacts is extremely tight. You can price yourself right out of the market by adding $25 to the production cost of the model. And nobody understands that better than Iacocca."

Dr. Leslie Ball, the retired safety chief for the NASA manned space program and a founder of the International Society of Reliability Engineers, recently made a careful study of the Pinto. "The release to production of the Pinto was the most reprehensible decision in the history of American engineering," he said. Ball can name more than 40 European and Japanese models in the Pinto price and weight range wit h safer gas-tank positioning. Ironically, many of them, like the Ford Capri, contain a "saddle-type" gas tank riding over the back axle. The patent on the saddle-type tank is owned by the Ford Motor Co.

Los Angeles auto safety expert Byron Bloch has made an in-depth study of the Pinto fuel system. "It's a catastrophic blunder," he says. "Ford made an extremely irresponsible decision when they placed such a weak tank in such a ridiculous location in such a soft rear end. It's almost designed to blow up-premeditated."

A Ford engineer, who doesn't want his name used, comments: "This company is run by salesmen, not engineers; so the priority is styling, not safety." He goes on to tell a story about gas-tank safety at Ford:

Lou Tubben is one of the most popular engineers at Ford. He's a friendly, outgoing guy with a genuine concern for safety. By 1971 he had grown so concerned about gas-tank integrity that he asked his boss if he could prepare a presentation on safer tank design. Tubben and his boss had both worked on the Pinto and shared a concern for its safety. His boss gave him the go-ahead, scheduled a date for the presentation and invited all company engineers and key production planning personnel. When time came for the meeting, a grand total of two people showed up-Lou Tubben and his boss.

"So you see," continued the anonymous Ford engineer ironically, "there are a few of us here at Ford who are concerned about fire safety." He adds: "They are mostly engineers who have to study a lot of accident reports and look at pictures of burned people. But we don't talk about it much. It isn't a popular subject. I've never seen safety on the agenda of a product meeting and, except for a brief period in 1956, I can't remember seeing the word safety in an advertisement. I really don't think the company wants American consumers to start thinking too much about safety-for fear they might demand it, I suppose."

Asked about the Pinto gas tank, another Ford engineer admitted: "That's all true. But you miss the point entirely. You see, safety isn't the issue, trunk space is. You have no idea how stiff the competition is over trunk space. Do you realize that if we put a Capri-type tank in the Pinto you could only get one set of golf clubs in the trunk?"

Blame for Sandra Gillespie's death, Robbie Carlton's unrecognizable face and all the other injuries and deaths in Pintos since 1970 does not rest on the shoulders of Lee Iacocca alone. For, while he and his associates fought their battle against a safer Pinto in Dearborn, a larger war against safer cars raged in Washington. One skirmish in that war involved Ford's successful eight-year lobbying effort against Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 301, the rear-end provisions of which would have forced Ford to redesign the Pinto.

But first some background:

During the early '60s, auto safety legislation became the bête-noire of American big business. The auto industry was the last great unregulated business, and if it couldn't reverse the tide of government regulation, the reasoning went, no one could.

People who know him cannot remember Henry Ford II taking a stronger stand than the one he took against the regulation of safety design. He spent weeks in Washington calling on members of Congress, holding press conferences and recruiting business cronies like W.B. Murphy of Campbell's Soup to join the anti-regulation battle. Displaying the sophistication for which today's American corporate leaders will be remembered, Murphy publicly called auto safety "a hula hoop, a fad that will pass." He was speaking to a special luncheon of the Business Council, an organization of 100 chief executives who gather periodically in Washington to provide "advice" and "counsel" to government. The target of their wrath in this instance was the Motor Vehicle Safety Bills introduced in both houses of Congress, largely in response to Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed.

By 1965, most pundits and lobbyists saw the handwriting on the wall and prepared to accept government "meddling" in the last bastion of free enterprise. Not Henry. With bulldog tenacity, he held out for defeat of the legislation to the very end, loyal to his grandfather's invention and to the company that makes it. But the Safety Act passed the House and Senate unanimously, and was signed into law by Lyndon Johnson in 1966.

While lobbying for and against legislation is pretty much a process of high-level back-slapping, press-conferencing and speech-making, fighting a regulatory agency is a much subtler matter. Henry headed home to lick his wounds in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and a planeload of the Ford Motor Company's best brains flew to Washington to start the "education" of the new federal auto safety bureaucrats.

Their job was to implant the official industry ideology in the minds of the new officials regulating auto safety. Briefly summarized, that ideology states that auto accidents are caused not by cars, but by 1) people and 2) highway conditions.

This philosophy is rather like blaming a robbery on the victim. Well, what did you expect? You were carrying money, weren't you? It is an extraordinary experience to hear automotive "safety engineers" talk for hours without ever mentioning cars. They will advocate spending billions educating youngsters, punishing drunks and redesigning street signs. Listening to them, you can momentarily begin to think that it is easier to control 100 million drivers than a handful of manufacturers. They show movies about guardrail design and advocate the clear-cutting of trees 100 feet back from every highway in the nation. If a car is unsafe, they argue, it is because its owner doesn't properly drive it. Or, perhaps, maintain it.

In light of an annual death rate approaching 50,000, they are forced to admit that driving is hazardous. But the car is, in the words of Arjay Miller, "the safest link in the safety chain."

Before the Ford experts left Washington to return to drafting tables in Dearborn they did one other thing. They managed to informally reach an agreement with the major public servants who would be making auto safety decisions. This agreement was that "cost-benefit" would be an acceptable mode of analysis by Detroit and its new regulators. And, as we shall see, cost-benefit analysis quickly became the basis of Ford's argument against safer car design.

Cost-benefit analysis was used only occasionally in government until President Kennedy appointed Ford Motor Company president Robert McNamara to be Secretary of Defense. McNamara, originally an accountant, preached cost-benefit with all the force of a Biblical zealot. Stated in its simplest terms, cost-benefit analysis says that if the cost is greater than the benefit, the project is not worth it-no matter what the benefit. Examine the cost of every action, decision, contract part or change, the doctrine says, then carefully evaluate the benefits (in dollars) to be certain that they exceed the cost before you begin a program or-and this is the crucial part for our story-pass a regulation.

As a management tool in a business in which profits matter over everything else, cost-benefit analysis makes a certain amount of sense. Serious problems come, however, when public officials who ought to have more than corporate profits at heart apply cost-benefit analysis to every conceivable decision. The inevitable result is that they must place a dollar value on human life.

Ever wonder what your life is worth in dollars? Perhaps $10 million? Ford has a better idea: $200,000.

Remember, Ford had gotten the federal regulators to agree to talk auto safety in terms of cost-benefit analysis. But in order to be able to argue that various safety costs were greater than their benefits, Ford needed to have a dollar value figure for the "benefit." Rather than be so uncouth as to come up with such a price tag itself, the auto industry pressured the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to do so. And in a 1972 report the agency decided a human life was worth $200,725. Inflationary forces have recently pushed the figure up to $278,000.

Furnished with this useful tool, Ford immediately went to work using it to prove why various safety improvements were too expensive to make.

Nowhere did the company argue harder that it should make no changes than in the area of rupture-prone fuel tanks. Not long after the government arrived at the $200,725-per-life figure, it surfaced, rounded off to a cleaner $200,000, in an internal Ford memorandum. This cost-benefit analysis argued that Ford should not make an $11-per-car improvement that would prevent 180 fiery deaths a year. (This minor change would have prevented gas tanks from breaking so easily both in rear-end collisions, like Sandra Gillespie's, and in rollover accidents, where the same thing tends to happen.)

Ford's cost-benefit table is buried in a seven-page company memorandum entitled "Fatalities Associated with Crash-Induced Fuel Leakage and Fires." The memo argues that there is no financial benefit in complying with proposed safety standards that would admittedly result in fewer auto fires, fewer burn deaths and fewer burn injuries. Naturally, memoranda that speak so casually of "burn deaths" and "burn injuries" are not released to the public. They are very effective, however, with Department of Transportation officials indoctrinated in McNamarian cost-benefit analysis.

All Ford had to do was convince men like John Volpe, Claude Brinegar and William Coleman (successive Secretaries of Transportation during the Nixon-Ford years) that certain safety standards would add so much to the price of cars that fewer people would buy them. This could damage the auto industry, which was still believed to be the bulwark of the American economy. "Compliance to these standards," Henry Ford II prophesied at more than one press conference, "will shut down the industry."

The Nixon Transportation Secretaries were the kind of regulatory officials big business dreams of. They understood and loved capitalism and thought like businessmen. Yet, best of all, they came into office uninformed on technical automotive matters. And you could talk "burn injuries" and "burn deaths" with these guys, and they didn't seem to envision children crying at funerals and people hiding in their homes with melted faces. Their minds appeared to have leapt right to the bottom line-more safety meant higher prices, higher prices meant lower sales and lower sales meant lower profits.

So when J. C. Echold, Director of Automotive Safety (which means chief anti-safety lobbyist) for Ford, wrote to the Department of Transportation-which he still does frequently, at great length-he felt secure attaching a memorandum that in effect says it is acceptable to kill 180 people and burn another 180 every year, even though we have the technology that could save their lives for $11 a car.

Furthermore, Echold attached this memo, confident, evidently, that the Secretary would question neither his low death/injury statistics nor his high cost estimates. But it turns out, on closer examination, that both these findings were misleading.

First, note that Ford's table shows an equal number of burn deaths and burn injuries. This is false. All independent experts estimate that for each person who dies by an auto fire, many more are left with charred hands, faces and limbs. Andrew McGuire of the Northern California Burn Center estimates the ratio of burn injuries to deaths at ten to one instead of the one to one Ford shows here. Even though Ford values a burn at only a piddling $67,000 instead of the $200,000 price of a life, the true ratio obviously throws the company's calculations way off.

The other side of the equation, the alleged $11 cost of a fire-prevention device, is also a misleading estimation. One document that was not sent to Washington by Ford was a "Confidential" cost analysis Mother Jones has managed to obtain, showing that crash fires could be largely prevented for considerably less than $11 a car. The cheapest method involves placing a heavy rubber bladder inside the gas tank to keep the fuel from spilling if the tank ruptures. Goodyear had developed the bladder and had demonstrated it to the automotive industry. We have in our possession crash-test reports showing that the Goodyear bladder worked well. On December 2, 1970 ( two years before Echold sent his cost-benefit memo to Washington), Ford Motor Company ran a rear-end crash test on a car with the rubber bladder in the gas tank. The tank ruptured, but no fuel leaked. On January 15, 1971, Ford again tested the bladder and again it worked. The total purchase and installation cost of the bladder would have been $5.08 per car. That $5.08 could have saved the lives of Sandra Gillespie and several hundred others.

When a federal regulatory agency like the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) decides to issue a new standard, the law usually requires it to invite all interested parties to respond before the standard is enforced-a reasonable enough custom on the surface. However, the auto industry has taken advantage of this process and has used it to delay lifesaving emission and safety standards for years. In the case of the standard that would have corrected that fragile Pinto fuel tank, the delay was for an incredible eight years.

The particular regulation involved here was Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 301. Ford picked portions of Standard 301 for strong opposition way back in 1968 when the Pinto was still in the blueprint stage. The intent of 301, and the 300 series that followed it, was to protect drivers and passengers after a crash occurs. Without question the worst post-crash hazard is fire. So Standard 301 originally proposed that all cars should be able to withstand a fixed barrier impact of 20 mph (that is, running into a wall at that speed) without losing fuel.

When the standard was proposed, Ford engineers pulled their crash-test results out of their files. The front ends of most cars were no problem-with minor alterations they could stand the impact without losing fuel. "We were already working on the front end," Ford engineer Dick Kimble admitted. "We knew we could meet the test on the front end." But with the Pinto particularly, a 20-mph rear-end standard meant redesigning the entire rear end of the car. With the Pinto scheduled for production in August of 1970, and with $200 million worth of tools in place, adoption of this standard would have created a minor financial disaster. So Standard 301 was targeted for delay, and, with some assistance from its industry associates, Ford succeeded beyond its wildest expectations: the standard was not adopted until the 1977 model year. Here is how it happened:

There are several main techniques in the art of combating a government safety standard: a) make your arguments in succession, so the feds can be working on disproving only one at a time; b) claim that the real problem is not X but Y (we already saw one instance of this in "the problem is not cars but people"); c) no matter how ridiculous each argument is, accompany it with thousands of pages of highly technical assertions it will take the government months or, preferably, years to test. Ford's large and active Washington office brought these techniques to new heights and became the envy of the lobbyists' trade.

The Ford people started arguing against Standard 301 way back in 1968 with a strong attack of technique b). Fire, they said, was not the real problem. Sure, cars catch fire and people burn occasionally. But statistically auto fires are such a minor problem that NHTSA should really concern itself with other matters.

Strange as it may seem, the Department of Transportation (NHTSA's parent agency) didn't know whether or not this was true. So it contracted with several independent research groups to study auto fires. The studies took months, which was just what Ford wanted.

The completed studies, however, showed auto fires to be more of a problem than Transportation officials ever dreamed of. Robert Nathan and Associates, a Washington research firm, found that 400,000 cars were burning up every year, burning more than 3,000 people to death. Furthermore, auto fires were increasing five times as fast as building fires. Another study showed that 35 per cent of all fire deaths in the U.S. occurred in automobiles. Forty per cent of all fire department calls in the 1960s were to vehicle fires-a public cost of $350 million a year, a figure that, incidentally, never shows up in cost-benefit analyses.

Another study was done by the Highway Traffic Research Institute in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a safety think-tank funded primarily by the auto industry (the giveaway there is the words "highway traffic" rather than "automobile" in the group's name). It concluded that 40 per cent of the lives lost in fuel-fed fires could be saved if the manufacturers complied with proposed Standard 301. Finally, a third report was prepared for NHTSA by consultant Eugene Trisko entitled "A National Survey of Motor Vehicle Fires." His report indicates that the Ford Motor Company makes 24 per cent of the cars on the American road, yet these cars account for 42 per cent of the collision-ruptured fuel tanks.

Ford lobbyists then used technique a)-bringing up a new argument. Their line then became: yes, perhaps burn accidents do happen, but rear-end collisions are relatively rare (note the echo of technique b) here as well). Thus Standard 301 was not needed. This set the NHTSA off on a new round of analyzing accident reports. The government's findings finally were that rear-end collisions were seven and a half times more likely to result in fuel spills than were front-end collisions. So much for that argument. By now it was 1972; NHTSA had been researching and analyzing for four years to answer Ford's objections. During that time, nearly 9,000 people burned to death in flaming wrecks. Tens of thousands more were badly burned and scarred for life. And the four-year delay meant that well over 10 million new unsafe vehicles went on the road, vehicles that will be crashing, leaking fuel and incinerating people well into the 1980s.

Ford now had to enter its third round of battling the new regulations. On the "the problem is not X but Y" principle, the company had to look around for something new to get itself off the hook. One might have thought that, faced with all the latest statistics on the horrifying number of deaths in flaming accidents, Ford would find the task difficult. But the company's rhetoric was brilliant. The problem was not burns, but...impact! Most of the people killed in these fiery accidents, claimed Ford, would have died whether the car burned or not. They were killed by the kinetic force of the impact, not the fire.

And so once again, as in some giant underwater tennis game, the ball bounced into the government's court and the absurdly pro-industry NHTSA began another slow-motion response. Once again it began a time-consuming round of test crashes and embarked on a study of accidents. The latter, however, revealed that a large and growing number of corpses taken from burned cars involved in rear-end crashes contained no cuts, bruises or broken bones. They clearly would have survived the accident unharmed if the cars had not caught fire. This pattern was confirmed in careful rear-end crash tests performed by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. A University of Miami study found an inordinate number of Pintos burning on rear-end impact and concluded that this demonstrated "a clear and present hazard to all Pinto owners."

Pressure on NHTSA from Ralph Nader and consumer groups began mounting. The industry-agency collusion was so obvious that Senator Joseph Montoya (D-N.M.) introduced legislation about Standard 301. NHTSA waffled some more and again announced its intentions to promulgate a rear-end collision standard.

Waiting, as it normally does, until the last day allowed for response, Ford filed with NHTSA a gargantuan batch of letters, studies and charts now arguing that the federal testing criteria were unfair. Ford also argued that design changes required to meet the standard would take 43 months, which seemed like a rather long time in light of the fact that the entire Pinto was designed in about two years. Specifically, new complaints about the standard involved the weight of the test vehicle, whether or not the brakes should be engaged at the moment of impact and the claim that the standard should only apply to cars, not trucks or buses. Perhaps the most amusing argument was that the engine should not be idling during crash tests, the rationale being that an idling engine meant that the gas tank had to contain gasoline and that the hot lights needed to film the crash might ignite the gasoline and cause a fire.

Some of these complaints were accepted, others rejected. But they all required examination and testing by a weak-kneed NHTSA, meaning more of those 18-month studies the industry loves so much. So the complaints served their real purpose-delay; all told, an eight-year delay, while Ford manufactured more than three million profitable, dangerously incendiary Pintos. To justify this delay, Henry Ford II called more press conferences to predict the demise of American civilization. "If we can't meet the standards when they are published," he warned, "we will have to close down. And if we have to close down some production because we don't meet standards we're in for real trouble in this country."

While government bureaucrats dragged their feet on lifesaving Standard 301, a different kind of expert was taking a close look at the Pinto-the "recon man." "Recon" stands for reconstruction; recon men reconstruct accidents for police departments, insurance companies and lawyers who want to know exactly who or what caused an accident. It didn't take many rear-end Pinto accidents to demonstrate the weakness of the car. Recon men began encouraging lawyers to look beyond one driver or another to the manufacturer in their search for fault, particularly in the growing number of accidents where passengers were uninjured by collision but were badly burned by fire.

Pinto lawsuits began mounting fast against Ford. Says John Versace, executive safety engineer at Ford's Safety Research Center, "Ulcers are running pretty high among the engineers who worked on the Pinto. Every lawyer in the country seems to want to take their depositions." (The Safety Research Center is an impressive glass and concrete building standing by itself about a mile from Ford World Headquarters in Dearborn. Looking at it, one imagines its large staff protects consumers from burned and broken limbs. Not so. The Center is the technical support arm of Jack Echold's 14-person anti-regulatory lobbying team in World Headquarters.)

When the Pinto liability suits began, Ford strategy was to go to a jury. Confident it could hide the Pinto crash tests, Ford thought that juries of solid American registered voters would buy the industry doctrine that drivers, not cars, cause accidents. It didn't work. It seems that juries are much quicker to see the truth than bureaucracies, a fact that gives one confidence in democracy. Juries began ruling against the company, granting million-dollar awards to plaintiffs.

"We'll never go to a jury again," says Al Stechter in Ford's Washington office. "Not in a fire case. Juries are just too sentimental. They see those charred remains and forget the evidence. No sir, we'll settle."

Settlement involves less cash, smaller legal fees and less publicity, but it is an indication of the weakness of their case. Nevertheless, Ford has been settling when it is clear that the company can't pin the blame on the driver of the other car. But, since the company carries $2 million deductible product-liability insurance, these settlements have a direct impact on the bottom line. They must therefore be considered a factor in determining the net operating profit on the Pinto. It's impossible to get a straight answer from Ford on the profitability of the Pinto and the impact of lawsuit settlements on it-even when you have a curious and mildly irate shareholder call to inquire, as we did. However, financial officer Charles Matthews did admit that the company establishes a reserve for large dollar settlements. He would not divulge the amount of the reserve and had no explanation for its absence from the annual report.

Until recently, it was clear that, whatever the cost of these settlements, it was not enough to seriously cut into the Pinto's enormous profits. The cost of retooling Pinto assembly lines and of equipping each car with a safety gadget like that $5.08 Goodyear bladder was, company accountants calculated, greater than that of paying out millions to survivors like Robbie Carlton or to widows and widowers of victims like Sandra Gillespie. The bottom line ruled, and inflammable Pintos kept rolling out of the factories.

In 1977, however, an incredibly sluggish government has at last instituted Standard 301. Now Pintos will have to have rupture-proof gas tanks. Or will they?

To everyone's surprise, the 1977 Pinto recently passed a rear-end crash test in Phoenix, Arizona, for NHTSA. The agency was so convinced the Pinto would fail that it was the first car tested. Amazingly, it did not burst into flame.

"We have had so many Ford failures in the past," explained agency engineer Tom Grubbs, "I felt sure the Pinto would fail."

How did it pass?

Remember that one-dollar, one-pound plastic baffle that was on one of the three modified Pintos that passed the pre-production crash tests nearly ten years ago? Well, it is a standard feature on the 1977 Pinto. In the Phoenix test it protected the gas tank from being perforated by those four bolts on the differential housing.

We asked Grubbs if he noticed any other substantial alterations in the rear-end structure of the car. "No," he replied, "the [plastic baffle] seems to be the only noticeable change over the 1976 model."

But was it? What Tom Grubbs and the Department of Transportation didn't know when they tested the car was that it was manufactured in St. Thomas, Ontario. Ontario? The significance of that becomes clear when you learn that Canada has for years had extremely strict rear-end collision standards.

Tom Irwin is the business manager of Charlie Rossi Ford, the Scottsdale, Arizona, dealership that sold the Pinto to Tom Grubbs. He refused to explain why he was selling Fords made in Canada when there is a huge Pinto assembly plant much closer by in California. "I know why you're asking that question, and I'm not going to answer it," he blurted out. "You'll have to ask the company."

But Ford's regional office in Phoenix has "no explanation" for the presence of Canadian cars in their local dealerships. Farther up the line in Dearborn, Ford people claim there is absolutely no difference between American and Canadian Pintos. They say cars are shipped back and forth across the border as a matter of course. But they were hard pressed to explain why some Canadian Pintos were shipped all the way to Scottsdale, Arizona. Significantly, one engineer at the St. Thomas plant did admit that the existence of strict rear-end collision standards in Canada "might encourage us to pay a little more attention to quality control on that part of the car."

The Department of Transportation is considering buying an American Pinto and running the test again. For now, it will only say that the situation is under investigation.

Whether the new American Pinto fails or passes the test, Standard 301 will never force the company to test or recall the more than two million pre-1977 Pintos still on the highway. Seventy or more people will burn to death in those cars every year for many years to come. If the past is any indication, Ford will continue to accept the deaths.

According to safety expert Byron Bloch, the older cars could quite easily be retrofitted with gas tanks containing fuel cells. "These improved tanks would add at least 10 mph improved safety performance to the rear end," he estimated, "but it would cost Ford $20 to $30 a car, so they won't do it unless they are forced to." Dr. Kenneth Saczalski, safety engineer with the Office of Naval Research in Washington, agrees. "The Defense Department has developed virtually fail-safe fuel systems and retrofitted them into existing vehicles. We have shown them to the auto industry and they have ignored them."

Unfortunately, the Pinto is not an isolated case of corporate malpractice in the auto industry. Neither is Ford a lone sinner. There probably isn't a car on the road without a safety hazard known to its manufacturer. And though Ford may have the best auto lobbyists in Washington, it is not alone. The anti-emission control lobby and the anti-safety lobby usually work in chorus form, presenting a well-harmonized message from the country's richest industry, spoken through the voices of individual companies-the Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Association, the Business Council and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Furthermore, cost-valuing human life is not used by Ford alone. Ford was just the only company careless enough to let such an embarrassing calculation slip into public records. The process of willfully trading lives for profits is built into corporate capitalism. Commodore Vanderbilt publicly scorned George Westinghouse and his "foolish" air brakes while people died by the hundreds in accidents on Vanderbilt's railroads.

The original draft of the Motor Vehicle Safety Act provided for criminal sanction against a manufacturer who willfully placed an unsafe car on the market. Early in the proceedings the auto industry lobbied the provision out of the bill. Since then, there have been those damage settlements, of course, but the only government punishment meted out to auto companies for noncompliance to standards has been a minuscule fine, usually $5,000 to $10,000. One wonders how long the Ford Motor Company would continue to market lethal cars were Henry Ford II and Lee Iacocca serving 20-year terms in Leavenworth for consumer homicide.

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One evening in the mid-1960s, Arjay Miller was driving home from his office in Dearborn, Michigan, in the four-door Lincoln Continental that went with his job as president of the Ford Motor Company. On a crowded highway, another car struck his from the rear. The Continental spun around and burst into flames.

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As Earth's climate continues to deteriorate, people are trying to slow the advancement of climate change. One of the ways they can do this is geoengineering - engineering the Earth's climate to change global warming. If this were to happen, governments would have to consider where these technologies would be implemented and who gets the side effects of them. While it could have many positive side effects, it would also create floods in some places, droughts in others, and possibly acid rain. This raises the ethical question of if it is more important to save the suffering of a few people (because of the consequences of geoengineering) or continue to let climate change destroy our planet.

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Is Climate Engineering Viable? And if it’s Viable, is it Ethical?

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Shivani Dharanipragada ’25 learned about technological innovations in geoengineering and explored their ethical and legal implications.

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AI powered surgical machines: are revolutionizing the field of surgery by offering enhanced precision, reduced risks, and improved outcomes.

Dilemma: The main ethical dilemma with AI-driven machines in surgery revolves around accountability for errors and the potential for over-reliance on technology. When AI assists or autonomously performs surgical tasks, determining who is responsible for complications or negative outcomes becomes complex

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Robot performs first realistic surgery without human help

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In work led by Johns Hopkins researchers, the robot performed unflappably across trials and with the expertise of a skilled human surgeon, even during unexpected scenarios typical in real life medical emergencies

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An engineer makes an exceptional design for a project only to notice that a superior of his stole his work and is now taking credit for it. However, if the engineer speaks up he could be ignored or it could be difficult to determine whether or not theft had occurred.

The superior engineer may have been a super visor for the younger less experienced engineer. However, the younger engineer must give the some sort of permission for the superior engineer to use his work. Some engineering groups must examine some hierarchies when it comes to copyright.

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non renewable resources are made from a lot of things but they are not infinite, they are used for many energy uses following nuclear or gas products. the ethical dilemma is to stop using fossil fuel or to continue use until there is no more, extracting them can also cause problems that contribute into pollution and make risks for humans and the environment

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An ethical dilemma present in the world is oil companies having to make the choice between drilling and providing people with fuel for their vehicles or preserving the environment. On one hand, they want to keep digging for fossil fuels to meet global energy demands and generate profit. On the other hand, extracting said fossil fuels releases high levels of greenhouse gases, which is a big cause of climate change. This ethical dilemma is prevalent in our society because although many are aware of the downsides of drilling for oil, they need it to get from point A to point B and carry day to day duties.

https://www.wilderness.org/news/blog/report-oil-and-gas-drilling-public-lands-fueling-climate-change

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Blog

Kanenori/Pixabay

Fossil fuel extraction on public lands to release massive amounts of emissions

The American Petroleum Institute has rolled out a multibillion-dollar public relations campaign stating that oil and gas can help to solve climate change. The association is claiming that expanding the use of fossil fuels can lower climate emissions that are trapping heat on our planet.

If that sounds fishy, it's because it is.

The campaign, which includes online ads, airport displays and billboards, credits oil and gas for the recent dip of 2.1 percent in the United States' climate emissions. It also pushes the false narrative that fossil fuels-especially natural gas-are the energy sources of the future.

Our new report, The Climate Report 2020: Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Public Lands, shows that couldn't be farther from the truth.

While climate emissions went down slightly in 2018, the decline has more to do with the country's shift away from coal, a notoriously dirty energy source. And although the gap left by coal has been partially filled by oil and gas, to say they can stave off climate change is just plain wrong.

Our experts found that on public lands alone, oil and gas development is set to generate a massive amount of climate emissions. Federal lands leased to the industry in the last three years could produce as much as 5.9 billion metric tonnes of greenhouse gases. That's more than half the emissions that China-the world's largest emitter-releases per year.

You won't see that number in the industry's advertisements.

The problem is that oil and gas are far from being clean energy sources. Even the most efficient natural gas plant still emits about half of the carbon dioxide emitted by a coal plant. That's still high considering the world needs to slash carbon emissions to avoid the worst effects of the climate crisis, according to the United Nations.

Federal lands leased in the last three years could generate half of China's annual climate emissions.

That's not all. The extraction of natural gas also releases methane, widely known as a climate change accelerant. The gas is released in smaller quantities than carbon dioxide, but it's 87 times more powerful in trapping heat in the Earth's atmosphere.

It's clear that by investing in oil and natural gas instead of coal, we're just replacing one emissions problem with another.

It's also clear that oil and gas companies are not interested in solving climate change. For instance, methane leaks could be easily cut with cost-effective solutions. But the industry has done the opposite, spending heavily to block the passage of any regulations.

The federal government has the industry's back

Mason Cummings/TWS

As fossil fuel companies attempt to rebrand themselves as "clean" to expand operations, the federal government has been giving them full support. So far, the Trump administration has offered 461 million acres of American public lands and waters for the development of oil and gas-an area technically bigger than the state of Alaska.

Catering public lands to fossil fuel extraction is highly irresponsible. They already contribute greatly to the climate change problem: Over 20 percent of total U.S. climate emissions come from oil, gas and coal extracted on those lands.

But from the very beginning, the Trump administration has managed public lands on behalf of corporate interests instead of the public. They have been offering sites to the industry at below-market rates and have purposely hidden the climate impact of fossil fuel developments.

As the world strives to solve the climate crisis, we seem to be going in the wrong direction. The results could be catastrophic-especially for lower-income and communities of color that are disproportionately impacted by extreme weather events including hurricanes, floods and wildfires.

The real solution: healthy lands

Instead of putting a band-aid on a bullet wound by investing in dirty energy to solve climate change, we need a long-term plan to reduce climate emissions.
We can start right here in our backyard: our shared public lands.
The federal government can easily reduce emissions stemming from public lands. They just have to reinstate limits on methane pollution, restrict the number of acres available for the oil and gas industry and charge a fair price for the land that is leased.

It gets better.

We can use this land to build responsible renewable energy projects such as wind turbines and solar panels. You know, the type that's actually clean. We can also foster natural carbon sinks-magical landscapes like the Tongass National Forest in Alaska that have the power to absorb carbon emissions. With this recipe, we can reach net-zero emissions on public lands and waters by 2030.

What's more, this approach is good for both the environment and people.

Less fossil fuel development on public lands will reduce air and visual pollution that so often burden local communities. Responsible renewable energy projects will put people to work. And healthy landscapes will strengthen climate resiliency for all and preserve our shared air, lands and waters.

Nelson Guda

For joining the movement to save our lands.

We were unable to process your request. Please try again.

Join the movement to save our wildlands

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Report: Oil and gas drilling on public lands is fueling climate change

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Blog The American Petroleum Institute has rolled out a multibillion-dollar public relations campaign stating that oil and gas can help to solve climate change. The association is claiming that expanding the use of fossil fuels can lower climate emissions that are trapping heat on our planet. If that sounds fishy, it's because it is.

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Studies show that facial recognition is least reliable for people of color, women, and nonbinary individuals. And that can be life-threatening when the technology is in the hands of law enforcement.

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Biased Technology: The Automated Discrimination of Facial Recognition

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Studies show that facial recognition is least reliable for people of color, women, and nonbinary individuals. And that can be life-threatening when the technology is in the hands of law enforcement.

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environmental sustainability is the key to human well-being in the present and future. The only way to reverse climate change and avoid climatic disasters is to live in harmony with nature. By compromising the planet, we are compromising our growth, development, and even survival. We each need to assess how we can lessen our impact on the planet on both an individual level and a business one.

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It's estimated that plastic releases more emissions per year than aviation and shipping, which is mostly down to its reliance on oil, contributing to climate change. And given humans throw away 353 million tonnes of plastic per year, this figure is likely to increase in the coming years.

Not only are we eating through fossil fuels at a rapid rate, but we are also destroying the air, land, and water quality through the emissions associated with this industry.

If we want to move away from this destruction, we need to intertwine environmental sustainability into our everyday lives. So let's look at why environmental sustainability is crucial, how we can achieve it, the benefits of it, and the environmental challenges the planet currently faces.

At CleanHub, we're committed to helping brands reduce their plastic footprint and work toward a more circular economy. What are your brands sustainable goals this year? Get in touch, we'd love to chat about how we can help you achieve those goals with a partnership.

What's on this page?
01 | The importance of environmental sustainability
02 | What are the benefits of environmental sustainability?
03 | How to achieve environmental sustainability
04 | Economic growth and environmental sustainability
05 | ESG and environmental sustainability
06 | The bottom line

What is environmental sustainability?

Sustainability can be broken down into three main areas: social, economic, and environmental - otherwise known as the Three Pillars of Sustainability.

The 'environmental' pillar of sustainability encourages people to live in a way that doesn't put stress on natural resources. With this in mind, we can maintain an ecological balance in our planet's natural environment, which will benefit today's ecosystems and protect future generations.

Want to learn more about this term? Check out our guide What is Environmental Sustainability? for everything you need to know.

The importance of environmental sustainability

Environmental sustainability is one of the biggest hopes we have in reversing the climatic disasters taking place on the planet right now.

To give you a better idea of how it works, let's take a look at why we need environmental sustainability for a healthy future.

It considers future generations

Our increasing levels of waste and the rising global temperatures suggest our planet is not on a good trajectory - with some experts claiming we're heading towards the point of no return.

Without environmental sustainability, climate disasters and severe weather events will become increasingly common. We only need to look at the past couple of years to see this unfold in real time.

For example, more than 33% of Pakistan went underwater in 2022, due to severe floods caused by climate change. It was estimated that 33 million people were displaced and roughly 1,200 died from this disaster - and this all started with a severe heat wave that melted glaciers, followed by an extreme monsoon.

At the same time, more than 66% of Europe received a severe drought warning - the worst drought in at least 500 years.

And in 2023, countries across the world broke records for blistering temperatures. For example, Vietnam recorded its highest temperature ever at 111.3 °F in the south of Hanoi on 6th May, while Sanbao (a remote town in China) reached a national record of 125.96 °F. China's capital even endured a temporary ban on outdoor work during its hottest month of the year.

This all seems very bleak - but there is hope that we can change things around. That's why cities around the world have already started working towards environmental sustainability. We look at the best examples of this on our page The Nine Greenest Cities in the World.

Protects wildlife

People around the world have become disconnected from nature over the past century, so it's easy to forget how dependent we are on wildlife.

Everything is connected - decreasing fish populations can put large sea mammals at risk of extinction, just the same as lower smaller pollinator numbers can put human food stocks at risk.

Unfortunately, we are failing wildlife miserably at the moment. Humans are pumping out harmful emissions, destroying habitats for industrialization, wiping out ecosystems for materials, poaching animals, littering waste in the open environment, and contributing to ocean pollution.

We urgently need to protect habitats and precious ecosystems - and here's how:

Protect vulnerable animal populations - When laws are put in place to protect animals, populations naturally rise. The figures speak for themselves. For example, the ban on commercial whaling in 1986 led to a strong recovery of humpback whales around the world, and now this population is thought to be around 93% of its original size

Continue conservation efforts - We need to carry on supporting coral reefs, rebuilding wetlands, planting trees in depleted regions, and creating wildflower meadows. All of this needs to be done with expert knowledge, to make sure it's done effectively and puts wildlife first

fully protected marine areas can increase the total biomass of marine life by more than Introduce more legislation on protecting nature - As well as protecting wildlife, we need to protect the nature they live in too. But this can only be effective if laws are put in place. For example, 400%

Reduce emissions - We drastically need to reduce our emission output to limit the impact of climate change and global warming. As the years go by, we're seeing more severe weather events, which are destroying habitats, reducing food and water supplies for animals, and causing detrimental impacts on population sizes of some animals

Create a circular economy - Fed up of seeing plastic waste littered around the planet? The key solution is to introduce a circular economy. This way, we can feed materials back into businesses, reduce our reliance on raw materials, lower emissions, and lessen the chance of animals eating plastic

Improves human health

It's estimated that an average of 9 million people die globally from air, water, soil, or ocean pollution each year. This clearly shows that we need environmental sustainability to not only improve our health but also remove a major threat to life.

From breathing in polluted air to eating contaminated food, there are numerous ways in which environmental degradation is taking a toll on our lives. You can find out everything you need to know by visiting our blog post: How Does Plastic Impact Human Health?

The benefits of environmental sustainability for businesses

Embracing sustainability is crucial for reversing climate change. Its benefits aren't just limited to nature either - there are also numerous commercial and financial benefits for brands and organizations.

Here are the top benefits of environmental sustainability for businesses.

Reduced energy costs

Energy and water consume a massive chunk of organizations' finances.

When companies focus on reducing their consumption to achieve environmental sustainability in the manufacturing process, they observe long-term savings. For instance, businesses that install solar panels can save up to 70% on their electricity bills, according to the Solar Trade Association.

Attracts a wider customer base

Roughly 73% of Americans and 84% of Europeans are likely to stop purchasing from companies that don't incorporate sustainability in their businesses and don't care about climate change.

This shows that sustainability is no longer a choice for brands - they need it to stay relevant in the business arena.

And by publicizing your green initiatives, you'll also gain a new customer base that wasn't aware of your sustainable business practices.

Tax benefits

Many governments around the world have acknowledged the current environmental crisis, and are providing tax incentives to companies carrying out sustainable business practices. The main ones include:

Improves workforce morale

Introducing sustainability in a business is a collaborative effort. When teams within organizations work and collaborate toward developing green initiatives, they feel a sense of pride, which improves their morale and positively impacts the corporate culture.

In fact, a recent study found that 71% of job seekers want to work for environmentally friendly employers.

Lowers environmental impact

Having an environmentally sustainable business isn't just about profitability and making your business look good, it can make a real difference.

By incorporating eco-friendly practices, you'll reduce your company's carbon footprint, which will result in fewer greenhouse gas emissions, less waste, and improved air, land, and water quality.

How to become more environmentally sustainable

Achieving environmental sustainability isn't possible without striving on both personal and professional levels. So here's how you can make your life and business more sustainable:

In personal life

Change starts from within, so there's no better way to improve the environment without changing our day-to-day lives.

Here are a few tips that you can incorporate into your daily life to help reduce your carbon footprint:

Try to consume less - Products all require materials and energy to make them. That means it's a good place to start by reducing your overall consumption

Try to eliminate plastic from your life - It's a good idea to start off small. For instance, getting reusable straws, cups, and grocery bags might seem like small swaps, but they have a big impact over time

Investigate labels for harmful materials/ingredients - This goes for all products, but especially on clothing (steer clear of polyester!)

Avoid wasting water - You can even go a step further and recycle water where possible, or carry out rainwater harvesting

Cut back on car emissions - An easy way to do this is by simply opting for public transport, cycling, or walking, rather than driving

Invest in renewables for your home - Solar and wind are both much more accessible and affordable for homeowners than they were a few years ago

Consider the carbon footprint of your diet - Reduce meat consumption (or avoid meat altogether), purchase from your local farmer's market, and avoid wasting food

Spread the word - The more people that do their bit for the planet, the better

In work life

The business world is different from our personal lives, but it also has massive potential for improvement. That's why we've listed a few ways you can make your business eco-friendly:

Assess your products - It's important to look at the whole picture too, which means you should conduct a life cycle assessment of your product or service

Rethink your supply chain - Change the manufacturers or service providers who don't consider environmental sustainability in their business.

Create an Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) strategy - More businesses are having to consider creating an ESG plan, as governments around the world introduce new laws and consumers ask for greener brands

Get your employees involved - By making your employees a central part of your environmental sustainability strategy, you can ensure there will be change in all areas of the business

Make your office space eco-friendly - Think greenery potted around the place, solar panels on the roof of the building, heat pumps to keep employees warm, and efficient recycling facilities in place

Incorporate the circular economy in your manufacturing process - Not sure where to start with this? We'd recommend getting a packaging assessment from an expert, who will have the know-how when it comes to reducing waste and feeding plastic back into the economy

Collaborate with third-party companies - These can help you improve the environment, reduce your carbon footprint, and lower your plastic consumption. And that's what we do at CleanHub. Companies partner with us to support the collection and safe processing of plastic waste in coastal regions. Head over to our live dashboard to see real-time data of the recovered material coming in.

Economic growth and environmental sustainability

Many conventional business practices are immensely harmful to the environment. Take plastic packaging in ecommerce, for example. A recent study found that ecommerce generates around 4.8 times more packaging waste than in-store purchasing.

Even though these practices might be cheaper than a sustainable alternative, we need to ditch them to align profits with both people and the planet.

And as companies grow, and profit climbs, energy use also increases, which is often derived from non-renewable sources, such as fossil fuels, and pollutes the environment.

This doesn't necessarily mean that the business world is doomed. Brand leaders simply need to look at more innovative ways to run their ships and become more environmentally sustainable.

And sometimes, innovation isn't even required - some brands just need to make a few small swaps around the business to incorporate sustainability into everyday operations. Simply switching to solar or wind power, instead of fossil fuels, can have a hugely beneficial impact on the environment - and it can cut costs in the long run.

The only issue is these innovations or swaps in practice is that they require initial investment. But given the expected future of businesses revolves around sustainability, this seems like an obligation, rather than a choice if companies want to stay ahead of the curve.

ESG and environmental sustainability

More people are becoming acquainted with the terms Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) - but what exactly is it?

An ESG strategy is a framework businesses adopt to show they take the environment, social impact, and governance seriously.

Sustainability is intertwined with the first pillar - the environment - meaning businesses need to adopt greener practices if they want to have an effective ESG strategy.

When it comes to shaping up a business, different industries will have different priorities - for example, ecommerce drastically needs to look at its transport emissions, while the food industry should analyze how to reduce plastic packaging.

But brands are stepping up. In fact, 96% of the world's biggest 250 companies now report on sustainability or ESG matters , according to KPMG.

Want to learn how you can market your ESG strategy effectively? Check out our guide on how to communicate your ESG strategy.

The bottom line

Environmental sustainability is the key to human well-being in the present and future.

The only way to reverse climate change and avoid climatic disasters is to live in harmony with nature. By compromising the planet, we are compromising our growth, development, and even survival.

We each need to assess how we can lessen our impact on the planet - on both an individual level and a business one.

Want to become more environmentally sustainable? At CleanHub, we're committed to helping brands reduce their plastic footprint and work toward a more circular economy. If you want to get involved, all you have to do is get in touch with one of our in-house experts.

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The Importance of Environmental Sustainability | CleanHub

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The importance of environmental sustainability continues to grow, as it helps us live harmoniously with the planet. Let's look into this in more detail.

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Employees may sometimes face the ethical dilemma of whether they should use company resources for their own personal gain. In moments of distress and frustration this line of what is right and wrong can be blurred and many employees fall into using company resources without asking for permission.

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Is it appropriate to make known a colleague using company’s resources for personal use?

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At my workplace, the company has trusted us with full access to its Cloud infrastructure service account (think of Azure, AWS, etc). The belief is for developers to have access to what they need fa…

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An engineer discovers a critical safety flaw in a bridge design just days before construction begins. Reporting it could delay the project and cost millions but ignoring it risks public safety.

Should the engineer speak up and face backlash or stay silent to protect their job and the timeline?

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The following series of engineering ethics cases were created by interviewing numerous engineers from Silicon Valley and beyond.

The cases have been written, anonymized, and honed to highlight the ethical content from each interview. While these cases are meant for engineering students and professionals for their professional development, nearly all of the cases occur in the context of business, and therefore are also relevant for those seeking business ethics cases.

These cases are suitable as homework and/or for classroom discussion. The goal of this project is to acquaint engineering students and professionals with the variety of ethical experiences of engineering as practiced "in the field." By becoming familiar with problems faced by other engineers we hope to thereby prepare those reading these cases if they too encounter difficult ethical dilemmas in their work.

Cases range from the mundane to the deadly. While we do not reveal how each particular case turned out, in general they turned out well - the people involved made the right decisions. But this is not to say that all of these right decisions came without personal cost. A few of the engineers did face negative repercussions and a very few even needed to find new employment. However, overall the interviewees were satisfied with how events turned out, even if they faced negative repercussions for their good decisions. They understood that doing the right thing is good in itself, regardless of the personal consequences they may have faced.

The engineering ethics cases can be sorted into the following categories:
The engineering ethics cases in this series were written by Santa Clara University School of Engineering students Clare Bartlett, Nabilah Deen, and Jocelyn Tan, who worked as Hackworth Engineering Ethics Fellows at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics over the course of the 2014-2015 academic year. In order to write these cases, the fellows interviewed numerous engineers and collected nearly 40 engineering ethics cases from Silicon Valley and beyond. The Hackworth Fellowships are made possible by a generous gift from Joan and the late Michael Hackworth.

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Engineering Ethics Cases - Markkula Center for Applied Ethics

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The Center’s 2015 Hackworth Engineering Ethics Fellows collected case studies from more than 30 SCU alumni about ethical issues they encountered during their careers.

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Is it alright for hackers to hack into different systems without permission to reveal vulnerabilities? On one hand, hackers could be hired to test the security of some systems, however more malicious hackers could hack into those same systems just to steal information or documents which could be used to sell to other companies/third parties.

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Navigating the Moral Ambiguity in the Ethics of Hacking

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The advancement of cyberattacks and data breaches has raised questions about the ethics of hacking and how we can navigate the gray area between security and privacy.

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The engineering ethical dilemma in this case is about Tesla’s Autopilot system causing a fatal crash because it did not work as expected. The engineers and the company had to decide how much safety testing, warnings, and clear instructions to give drivers. The engineers previously did not fully make sure the system was completely safe as it would take more time and cost more money. The case shows the importance of making sure new technology is safe and honestly explained to users.

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Nuclear energy is one of the ethical dilemmas engineers have to encounter. It is a clean, efficient source of energy, but it is also a tremendous source of radioactive waste that takes thousands of years to decay. Improper storage or disposal would spell environmental degradation and a public health hazard, but the shutdown of nuclear facilities would cause a rise in fossil fuel use and worsen climate change. The catch-all is energy needs, nature preservation, and long-term security all in one. Good management incorporating adherence to strict regulations and advanced containment mechanisms can make nuclear power a force for sustainable development.

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Using AI tools without proper knowledge can cause problems for civil engineers. If they rely too much on AI or don’t check the results carefully, it might lead to mistakes in building designs or safety issues. This can break important ethical rules because engineers must make sure their work is safe and reliable. That’s why it’s important for engineers to understand AI tools well and use them responsibly.

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Mishandling AI tools puts civil engineers at risk for ethical violations

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While AI could revolutionize civil engineering, IBM’s program failure should remind engineers of their ethical obligations when using emerging technologies.

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River dams are heavily debated to be both ethical and unethical. On one hand, they save nearby land from flooding and providing electricity. On the other hand though, they change and sometimes damage the surrounding ecosystem forever. Dams also are costly and use a lot of fossil fuels during construction, further damaging ecosystems.

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Scenario: My boss is helping a client design their new building. My boss rushed the design without ensuring that it was structurally sound and when I confronted him, he threatened to fire me if I mentioned it to anyone. If I speak up I risk losing my job however the client won't pay for a potentially unsafe structure. If I stay quiet I will keep my job however I risk someone being hurt from an unsafe design.

Should I speak up and tell the client or should I stay quiet?

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Tom Koch (Acting DAD, BE Office of Applied Research and Outreach) and Ted Rosenbaum (Acting BE Director)

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Penalty Offenses Concerning Damaged or Defective Merchandise

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The FTC has issued a Notice that it has determined that certain acts or practices involving the sale of merchandise which is damaged or defective or different from that ordered are unfair or decept

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+A environmental engineer working for a construction company is looking for sites for a new factory that he must approve. The site is great for business, but this means they'd have to cut down some trees, possibly polluting a river, used by wildlife and communities in the area, damaging the environment. The engineer thinks the report is rushed and could approve the report, possibly damaging an environment significantly, or preserving it and looking for a new and more convenient site.

There could've been two harsh outcomes He could be harshly judged by the company for not taking up such a profitable site, maybe even losing his position, or he can approve the report, while facing the consequence and guilt of damaging a community and environment.

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The ethical dilemma of using AI in healthcare is about using technology to help patients while keeping them safe and treated fairly. AI can make diagnoses faster, help doctors, and improve treatments, but it can also risk privacy, cause unfair access to care, take away lots of jobs, and reduce human kindness and emotion. The main question is how to use AI to help people without hurting them or treating them unfairly.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8826344/

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Ethical Issues of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and Healthcare

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is a term applied to a machine or software and refers to its capability of simulating intelligent human behavior, instantaneous calculations, problem-solving, and evaluation of new data based on previously assessed data (1). AI heavily influences many industries and fields, including agriculture and farming, manufacturing and production, autonomous vehicles, fashion, sports analytics and activities, healthcare, and the medical system. This technology has the power to impact the future of the industry and human beings, but it is a double-edged sword.

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Whistleblowing in engeering happens when an engineer see something unsafe or illegal in the work space. For example, Roger Boisjoly had warned NASA about a problem with the space shuttle Challenger's rocket seals, but he ended up getting ignored, leading to the shuttle exploding. Sometimes whistleblowers could risk losing their jobs, but their actions do prevent accidents and could save lives of others. Engineers have to put the public's safety first even if it's risky for themselves.

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Why whistleblowers are critical to engineering | GlobalSpec

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Whistleblowers are often viewed negatively, evoking visions of some hysterical worry wart telling people that they were doing their jobs incorrectly. Because whistleblowers are viewed as quick to sound the alarm over the slightest detail, they are often treated as a snitch or a tattletale. As such, they tend to face negative reprisals ranging from isolation among coworkers, outright or covert criticism and even career jeopardy.

Yet, in the world of engineering, the role of whistleblower has been, in some cases, lifesaving if not at least informative, possibly preventing future catastrophes. Unfortunately, such engineers historically have not been treated well, with some whistleblowers experiencing reprisals in the shape of job loss and, in extreme cases, even death. Such was reportedly the case for well-known whistleblower Karen Silkwood, a chemical technician at the Kerr-McGee Cimarron Fuel Fabrication Site in Oklahoma, who sounded the alarm on her employer’s handling of health and safety issues within its nuclear facility. On her way to meet with a New York Times journalist, Silkwood was killed in a car crash that reportedly occurred under suspicious circumstances.

Though the case of Karen Silkwood is extreme, whistleblowers continue to sound the alarm on instances of fraud, abuse and waste along with concerns for safety, despite such reprisals. Typically, the whistleblower wants to do what is right and that alone is generally reward enough for coming forward.

How it happens

Whistleblowing often occurs as a last resort, usually after someone has made the discovery of an issue or a problem within a government, an organization or a company. To deal with said issue or problem, the whistleblower generally attempts to bring the issue to the attention of his or her employer through the appropriate channels. When that fails, the individual, without further recourse, generally lets word of the problem or issue deliberately slip either before something (usually dangerous, if not catastrophic) happens.

Whistleblowing instances

The Space Shuttle Challenger

Ahead of Challenger’s launch, mechanical engineer Roger Boisjoly alerted his superiors at Morton Thiokol, the manufacturer of the space shuttle program’s solid rocket boosters (SRBs), that the O-rings sealing two sections of the SRBs together failed during previous tests because of the unusually cold temperatures preceding the test launch. After repeated attempts to communicate this concern to his superiors, warning that a failure in both O-rings would result in certain disaster, his warnings went unheeded. Temperatures were forecast to be low again ahead of the Jan. 28, 1986 launch. As predicted, the colder temperatures had altered the flexibility of the O-rings, preventing them from forming a seal and the shuttle broke apart 73 seconds into the flight, killing all seven crew members on board.

Although Boisjoly would eventually earn commendation for his whistleblowing efforts, receiving the Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility by the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1988, it would come at a cost. In the time immediately following the disaster, Boisjoly was shunned by his colleagues and managers at Morton Thiokol and he eventually resigned from the manufacturer.

The case of Salvador Castro

Salvador Castro was a medical electronics engineer hired by Air Shields Inc., an engineering company in Hatboro, Pennsylvania. Shortly after his hiring in 1995, Castro was tasked with examining an infant respirator as a favor to a colleague. Noting a design flaw in a valve that could potentially expose infants to dangerously high lung pressure, Castro brought the matter to his superiors along with an inexpensive solution to the problem. The solution, according to reports, was a simple fix that would move the valve in question closer to the baby. Noting the inaction of his superiors following his complaint, Castro then threatened to notify the FDA. Castro was fired from his position; the company justified his dismissal by saying he had failed to meet the requirements to fulfill the position of a senior engineer. It took four years after Castro’s initial warnings for the company to eventually fix the respirator, only after the FDA forced Air Shield to recall the product. Luckily, there were not any fatalities associated with the malfunctioning respirator.

Despite being fired from the company, Castro would later be commended for his whistleblowing efforts.

Source: Oleg V. Belyakov / CC BY-SA 3.0Boeing 737 Max

A more recent example of whistleblowing in engineering has been ongoing for the larger part of 2019. Following the crashes of two Boeing 737 Max commercial airliners — Lion Air Flight 620 in October 2018 and Ethiopian Air Flight 302 in March 2019 — current and former Boeing employees called a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) hotline for whistleblowers. They reported that Boeing had been alerted to issues with the planes’ angle of attack sensor, which measures the plane’s angle while it is in the air, and issues with the model’s maneuvering characteristics augmentation system (MCAS). A feature new to the 737 Max, the MCAS is responsible for pitch stability.

According to those early whistleblower efforts, Boeing did not report that the angle of attack sensor had experienced wire damage thanks to the presence of foreign debris. Likewise, reports from whistleblowers also pointed to the MCAS control cut-out switches as a source of concern as they reportedly disengaged the MCAS software.

All told, 346 people died in both crashes and the Boeing 737 Max was subsequently grounded.

Fast forward to the beginning of October and reports have emerged that another Boeing engineer had previously blown the whistle on the company, claiming in an internal ethics complaint from this year that while the Boeing 737 Max jet was under development, Boeing rejected a proposed safety system in favor of minimizing costs. That engineer suggested that the rejected equipment might have reduced the risks that allegedly contributed to the two fatal crashes.

Examples like the Castro case and the Challenger case have likely shaped how modern-day whistleblowing events are handled. In the case of Boeing, at least, whistleblower protections were in place to encourage Boeing employees to come forward, whereas in the Challenger and Castro cases, those resources were likely limited. That said, it is still too soon to tell what the long-term impact Boeing engineers’ whistleblowing actions will mean for the future of whistleblowing, but in the short term, the impact is clear: No more fatalities linked to the issues plaguing the Boeing 737 Max.

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My topic is renewable resources and how they are just as bad as oil mining. Oil is one of the hardest things to find right now and we are going to run out of it before we find enough. Everything that we are using as a renewable resource comes from oil this is why it is an unethical dilemma. Wind turbines, solar panels, lithium batteries are all damaging to the environment. polluting waters and killing environments. If these things were really the answer they would be everywhere and people would be more believing in these renewable resources. everything we use is made from OIL.

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We are RES, the world’s largest independent renewable energy company with 40 years of experience delivering global renewable solutions.

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Sarah, a recently promoted manager at an industrial engineering company discovers that factory workers are asked to work more than eight hours a day without getting paid overtime. What should Sarah do?

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A recently promoted manager at an industrial engineering company discovers that factory workers are asked to work more than eight hours a day without getting paid overtime.

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AI can make work faster and more efficient, boosting productivity in many industries. However, it can also replace lower-skilled jobs, leaving many people unemployed. This can widen the gap between wealthy tech leaders and vulnerable workers. To avoid this, society must focus on retraining those affected.

https://groupify.ai/blog/ethical-dilemmas-of-ai?

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Should engineers and companies continue to develop and distribute 3D printing technology and blueprints knowing they can be used to create untraceable, homemade weapons? 3D printing technology allows anyone with a printer and design files to manufacture objects at home, including potentially dangerous items like firearms. This raises serious concerns about safety, regulation, and societal impact.

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Print and shoot: How 3D-printed guns are spreading online

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The technology to build your own lethal weapon is promoted on social media

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Boeing decided when designing their 737 Max to cut costs on many things with lead to many deadly mistakes. They cut corners on many important safety features such as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) as well as communication failures and insufficient training. These choices to cut corners lead to 2 planes crashing in 2019 and 2020, as well as a door blow out in 2024.

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A parking lot at Boeing Field in Seattle, Washington, filled with undelivered Boeing 737 MAX aircraft during the grounding following two fatal crashes

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Artificial intelligence is one of the main unethical dilemmas of this generation since it replaces many people's mechanical jobs. Although AI facilitates a lot for people it also can cause poor living conditions for many people since it replaces their job, hence impacting their finances and economy. However, if used correctly it can be optimized and used as a tool to more efficiently get things done. Especially since AI cannot fully replace human creativity.

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Unlocking Innovation: AI in Mechanical Engineering

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Mechanical engineering has always been at the forefront of technological advancements, driving innovation across various industries.

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Engineer's duty: They had the responsibility to ensure the safety of the astronauts and recommend against launching if it was unsafe.

Management's pressure: There was a strong push to launch on schedule due to political and financial reasons.

Dilemma: Should the engineers speak up and stop the launch, risking their careers and community reputation? Or should they go along with the decisions of losing humans lives.

Both choices had severe consequences either risking safety or risking professional/organizational fallout

https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/