Stephen H. Unger (moderator). A professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Columbia University, Unger previously worked in corporate R&D, at Bell Labs among other places. A founder and former president of the IEEE Society on the Social Implications of Technology (SSIT), he is a current member of the IEEE Ethics Committee. He is the author of Controlling Technology: Ethics and the Responsible Engineer (John Wiley & Sons, 1994).
Participants
KOOPMAN: The issue is, if you're tasked with doing an analysis or making an estimate or some other engineering task, and the answer turns out to not be what people want, then you have this problem. What do you do about it? Do you give them the answer they don't want to hear? Do you want to tell them the project is going to be late? Now you're butting heads with your management. That's a real problem. And that happens every day.
BUD ELDON: With all due respect, also many times when you go into that sort of situation, many times it becomes a challenge for engineers to figure a way to make it happen the way you want it to happen.
KOOPMAN: That's fine. I don't have a problem with that.
ELDON: But a lot of the engineers who do the "analysis" come up with a conclusion based on what turn out to be good assumptions in the current situation, but without considering ways to get around the assumptions.
KOOPMAN: So if the manager takes your hand and says, "We're going to work together, we're going to try to get it on the assumptions," that's one thing, that's the manager's job. But if the manager says, "No, wrong, it's half that," and the manager doesn't have a clue as to how to do it-you can't do that to the engineer and expect him to maintain his integrity.
WALT ELDEN: Let me point out a way that a good record-holding organization will deal with that, and I work for one: in that situation what you're supposed to do is move it to an area which we will call risk management. What are the risks that we're likely to face on this project? You identify them early, in advance, and you keep bringing these risks up, so that as a team-program manager, business development, marketing, engineering-you start identifying these risks. Then, recognizing that we're not going to meet this tolerance, this budget, this cost, this schedule, the proper thing to do then is to develop risk mitigation procedures.
KOOPMAN: The negative way is to say, "We don't want to talk about that risk because our schedule has already stretched the limit." We don't have controversy mediation, you're not going to tell anyone about that risk. . . .
WALT ELDEN: Then you're forcing that person to go outside.
KOOPMAN: It doesn't have to be overt. Nothing need be said. It could be part of the culture that you know if you open your mouth, you can get hammered. It only takes a couple of examples to establish that to everybody else. Then it's really tough, because there's no way to prove anything happened. It's just part of the culture.This thing where everybody just understands the way it works is one of the most insidious. Getting hammered
UNGER: We [the Ethics Committee?] have received what appears to be a real case. This involves a software engineer hired by a startup company, and the company is supposed to produce some sort of software product, but they start out with some existing software, which this engineer discovered is proprietary software from another company for which they have not obtained licenses. And he then called this to the attention of his managers, including eventually the head of the company. At first they said, "Okay, we will stop doing that." But then a short time later it began again, and when he brought it back again, he was told to stop talking about this, to stop asking questions. Eventually this came to the attention of one of the companies that was a victim. It called in the law, and meanwhile the engineer was fired and is now prepared to testify in court. Now, I believe, the latest development is he's been advised to bring this to the Member Conduct Committee, where Walt [Elden] is waiting to receive the case.
MITCHAM: Can I put a perspective on this? When you ask the question of what can we do to support ethical engineers, that's part of a general life problem of what can we do to support being ethical in general. Engineers are not unique in having these kinds of problems.
UNGER: Absolutely.
WUJEK: But the consequences can be unique, or much more far reaching.
MITCHAM: They can be, but in many cases, basically, it seems to me that if you want to be a moral or ethical person, you have got to accept that you will have to pay some price for that. And that's true whether you're an engineer or whether you're in the university or whether you work as a garbage collector, for heaven's sake. Engineers ought not to get too exercised about, well, being exceptional or being put on the spot more. All of us trying to be ethical are put on the spot.
WALT ELDEN: Let me put a personal perspective on this. This particular individual is an alien. He's got five dependents. In 30 days he can be deported-now he's up against the entire establishment. Years ago I was in a somewhat similar situation, and that's why I'm sitting here today. Not because of a specific public safety issue, but because of creating the professional activities committee and what I was doing in my former corporation over a period of about two years [namely?]. One Friday morning I was called in, and I was given an alternative, either to resign or be terminated. I had seen this coming, and I had an attorney, and he advised that I resign. So I resigned under coercion. MITCHAM: This was because you were acting in the IEEE. . .
ELDEN: I was the first one that after we voted and changed their institution [our constitution? and if so, when exactly?], I formed the first professional activities [please clarify], and I was very active in ethics registration licensure [ditto], and I was trying to make changes in this Fortune 400 company, which was heavily involved with commercial activities affecting the public-some of its products were failing [and endangering?] the public. So I was set up, and a case was brought against me by the company. What happened? I resigned and I really went into shock. I was unable to seek employment for nine months. I was physically wrecked. So we used our own personal resources. That's when I got involved with Steve, and we formed the Member Conduct Committee. My wife finally said, "Well, just let it go." It took me about ten years to let it go, and I quit IEEE's professional activities until two years ago when I called Steve and said, "I'm near retirement. they can't touch me anymore. I want to get involved."
From Bart to the MCC UNGER: Let me say a word or two about the Bart [the Bay Area Rapid Transit] case. The first glimmer of that was in an article in Spectrum by Gordon D. Friedlander (October 1974, pp. 69-76), [discussing what had gone so badly wrong in the construction of what was meant to be an outstanding urban mass transit system in San Francisco]. He had a little box in there, a side bar, where he made some mention of the fact that three engineers had been fired for reasons that weren't altogether clear. This got my attention, and I started to investigate that whole thing. This led the then Committee on Social Implications of Technology, which was a standing committee of IEEE's Technical Activities Board and a pioneer here, to pass a resolution requesting that the IEEE do two things: one, come to the aid of the Bart engineers in some useful way; and two, develop some sort of mechanisms to help people like that in the future, that is, other IEEE members who got into similar straits. I'm not going to go into a lot of details, but there was also at that time the beginnings of the U.S. Activities Board. They decided that the most effective thing that could be done for the Bart engineers was for the IEEE to enter an amicus curiae brief on their behalf. The attorneys produced a very interesting brief, which effectively asked the judge to rule that an engineer should be considered to have an implied clause in the employment contract requiring the engineer to protect the public health and welfare, analogous to provisions that were in the codes of ethics that did exist for other engineering organizations at that time. This was, I think, a historic event, that brief. The result was a little mixed: about a week after the brief was entered, the Bart management agreed to a settlement with the engineers, giving them what they considered a substantial sum of money; but it was a bit unfortunate in that no legal precedent was thereby established, because the case was then dropped. Meanwhile, the IEEE committee on social implications of technology began developing ideas for enforcement mechanisms. Walt [Elden] got involved in this as well and other entities in the IEEE, which eventually led to the development of the Member Conduct Committee operation, which had two arms or two functions. One was to enforce the code on engineers in the sense that if an IEEE member was found to have violated the code, then that engineer could be brought before a panel and eventually censored in some way by the IEEE. The other part was that the committee on conduct was authorized to investigate cases where an engineer's career was jeopardized as a result of adherence to the code of ethics. This went into effect, it was 1977. . .
ELDEN: '78. Supporting ethical engineers
WUJEK: I'd like to point out that the code of ethics, the IEEE code of ethics, has in its language a passage that tells us a lot about what we are supposed to be doing. For example, we're charged "to accept responsibility in making engineering decisions consistent with the safety, health and welfare of the public and to disclose promptly factors that might endanger the public or the environment." It's written large. We're also told, not only are we supposed to behave so, but we are supposed to assist our colleagues and support them in so doing. Yet, what are you, IEEE, as an entity, prepared to do to support us who behave ethically, and, therefore, are caused to suffer? And until recently the answer was nothing, absolutely nothing. But that has now changed. In particular, in late 1994 the board of directors of the IEEE passed a resolution that had gradually percolated its way up through the bureaucracy. I happened to be chair of the ethics committee at the time.
UNGER: One of the achievements that we have made as a result of that resolution is that the board of directors has directed that the members receive a copy of the IEEE code of ethics with the dues notice each year.
WUJEK: Like most of these documents it's full of "whereas's" and so on, but the key thing from my point of view, is one, we now provide help for engineers, a hotline, where an engineer, a member of the IEEE, although we don't insist upon that, can call in and secure non-legal assistance, at least suggestions.
MITCHAM: Is this an 800 hotline number? UNGER: It's not an 800 number. You have to invest in making a phone call. This filters out frivolous calls, we hope. Also, you can also use E Mail to reach the IEEE. The call or the e-mail message is originally fielded by a staff person who's been briefed as to what to do with these things.
MITCHAM: Do you have any information on how this has been used?
ELDEN: Well, it's only been in operation since August 9th, I believe, so it's just about one month, and some kinds of input that you get are simply irrelevant to the purpose of the hotline. There are people who perhaps legitimately have been the subject of abuse of some kind in the workplace, for example, somebody did not get credit for a piece of work done or didn't get a promotion that was clearly deserved or was fired for incompetence or whatever. There are going to be people who have problems, and they're going to just look for somebody to listen. There are some people who are unbalanced in various ways.
MITCHAM: We will always attract a few of those.
UNGER: You have to expect, and we anticipate such things. We will get cases of people who have been discriminated against. Now that's something we ought to be able to help people with, but it's not something-unless the person doing the discriminating is an IEEE member-this does not fall under engineering ethics in the IEEE. There are, in fact, other avenues for helping such people, and what we would do is direct people. There is a committee in the IEEE [which is that??] that's supposed to help people who are victims of discrimination. So we have somebody now we can refer people to.
WHITBECK: I'm reminded of the stories about you see a person floating down the river all battered and beaten up and you pull him out of the river and you try to get him some help. And then the next ones come along and you pull them out of the river and you try to get them some help. Pretty soon you ask who's up-stream throwing them in. I think that the hotline is important, and I'm really glad to see that it's being instituted, but I think it's really important for us to think about what we do upstream.
UNGER: The hotline is not intended simply as a rescue operation for individuals. We do hope that we will be of help to people, and we are also very sensitive to making sure that we don't do any harm to individuals. But we really see this as a service to the profession to serve as a deterrent eventually to those upstream people. Ethics website SLOVICK: I've heard several mentions of Caroline's website. Perhaps you would like to take a minute and just review what you do, what you are trying to accomplish in that?
WHITBECK: This is a project that is funded by the National Science Foundation. We are not quite one year into it, but we've got quite varied use-actually, the use of the center seems to be growing exponentially. I encourage all of you who have useful things that you are willing to have us put on the web, to give them to me so we will have them in a central place, or if you know of useful websites that are already out there, tell me, so I can link to them. We're trying to put a number of ethics codes on the web. I just got back from Canada. We're going to put, for example, the code of ethics of the Order of Quebec Engineers on the web. They say, for example, that whenever an engineer considers that certain works are a danger to public safety, he must notify the Order of Engineers of Quebec or the persons responsible for such work. So in that system, the society has a legal function,
WUJEK: You also have cases.
WHITBECK: We have an enormous number of cases. For a start, we have 32 of the National Society of Professional Engineers cases. The NSPE developed cases and then had their board of ethics review them. Well, we found for a student discussion, the initial formulation of the cases was not too interesting, so we have rewritten them in a discussion format that is fun for society meetings or for classes. We also have a number of cases from corporations. This might be extremely interesting to you. The Gray Matters [right name? why are they called this? do they all involve defense contracting?] cases from Lockheed Martin, for example, we have got 20 of those, and they would be things like, suppose you have good evidence that financial fraud has been committed in your area, and you think it's intentional, because the program was running out of money, should you-and then it gives you four choices-should you notify the newspapers, should you notify your local audit office, should you do nothing, keep quiet, should you call. . .
BUD ELDON: Get an attorney.
WHITBECK: And the answers are graded positively and negatively.
UNGER: "C" is always the correct answer.
WHITBECK: The answer-I forgot one of the options!-was to call the Department of Defense hotline. So in this case, it's a clear whistle-blowing case, you can imagine that the company isn't crazy about your going to the DOD, but they give that zero points, neither positive nor negative. Well, you certainly have the right to do this, but gee, wouldn't you like to tell the local audit office about it first, and they would like you to tell the local audit office. They give you plus ten points for that. They give you plus five points for an anonymous phone call to the ethics office, because that would get attention to it initially, and they give you minus ten points for going to the newspapers. Well, that's useful for new engineers in corporations to see that whistle blowing to the DOD is very different than whistle blowing to the newspapers. And of course this is from Lockheed Martin, this isn't from God, so one can sort of criticize the answers they give. But it's a very nuanced set of responses, and so it gives the engineer who' at a loss some very specific directions, and it also gives you a sense of what an ethically concerned company wants its people to be able to do.
SLOVICK:The corporate world - We have had a couple of interesting examples of infrastructure for dealing with ethical issues. Can we hear something about what your own experience has been?
WALT ELDEN: My company has established a standards of business conduct manual that is issued to its 25,000 employees every year, and every year we sign a legal practice [right word?] in accordance with that. They're doing that to protect the company against possible allegations or concerns of the government, who is its biggest customer, [and to certify] that we are in compliance with federal law. But then it also touches these things like bribery, gifts, and also gets into-if you're international, transnational-practices in other countries that may be acceptable there, but is not going to be accepted here.
KOOPMAN: The companies I have worked for, they definitely have hotlines and are places that have posters saying, "Behave ethically. It's real important," and all that. I find, however, that there's a disconnect between what the top management is saying and what the low level management is actually implementing. If the daily operations are such that they compromise your integrity just a little bit every time you do something-even on the little things like filling out time cards-what happens with the bigger things?
WUJEK: I do feel that the tone for an organization is set by the top manager. You can have a statement of ethics behind the receptionist as you enter the door, and have all kinds of things published, but if the management conveys downward through this structure that this is how we do business, that has much more impact than all the words, all the orientations, all the discussions. And a company that's represented at this table, Hewlett Packard, they have enjoyed an excellent reputation going back to the days when Bill Hewlett and Ray Packard were running the show.
BUD ELDON: Thank you, Joe, for those comments about HP. They're true.
WALT ELDEN: Just let me add a little bit to what I said before about my current employer. Each of our divisions has an officer who is part of that corporate committee that we would go to. Separate from that, we have a 1-800 fund [what does that mean?] person that we can call directly if we can't get things resolved locally.
WUJEK: Is that a company employee?
ELDEN: It's someone at corporate.
BENJAMIN: My experience is an entirely different one. About 30 years ago I was part of a small group of about 15 or 20 engineers and technicians doing R&D in medical electronics. We organized ourselves almost as a cooperative, so that many of these problems just didn't exist in the form in which we are discussing them here. For example, we would get together once a week as an entire group, because it was a small enough group that we could do this, and discuss anything we felt like discussing. You end up with an extremely tight group of people, and questions like do we go down a slippery slope are recognized more or less immediately, and one doesn't start down the slippery slope. But everybody else. . .
SWEET: By way of adding some some other nuances to this discussion, let's take as an example the export of nuclear-weapons-related technology, where it's become painfully clear that engineers working for certain firms in Europe have few scruples about selling technology to countries like Iraq, no questions asked. What if you're an engineer in this country in that kind of situation, and you look at what your competitors are doing in some other country?
BENJAMIN: You can't weasel out by saying, "Oh, well, I'm so small, the world is so big. And if I don't do this, somebody else will." Our little company made a device for measuring blood pressure noninvasively, which was not available through any other company, and we received an order for it from the U.S. Chemical Warfare Center. We thought hard about it and wrote them a polite letter back saying that we're sorry, but we could not make it available. About a month later I got a letter back from someone who had been one of our customers, a doctor who was now at the Chemical Warfare Center, saying that this matter had come to his attention. He wanted us to know that the research department wanted to use the device in poison studies, and that it would end up by being used in poison centers across the country. Well, I got in touch with him, and first of all, I asked him how it happened to come to his attention, and he said, "Oh, well, your letter was supposed to go on the bulletin board down at the Army Chemical Center with a note above it saying, "Does anybody know these people? Can you get in touch with them?'
WUJEK: "And will they admit it?"
BENJAMIN: So we had a lengthy discussion at one of our lunch meetings about what to do about all of this, because it certainly seemed like you could justify it, and besides that, as usual, we were very poor. Well, the conclusion was that if they would put what the guy had said to me on the phone in writing, that we would sell it to them. So I wrote them another letter back to them saying exactly that, and that was the last we ever heard. Well, the point I'm making of all of this was that in the process, it had upset enough people down there, just our refusal to sell this to them, it must have made a number of people say to themselves secretly, "What am I doing here that is so bad that a company is unwilling to sell us an instrument?"
WUJEK: Good story. Thank you.
MITCHAM: Let me tell another interesting story, the story of my son, who's an engineer. When he graduated from The Polytechnical Institute of New York [Brooklyn] and was interviewing for a job, he asked every single interviewer whether he would be required to work on defense contracts, and he refused, did not want to have to be required to work on defense contracts. Most of the employers who were taken aback by even the question, the ones that were willing to give him the time of day to talk about it, basically told him he had to go elsewhere. Well, the result was that, although he graduated with a degree in computer science and engineering, he became a heating, ventilating and air conditioning engineer and wound up going to Chicago and working with Johnson Controls, a big engineering outfit-and got assigned to doing the new Cook County Jail! He was very shook up by that. They told him that he wouldn't have to work on defense stuff, but then he gets assigned to doing the Cook County Jail. The bottom line is he has quit. They would not give him the opportunity to work on other things.
UNGER: I think it's very reasonable to ask that employers in such a situation respect the engineer's decisions and do the best they can to accommodate them. If it's a large company, presumably they have other kinds of things going on, they ought to feel some obligation to try to find something else for that engineer to do within the company that doesn't violate his moral principals. Failing that, then I guess the next step is to make it, at least allow a graceful withdrawal, maybe give him some reasonable time with pay to look for another job and so forth, to allow him to go somewhere else.
WHITBECK: Actually, that's a topic that many of my students have chosen for their scenarios, took to companies to interview. I remember one student finding that some companies could say to you, "Well, look, we have actually two divisions. This division does government contracts, and this division does consumer goods," and if you worked in a consumer goods division, you don't have to worry. Other companies would say, "No, no, you have to take whatever comes along, so you had better not work here."
KOOPMAN: With the Department of Defense emphasis on off the shelf compliance, it's almost impossible [to determine or predict] what you're going to work on and where it's going to go. You build CPUs for workstations or for PCs, it's going to go into military equipment, there's no doubt about that. This is a very difficult thing. I grew up in the cold war. I have a different perspective than some of you. I don't think it's fair to condemn these specific instances-to make all engineers who happen to be doing something [like military work] feel like they're doing something wrong.
UNGER: I think you have to consider with your own knowledge and your own values whether or not something is inherently so bad that you don't want to have anything to do with promoting it in any sense. Communicating ethics
SWEET: As we see this ethics infrastructure growing exponentially with hotlines and these printed long codes of ethics distributed to employees, and so on, is there some danger of this whole infrastructure getting to be a terribly perfunctory thing that is honored more in the breach than in the observation? Is there anything more we can do to guard against that?
MITCHAM: Let me comment on that as a person who teaches engineering ethics and social issues to engineers on a regular basis. My experience with engineering students is that by and large they want to do something good for humanity and the world as a whole. The problem is that they have blinders on about what the good is. I find that it's useful and helpful to help them reflect more critically about the social context within which they work.
UNGER: Speaking of students, you might be interested to know that for the original IEEE ethics code, the 1974 version, the initial draft of that came from students of mine in my technology and society seminar. . .
BUD ELDON: Are you aware, then, of the one single difference between the '74 code and the '79 code? The '79 code says, instead of the last word being "engineers," it says, "IEEE members in the discharge of their responsibility to employers, to clients, and to the community. . ." That is the difference, meaning it is an IEEE code, not an "engineers code."
WALT ELDEN: Why was it necessary to go through these evolutions-'74, '79, and then '90?
UNGER: The 1990 code was the initiative of Emerson Pugh, the IEEE president at that time, and he wanted to see something that was more concise than the previous code.
BUD ELDON: How does it work right now? What are the deficiencies, if there are any?
UNGER: I think brevity in itself is a virtue. If a code is shorter, it's more likely that people will look at it.
WALT ELDEN: What I'd like to see supplementing that is a broader document with some guidelines We have no guiding documents. I think it would be helpful to get some precedents from the past 20 years. We have practically none to draw upon.
WHITBECK: I think Walter's points are well-taken. If you try to apply as brief a code as this, I think it would be terribly difficult.
MITCHAM: I think it's a good code of ethics. I find this easier to teach with my students than the '79 code. I use it more. It's more able to be communicated.
SWEET: Are there any other situations in which a case-oriented approach might be an effective way of discussing and communicating ethical standards?
WHITBECK: Education is certainly not something that is limited to the university, and what we have do is put it out there in a way that's readily available to practicing engineers. Let's face it. When you joined your organization, did you immediately sit down and read the policies? No, you didn't. You looked up stuff when you needed to, when you had issues to address. Now that's the way ethics education happens in one's own experience, and a fair amount of it is what you might call "just in time" ethics. Summing up. . .
UNGER: Let me try to summarize some of the things we have discussed. Certainly one point is that it would be very valuable to compile case studies based on both real and fictional cases. I believe we generally agreed that we ought to be doing what we can do to strengthen the ethics support machinery, such as the hotline, and the work from the Member Conduct Committee. We might consider an award. As far as education goes, we see this as a process that should begin at the university level but continue throughout the career of an engineer, just as in technical areas, education is a lifelong process. There's agreement that engineers ought to think carefully about particular situations where they're invited to perform some job or asked to perform some job. They should at least consider whether the end purposes are consistent with their own values.
Spectrum editor: SWEET [link to Whitbeck's website to be incorporated into text] [sidebar, toward end] The IEEE Ethics Code [quotes to go with photos]
UNGER: "I think you have to consider with your own knowledge and your own values whether or not something is inherently so bad that you don't want to have anything to do with promoting it in any sense."
ELDON: "With all due respect, also many times when you go into that sort of situation [where an engineer thinks terms of a contract cannot be met], many times it becomes a challenge for engineers to figure a way to make it happen the way you want it to happen."
ELDEN: "So I was set up, and a case was brought against me by the company. I resigned and really went into shock. That's when I got involved with Steve, and we formed the Member Conduct Committee."
WUJEK: "Like most of these documents it's full of 'whereas's' and so on, but the key thing from my point of view, is one, we now provide help for engineers, a hotline. . ."
BENJAMIN: "Just our refusal to sell this to them, it must have made a number of people say to themselves secretly, 'What am I doing here that is so bad that a company is unwilling to sell us an instrument?' " or You can't weasel out by saying, 'Oh, well, I'm so small, the world is so big. And if I don't do this, somebody else will.' "
KOOPMAN: "I grew up in the cold war. I have a different perspective than some of you. I don't think it's fair to condemn these specific instances-to make all engineers who happen to be doing something [like military work] feel like they're doing something wrong." or "If the daily operations are such that they compromise your integrity just a little bit every time you do something-even on the little things like filling out time cards-what happens with the bigger things?"
MITCHAM: "My experience with engineering students is that by and large they want to do something good for humanity and the world as a whole. The problem is that they have blinders on about what the good is."
WHITBECK: "When you joined your organization, did you immediately sit down and read the policies? No, you didn't. You looked up stuff when you needed to, when you had issues to address. Now that's the way ethics education happens in one's own experience, and a fair amount of it is what you might call 'just in time' ethics."
[optional photos/quotes from Slovick and Sweet] Slovick: "We have had a couple of interesting examples of infrastructure for dealing with ethical issues. Can we hear something about what your own experience has been?"
SWEET:"Is there some danger of this whole infrastructure getting to be a terribly perfunctory thing that is honored more in the breach than in the observation?"