Allowing Defective Chips to Go to Market A production line engineer, Shane, checks every chip for quality control (QC). His workers find errors approximately every 150 chips. They estimate that allowing defective chips on the market will yield a $425,000 profit for the company.
Underbidding the Job A company is asked to perform detail design and engineering/construction management for a new water supply system for the city of Cesspool, USA. The system will serve about 50 thousand residences. This job has an estimated constructed value of between $10M-$15M.
Risk, Tradeoffs, and Informed Consent: "The Hundred-Year Flood" Recently, the 100-year flood plain (hereafter referred to as the "flood plain") for the Zilch River has been estimated by the state's waterway engineers. The estimates are based on historical records, such as weather data, newspaper accounts, and interviews with long-time residents of the communities along the river's course.
Index to Problems Integrated with Ethical Issues These problems were originally developed as part an NSF-funded project to create numerical problems that raise ethical issues for use in engineering and other course assignment.
Relevant Literature on this Topic
Joseph R. Herkert, ed. 1999. Social, Ethical and Policy Implications of Engineering: Selected Readings. Piscataway, New Jersey: IEEE Press (in press). Other keywords for this: consumer safety; design and the environment; ethical codes and guidelines from professional societies; ethics and the law; ethics support; global environmental issues; medical information; negligence, privacy; product quality; professional responsibility; professional societies; technical and scholarly societies; professionalism in computing; public safety; risk assessment; safety & performance; system security; whistleblowing.
Joseph R. Herkert. 1998. "Sustainable Development, Engineering and Multinational Corporations: Ethical and Public Policy Implications." Science and Engineering Ethics 4 (3): 333-346. Reprinted in CHEMTECH, November, 1998: 47-53. Other keywords for this: design and the environment; ethical codes and guidelines from professional societies; global environmental issues; professional responsibility; professional societies; technical and scholarly societies.
W. Bakker and M. C. Loui, "Can designing and selling low-quality products be ethical?," Science and Engineering Ethics, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 153-170, April 1997. Condensed version: M. C. Loui, "The engineer's responsibility for quality," Science and Engineering Ethics, vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 347-350, July 1998. Other keywords for this: design process; responsibility for product quality; consumer/consumption information; corporate ethics.
Christelle Didier, "L'aÈrotrain ou la tragÈdie de Jean Bertin," in Christelle Didier, Annie Gireaux-Geneaux, and Bertrand HÈriard Dubreuil. Ethique industrielle: Textes pour un dÈbat, Editions De Boeck universitÈ, Bruxelles, 1998, pp. 323-337. Other keywords for this: ethics and prudence; self-deception; ambiguity; invention.