The purpose of having a “Code of Ethics is to hold ourselves to a certain standard and recognize that with great power comes great responsibility. As engineers in some cases the things we make decide life or death depending on the quality of our work. It is important to understand that cutting corners and doing things unethically is wrong and in some cases outright dangerous and should be avoided at all costs. When faced with an ethical dilemma I like to make my thought process fairly straight forward. I examine the problem and determine what the problem is. From there I decide the course of action that will produce the least amount of harm. To do so I weigh human costs and material costs, human usually outweigh all material costs.
From there I make the decision with the least cost associated with it. While I would love for everything to be quite cut and dry as with all things involving other people things are never that simple.
In my group we discussed the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. I felt that my group members introduced somewhat similar ethical considerations to what I had been thinking of. We were able to gain consensus that from an ethical standpoint the launch should have been postponed when they had information that the flight could have been compromised. Some chose to play devil’s advocate and mentioned the notion that millions of dollars were resting on the successful launch of Columbia. I would say to a certain extend we were able to comfortably say that the most ethical decision would have been to postpone the launch.
I believe the three ethical virtues which relate to this case are Integrity, Responsibility and Fidelity. I made my determinations because of the following reasons: I chose Integrity because the disaster could have been averted if the managers in charge of the launch would have had the discipline to put the lives of their astronauts over the success of a launch. I chose Responsibility for very similar reasons to why I chose Integrity, the managers at NASA had a responsibility to make the right ethical call even if it was hard and unpopular. Fidelity is important because the culture at NASA cultivated “Go Fever” a term used to describe the desire to complete a project while sometimes disregarding potential problems or mistakes. The other virtues are not any less important than the three that I chose but my selections are simply more relevant to my case study. I would say Prudence is another virtue which was not listed but could also be applied to this case study. With prudence the disaster may have been averted.