Engineering and Ethics

Abstract

dominated the study of society, more questions of ethics and public policy appear. Policy makers want to know the values woven into technical issues. Sometimes, though, the lists of values seem simply tacked onto the science. There ought to be a field of policy criticism and political criticism that is more in tune with the humanities than the sciences-inexact, qualitative, evaluative, particular, yet trained and disciplined-like literary or art criticism and in which there are standards, excellences, and a kind of rigor but not efforts to achieve the exact knowledge of scientific testing. In a sense such a field already exists in political commentary and editorial writing, but its existence is not fully acknowledged, worked out, or in possession of an intellectual homeland.