Abstract
Abstract This paper centers on a five-month ethnographic field study among engineers in a Danish collaborative industrial robotics project, to examine how the everyday work of engineers intersects with existing, formally-adopted engineering ethics approaches.Methods included a literature review of engineering ethics, participant observation in a technical research institute and in machine workshops, document and visual media analysis, object elicitation, and qualitative interviews. Empirical findings from this investigation are used to evaluate existing formalized engineering ethics in relation to engineering praxis. Juxtaposed with engineers’ everyday ethical decision-making practices, professional ethics approaches are shown to be based in deontological and virtue ethics, narrowly focused on the individual engineer as a professional, and thus inappropriate and insufficient for the very practical field of engineering. The author argues for an alternative direction toward a situated pragmatic and social ethics in engineering that disrupts the current social arrangement around robot development through ethnographic intervention in the engineers’ negotiation of values in the design process.
Highlights
This paper centers on a five-month ethnographic field study among engineers in a Danish collaborative industrial robotics project, to examine how the everyday work of engineers intersects with existing, formally-adopted engineering ethics approaches
From a review of engineering and design literature, including an examination of professional engineering association membership documents, I found that existing formalized attempts at engineering ethics have been neither pragmatic nor social
I have found that professional engineering ethics is prescriptive and narrowly focused on the individual engineer – not fitting the context of development, comprising dynamic and social negotiations, that I observed amongst the engineers in this study
Summary
This paper centers on a five-month ethnographic field study among engineers in a Danish collaborative industrial robotics project, to examine how the everyday work of engineers intersects with existing, formally-adopted engineering ethics approaches. The author argues for an alternative direction toward a situated pragmatic and social ethics in engineering that disrupts the current social arrangement around robot development through ethnographic intervention in the engineers’ negomission dedicated 700 million euros to robotics research and development projects [3]. With such economic and political interest in robotics and relatively high stakes, the moment is right for a reevaluation of engineering ethics approaches. Philosopher and STS (Science and Technology Studies) scholar Heinz Luegenbiehl (1983) argued that the narrow focus on engineers as professionals neglected to consider engineers as practitioners: Open Access. alone 4.0 License
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