Line Drawing is an important instrument for ethics case analysis, a solution to an ethical problem remains unclear even after identifying their facts, concepts, and ethical issues. To handle such a problem situation, it sometimes helps to compare it to other cases. Line drawing involves envisioning similar cases, the extremes of which contain cases that can clearly be solved and the problem situation fits somewhere within the extremes.

For example, in a problem situation dealing with an ethically questionable gift, a gift worth $5,000 may matter much more than a gift worth $50.

A general procedure for line drawing would consist of steps to: 

•  Identify major aspects of the problem situation such as facts, concepts, and ethical issues.
•  From among those, take aspects that can be modelled with ranges, thus establishing dimensions
• For each dimension, identify relevant ranges (e.g. in the example above, $50 to $5,000 may be an interesting range, while raising the upper limit to $50,000 may not make much difference);
• Pick cases (either actual or hypothetical or both, but with clear resolutions) that do not differ from the problem situation in terms of any facts other than those that fall in the dimensions. The cases should span the range of the dimensions;
• Rank the problem situation and the other cases along the dimensions. 

Case Study 

As a case study to study to I will use case 41 Oil Spill from Engineering Ethics to illustrate the line drawing method 

Peter had been working with Bigness Oil for several years, and he has established a strong, trusting relationship with the manager of the local facility. The facility, on Peter’s recommendations, has followed all of the environmental regulations to the letter, and it has a solid reputation with the state regulatory agency. The local facility receives various petrochemical products via pipelines and tank trucks, and it blends them for resale to the private sector. 

Jesse has been so pleased with peter that he has recommended that peter be retained as the corporate consulting engineer. This would be a significant advancement for Peter’s steady and impressive rise in the firm. There is talk of a vice-presidency in a few years. 

One day, over coffee, Jesse starts telling Peter a story about a mysterious loss in one of the raw petrochemicals he receives by pipeline. Sometime during the 1950s, when operations were more lax, a loss in one of the process chemicals was discovered when the books were audited. There were apparently 10,000 gallons of the chemical missing. After running pressure tests on the pipelines, the plant manager found that one of the pipes had corroded and had been leaking the chemical into the ground. After stopping the leak, the company sank observation and sampling wells and found that the product was sitting in vertical plume, slowly diffusing into a deep aquifer. Because there was no surface or groundwater pollution off the plant property, the plant manager decided to do nothing. Jesse thought that somewhere under the plant there still sits this plume, although the last test from the sampling wells showed that the concentration of the chemical in the groundwater within 400 feet of the surface was essentially zero. The wells were capped, and the story never appeared in the press. 

Peter is taken aback by this apparently innocent revelation. He recognizes that state law requires him to report all spills, but what about spills that occurred years ago, where the effects of the spill seem to have dissipated? He frowns and says to Jesse, “We have to report this spill to the state, you know.” 

Jesse is incredulous. “But there is no spill. If the state made us look for it, we probably could not find it; and even if we did, it makes no sense what-ever to pump it out or contain it in any way.” 

“But the law says that we have to report….,” replies Peter.

“Hey, look. I told you this in confidence. Your own engineering code of ethics requires client confidentiality. And what would be the good of going to the state? There is nothing to be done. The only thing that would happen is that the company would get into trouble and have to spend useless dollars to correct a situation that cannot be corrected and does not need remediation.”

“But…..”

“Peter, let me be frank. If you go to the state with this, you will not be doing anyone any good not the company, not the environment, and certainly not your own career. I cannot have a consulting engineer who does not value client loyalty.” 

Line Drawing 

In this case it is not clear what peter should do, if Peter decides to use line-drawing as a method to help solve the problem he will need to identify the points that make informing the state the right or wrong decision these may be: 

• Size of the spill
• Law
• Personal gain
• Time since spill
• Reliability of source
• If the problem can be solved
• Impact to public
• Impact to environment 

Peter should then place these into positive and negative paradigms. Peter should then find where his case fits between these two paradigms, and use this as a way to decide if he should go to the government. In the positive paradigm I will place reasons not to go to the state and in the negative reasons to go to the state. 

Positive paradigm                                                               Negative Paradigm

Small spill                    ————————————–X-         Large spill

No legal obligation     ————————————–X-         Legal obligation

No personal gain         ————————————–X-         Large personal gain

Happened long ago     -X————————————–         Recent event

Unreliable source       —-X———————————–          Reliable source

Hard to solve               ——-X———————————         Easy to solve 

No harm to public     ————–Unknown—————        Harmful to public

No harm to              ————– Unknown —————          Harmful to environment Environment 

Decision

From the above data Peter can see that the solution to the problem may be to check out the facts for himself before doing anything, since this happened about 50 years ago it is unlikely that anyone involved still works with Bigness Oil. Jesse himself must have heard of this second hand this could be just a rumour started in the company. It’s unlikely that if this happened that a record of it would have been kept so the only option for Peter if he wants to check this out would be to find and open one of these capped wells to check the water for himself. Peter also realises that the info on environment and public health is unknown as from the story it seems people assumed the aquifer had no outlet where it may affect have an impact. 

Conclusion 

In the above example Peter can objectively look at the facts without being overly influenced by the size of the spill or his career, he can then see that this story may just be a story, but one that if true could be a major problem.

Seventy-three seconds into the January 1986 flight of the space shuttle Challenger, the craft exploded, killing the seven astronauts aboard. Videotapes released by NASA showed that a few seconds before the explosion, an unusual plume of fire and smoke could be seen spewing from the lower section of the shuttle’s right solid-fuel rocket. It was generally assumed and NASA did little to disturb this opinion that all aboard died the moment the external tank blew up. NASA later conceded it was likely that at least three of the crewmen aboard remained conscious after the explosion, and perhaps even throughout the few minutes it took for the crew compartment of the shuttle to fall back to Earth and slam into the Atlantic Ocean. The agency was highly secretive about matters relating to the Challenger tragedy, actively fighting in the courts media requests to be allowed access to photos of the wreckage, the details of the settlements made with the crews’ families, or the autopsy reports.
Not everyone aboard died the exact second the external tank exploded. A complete understanding of exactly what happened in that cabin after the explosion remains elusive because the impact of the crash, plus the six weeks the wreckage and bodies spent in the sea, made it impossible to determine precisely when and how everybody aboard died. If the cabin depressurized immediately, the crew would have lived about 6 to 15 seconds after the blast; if not, they might have survived for the full two minutes and forty-five seconds it took the cabin to fall 65,000 feet back to Earth. They most certainly could not have lived through the crushing 207 mph impact with the waters off the Florida coast.

Roger Boisjoly

Roger Boisjoly was an engineer who worked for Morton Thiokol, the manufacturer of the solid rocket boosters for the space shuttle program. In July, 1985 Boisjoly wrote a memo about the faulty design of the solid rocket boosters which if not solved could cause a major disaster such a disaster happened less than a year later with the challenger space shuttle. According to Boisjoly’s research there was a problem in which the first of a system of 2 O-Rings would fail and would damage the second O-Ring. Boisjoly found that the amount of damage to the O-Ring was dependant on the time it took to warm up so the colder the starting temp the more likely it was that the O-Rings would fail. Boisjoly realized that if the second O-Ring were to fail that it would result in the loss of the shuttle and crew. The weather forecast for the 28 of January was -1 °C the minimum temperature permitted for launch.

Morton Thiokol

The memo that Boisjoly sent to his managers in Morton Thiokol was ignored it is believed that the management was more concerned with a new contract worth up to $1 Billion than the potential risk to the shuttle, crew or public. the management of Morton Thiokol feared that raising concerns about the safety of the shuttles that would delay launches and may cause them to lose the new contract. After several more memos they set up a taskforce that included Roger Boisjoly to investigate but after a month he realized that the taskforce had no power, no resources and no management support. Eventually, in late 1985 Boisjoly advised his managers that – if the problem was not fixed, there was a distinct chance that a shuttle mission would end in disaster. No action was taken.

11:39am

There was a burst of static on the air to ground loop in Mission Control, the television screens showed a cloud of smoke and water vapour where challenger had been.

Flight director Jay Greene prompted his flight dynamics officer for info he responded “the (radar) filter has discreting sources”. This was another indication that challenger had broken up.

A minute later, the ground controller reported “negative contact loss of downlink”(radio and telemetry data from challenger.

Jay Greene ordered his team to “watch your data carefully”

Steve Nesbitt, public affairs officer reported:”flight controllers here are looking very carefully at the situation. Obviously a major malfunction. We have no downlink” paused then said “We have a report from the Flight Dynamics Officer that the vehicle has exploded”

Greene then put contingency procedures into effect at Mission Control these included:

• Locking the doors of the control centre
• Shutting down telephone communications
• Ensuring the relevant data was recorded and preserved

Commissions

A commission was setup to investigate the accident. The Presidential Commission found the O-Rings too be the cause of the accident. A latter house committee hearing agreed with the technical causes of the accident but suggested the following contributing causes.

Case Study

Since after this the changes in NASA were only superficial (the same thing happened again a few years later) the only things to come out of this are that Roger Boisjoly got a new job and lectures got a case study. I guess that’s what seven lives and a space shuttle get you these days. 

In the following report I will look at the arguments for and against using a human cadaver as a test subject for car safety tests. In particular I will look at this from a utilitarian view and from respect for persons; also I will look at religious views on donating body to science.

Respect for Persons

“do  unto others as you would have them do unto you”

The Respect for persons argument is that these cadavers were once living humans and says that they should be treated with respect and given a proper funeral by there loved ones. The belief is that a human body shouldn’t be treated any differently than it would if the person was still alive.

Religion is often lumped in with this argument but this is mostly because of church being like a book club where no one bothered to read the book but turned up because they were told there would be wine and crackers. So ill deal with religion separately.

Utilitarian

“the greatest good for the greatest number of people”

Utilitarianism is the idea that the outcome of on action is justified if more people benefited than suffered from the action. In relation to this we look at the research of Albert King. Albert King is a researcher who in 1995 calculated the number of human lives saved as a result of cadaver research.   As a result of design changes implemented since 1987 cadaver research has:

• saved 8500 lives annually
• each year 61 people survive due to wearing seat belts
• 147 live due to air bags
• 68 survive windshield impact

From this we can see that using cadavers in crash tests has had an impact on the safety of cars and a real impact on humans living through car crashes.

Child protection is hampered by the lack of information about children’s tolerance to Impact. The  only way to provide that data is to perform experiments on children.  Which at the moment, none of   the major car producing nations will permit. As a result of these tests being neglected children are put at needless risk daily. From a utilitarian point of view the suffering of the parents of children being used in crashes is small compared to those who lose a child in a car crash.

Religion and Body Donation

All major religion except Islam approve of organ and body donation as a charitable act of giving. Most express that it is an individual decision. People are often unaware of the attitudes of their faith toward donation, you would think that someone who based there whole belief system around one book would make the time to actually read it. Although specific teachings and requirements related to donation vary, there is a general agreement that donating your body to benefit others demonstrates love for other people.

“any act that can save a life, such as organ donation, is a great thing and quite acceptable within our faith.”

Pope John Paul II

“We honor those people who donate their bodies and organs to the advancement of medical science and to saving lives.”

Reverend Gyomay Masao, president and founder of The Buddhist Temple of Chicago

As far as the religious argument against body donation is concerned preventing the death or suffering of others is held in the highest regard by all faiths. Ultimately, the choice to do so, according to the various religions, is yours.

Conclusion

The uses of cadavers in all sorts of tests are a big advantage to science and save human lives to the point where there use must not be abandoned. Cadavers have been used in labs, test sites, and body farms for years but the issue of respect has always come up. One of the ways that cadavers are used the way a body is respected is as follows:

• All that the labs are told about their specimens is the date they died, what they died from and how old they were when they passed away.
• The heads of cadavers are shaved to make them seem less human and more like laboratory specimens, Esquivel said.
• Instead of names, the cadavers are given identification numbers, printed on small metal discs clipped to the ears.

This dehumanization is not a good compromise for some people. What may be a better option is some variation (maybe less extreme) of the method use by the Tzu Chi University’s medical school in Taiwan.

In this school the students meet the cadavers relatives and before the students here wield their scalpels, they will know the dead intimately, composing poems and slide shows to them, writing their biographies and sometimes lighting incense in their honor. When they are finished, the students will carry the donors’ coffins to the crematory, mourning them as their “silent mentors” who taught them with their bodies.

This I feel would solve a lot of the respect concerns by giving the cadavers credit for the contribution they made, and showing the family how much the gift given was appreciated.

The issue of privacy is becoming an ever increasing concern that engineers need to take into consideration. With the increase in software applications and the amount of information the public is willing to hand over to computers, engineers never before had access to such a large and varied amount of information, or had to design secure system to handle this info. The Engendering Code of Ethics for The Institution of Engineers of Ireland while not mentioning privacy directly makes indirect references as in:

1.1

Members shall behave with integrity and objectivity in their relationships with colleagues, clients, employers, employees and with society in general.

or:

1.9

At all times in their relations with the public, Members shall apply their skill and experience to the common good and the advancement of human welfare with proper regard for the safety, health and welfare of the public. A Member shall not engage in any activity which he/she knows or has reasonable grounds for believing is likely to result in a serious detriment to any person or persons.

One reason the issue of privacy is so contentious in engineering is that engineer will create a system that gathers the information, but is rarely in a position to decide how the information should be used. When asked to design a new system engineers should consider the clients privacy policy and their track record of sticking to it.

3.1

 Members shall not engage in conduct which is dishonest or illegal or which may bring the Institution or the profession into disrepute or which may prejudice the Institution or the profession…

Privacy and the Law

Over the past few years privacy has become a major legal issue countries and law that were not clear or in some cases even needed before the wide spread use of the internet are now being put in place and clarified. The objectives of these laws differ from place to place but in general are to:

• Insure information is secure
• Insure  information is used only for the purpose it was gathered
• Not pass information to third parties

Even with these new laws there are still gray legal areas like dealing with countries with no privacy laws or governments that practice censorship. One example where privacy lost to law was in 2005 when Yahoo supplied information to China, which resulted in the arrest of Shi Tao, age 37, for 10 years. Yahoo states that they were following Chinese law. Other large companies (Google, Microsoft, AOL, Skype ….) also have in the past been under legal obligation to give information to the Chinese government, but most have moved there information to servers outside China to avoid it happening again. Yahoo on the other hand has said that they will not protect the privacy and confidentiality of its Chinese customers from the authorities. Senior vice president at Yahoo Michael Callahan said he could not even tell Congress how often it opened its files to the Chinese government because that information would violate Chinese law. “We no longer operate the company on a day-to-day basis”.

While technologically and financially you [Yahoo] are giants, morally you are pygmies

—Tom Lantos, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee (2007)

Human rights advocates such as Human Rights Watch and media groups such as Reporters Without Borders state that it is “ironic that companies whose existence depends on freedom of information and expression have taken on the role of censor.”

Privacy and Human Rights

While the above example shows how people who collect large amounts of data can damage human rights by working with governments, it is these companies that are in the best position to help the identify and locate local hate groups or against strict governments who censor content. One example that done both is Google’s Orkut.

Orkut was very popular in Iran, but the web site is now blocked by the government. The official statement from Iran is that this is due “to national security issues, and Islamic ethical issues about dating and match-making”. Orkut made no attempt to stop Iran’s citizens using the site, and some believe that they may have been behind some of the proxy sites that allowed people to bypass the governmental blockage such as orkutproxy.com. Due either to lack of compliance and possibly some covert defiance it took a long time for Iran to censor Orkut, but now it’s almost impossible to access Orkut from inside Iran. Since the blockage other social-networking sites have appeared in Iran most using the same model as Orkut but are heavily censored by the government. Other Islamic states have also blocked Orkut the reason for the bans seem to be Orkut’s unwillingness to censor dating and related content. Orkut entered agreements with law enforcement in India and Brazil to deal with drug traffickers/dealers and hate groups that use the network.

Conclusion

The issue of privacy is so complicated because of conflicting moral views on how it should be used. While most people would if asked say that be used for only the purpose it was gathered and would be angered by its use to silence government opposition, I feel many would accept its use to prevent crime, hate groups, and child porn sites. There is no clear cut rules for the engineer as to how to deal with privacy issues, not sharing info can be as damaging as Yahoo’s open book deal with China. Maybe the answer is more in line with Orkut where what information Orkut shares with authorities seems to be more based on their own values then on local laws.

In the past I would have had a lot of experience with team work as for about 4 years I worked part time as a waiter in hotel function rooms. Where two or three times (+) a week we had the pleasure of setting up, serving and clearing a room that could hold over 1000 drunken idiots. In this job where people who get very stressed, couldn’t handle pressure or freak out when something goes wrong don’t normally last their first night. So the team was quite relaxed and well formed, in general whoever started the task took charge and directed anyone else who came on board. I have little experience in my past of being at the forming stage of team development as any teams I have joined were long running and well started before I joined. Even when in school as I went to a gaelscoil although people left it was rare to have someone new join, so we went from primary to leaving cert with the same group

Killaloe

The teams/groups I have been involved with in the past have been well formed and laid back, this give me little ability to interact with the grope in killaloe. I am more familiar with a situation where if someone says “I can do this” they normally can, and while this was the case with Wheeler and the nails and Roisin with the rings, the words were more often a prelude to chaos. I don’t feel I was of much help to the team in Killaloe as I held back too long and didn’t offer much advice or input in the tasks. This may have been partly because I was new to the class and didn’t know them that well, but I am (as anyone who saw my presentation knows) not a naturally outgoing person. In the future I should try to be more active in the team as this would benefit both the team and myself.

Feedback

After a task was finished by the group we were given feedback by the guide on how we did and we should do to improve. This advice was very helpful and I feel was taken by the group as a whole, because as we finished more tasks we had more success and worked better as a team.

Summary

When taking part in teams in the future there are a few things I found that I need to work on the biggest is that I need to be more active and speak up more, but also I should keep in mind the different stages of group development.

• Forming
• Storming
• Norming
• Performing

In particular the early stages as I am much less familiar with these.

On Mon 21^st Sep I gave a 5min presentation to the class on scuba diving with Q & A after, and put a note on my blog asking for feedback. I was nervous in doing this presentation as it is not something I do often. In my feedback I was told that I wasn’t loud enough to be heard at the back this is a problem I have had in the past and will have to work on in the future.

Topic

The topic I picked was scuba diving I picked this because it’s a topic I am familiar whit as I have been involved with it in the past and recently started back by joining the UL sub aqua club. As a topic this may have been too big a topic. I may have been better to pick an area in diving that I am directly involved with like shore or wreck diving as each discipline can take hours of training and classes it is rare that someone who isn’t diving professionally would have a good knowledge of them all.

Structure

After reading Colin’s comments on other students blogs I noticed that the structure was something that wasn’t been done well, so I did start out trying to concentrate on the structure. I put the first draft of my presentation together with structure in mind and felt that while it may not have been perfect I felt it was a reasonable attempt, until I realized that I was going from hazard into plugging the club. Not wanting to stand in front of the class and say “this is how you could die, and this is where you can sign up” I decided to move a few things around. The end result was that for very little gain the only thing left of my original structure was that the history of diving was still at the start.

Time

I don’t do many presentations but from the few I have done I have found that I try to race through them and get them over with. I realized before the presentation that me racing through would affect my time more than content. As a result I did my best to pace myself and not rush through the presentation. While I am not sure how I done for time I do feel that I didn’t rush as much as I previously had. One negative that I noticed in my comments was from Danny who said “didn’t vary your tone enough“this may be due to me watching my time and is something I’ll have to watch for in future.

Slides & Pictures

For my slides I focused on summing things up in bullet points and keep the amount of text to a min to get my point across. I also spent a bit of time online looking for pictures that illustrated my points. The feedback I got from my slides and picture was mostly positive. I was a bit worried that the text would be hard to read but there didn’t seem to be any problems. While I am well aware that I should be looking for way to improve my slides I feel I have enough things to improve in my overall presentation skills so for now I am latching onto this as

1. Something I done well
2. Something that went to plan

I’ll start my improving from the bottom and work my way up.

Q & A

I have to admit that I was a little thrown by Q&A section because while I felt that I could answer most questions on sport diving, the questions tended to be on things I know of rather than know about such as rescue diving this is a qualification awarded by the international professional body and as I have only ever belonged to recreational dive clubs I would not have had much contact with that side of the sport. There is a lot to the sport and each field requires additional training both practical and theory so as I said at the start I would have been better to have done a presentation on one or two fields rather than giving an overview of the sport as a whole.

Summary

From the feedback I got and my own impressions I feel that those that could hear me found my presentation interesting and those that couldn’t liked the pictures, so something for everyone a great presentation. I will admit that the possibility exists that if I spoke up, relaxed, wasn’t so nervous, wasn’t so concerned about time and reduced the range of my topic it may have been even better. I guess I’ll just have to watch out for those few points in the future.