Lisa Newton

Engineering Ethics: Looking Back, Looking Forward

The eight pieces constituting this Meeting Report are summaries of presentations made during a panel session at the 2011 Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE) annual meeting held between March 3rd and 6th in Cincinnati. Lisa Newton organized the session and served as chair. The panel of eight consisted both of pioneers in the field and more recent arrivals. It covered a range of topics from how the field has developed to where it should be going, from identification of issues needing further study to problems of training the next generation of engineers and engineering-ethics scholars.

Birth, Life, Death

This chapter tracks the crucial initial cases and concerns in the development of Bioethics in the United States, from the ethical tangles surrounding the manipulation of cells, technology-assisted reproduction, abortion, care for the impaired infant, on to the decisions regarding death, withholding of interventions, and assisted suicide.

Coming to Value Nature

This chapter steps back to consider the many orientations to the natural environment, aiming not at praising one or the other, but at permitting an analytic understanding of the ethical differences among them. Some directions that corporations and citizens might take to continue the progress noted in the last chapter are suggested.

Allocation of Health Care Resources

This chapter looks at the currently intractable justice problems of health care distribution: the explosion of health care costs, the vastly unequal access to health care, the disconnect between patient responsibility and medical decision-making, the perverse incentives embedded in the location of health care in the private sector. A solution is proposed and described, returning monitoring of health to the local public health facilities; discussion indicates the low probability of adoption.

Business Hears the Call

The positive response of American business to the demands of environmental sustainability is traced, from the earliest cases where technological sophistication made environmentally-friendly products and processes a major goal of manufacturing through to the new emphasis on “sustainable development.” New paradigms emerge in the relation of business to the natural environment—biomimicry, the preservation of biodiversity, the orientation to “biophilia,” and ultimately William McDonough’s replacement of “cradle to grave” with “cradle to cradle.”