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Title: Reflections on the History of Engineering in the United States : A Preface to Engineering Ethics
Creator: Davis, Michael
Date: 2005, 1992-11-19
Publisher: Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions, IIT
Description: This paper traces the history of the profession of engineering in the United States as a way to gain a better understanding of the field of...
Show moreThis paper traces the history of the profession of engineering in the United States as a way to gain a better understanding of the field of engineering and of engineering ethics.
Lecture at the Center for Academic Ethics and College of Engineering, Wayne State University. Detroit, Michigan. 19 November 1992
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Title: Davis Discussant Remarks - APPE 2010
Creator: Davis, Michael
Date: 2010-05, 2010-03
Publisher: National Academy of Engineering
Description: Remarks by Dr. Michael Davis as part of the panel "Engineering and Social Justice: What are the Difficulties, What are the Possibilities? as...
Show moreRemarks by Dr. Michael Davis as part of the panel "Engineering and Social Justice: What are the Difficulties, What are the Possibilities? as part of a mini conference at the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics Annual Meeting entitled, "Engineering Towards a More Just and Sustainable World
Sponsorship: Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, National Academy of Engineering, Center for Engineering, Ethics and Society
Results from APPE Mini-Conference: Engineering towards a More Just and Sustainable World Cincinnati, Ohio March 6 – 7, 2010
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Title: Five Kinds of Ethics Across the Curriculum : An Introduction to Four Experiments with One Kind
Creator: Davis, Michael
Date: 2009, 2004
Publisher: Philosophy Documentation Center
Description: Since 1991, the National Science Foundation has made three large grants to the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at the...
Show moreSince 1991, the National Science Foundation has made three large grants to the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at the Illinois Institute of Technology to offer workshops to help faculty integrate ethics into technical courses across the curriculum. We called what we were doing "ethics across the curriculum". This paper seeks to to explain what ethics across the curriculum represents, and what it does not represent. Namely, it is not morality across the curriculum, moral theory across the curriculum, social ethics across the curriculum, or professional ethics across the curriculum.
Teaching Ethics, Vol. 4, Issue 2, pp.1-14
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Title: Getting an Ethics Charge Out of Current Events : Some Doubts About Katrina
Creator: Davis, Michael
Date: 2006, 2006
Publisher: Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions, IIT
Description: The author discusses why he believes that Hurricane Katrina, which is certainly the biggest engineering disaster in the history of the United...
Show moreThe author discusses why he believes that Hurricane Katrina, which is certainly the biggest engineering disaster in the history of the United States, is not a good case for teaching engineering ethics. This is for three major reasons. First, there is the question of what happened. Second, there is the question of what part engineers had in what happened, which decisions were theirs and which belonged to elected or appointed officials who were not engineers. Third, there is the question of what part engineering ethics had, or should have had, in the decisions engineered did make. We lack any dramatic moment such as the Challenger Disaster provided, a moment when ethics mattered in a way that is both precise and interesting.
resentation at the American Society of Engineering Education Annual Conference. Hyatt Regency, Chicago, IL. June 20, 2006.
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Title: What Engineering Societies Can Do About Ethics
Creator: Davis, Michael
Date: 2006, 1988-09-27
Publisher: Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions, IIT
Description: This talk looks at how engineering societies can promote ethical practice and discussion about ethics among their members. After some remarks...
Show moreThis talk looks at how engineering societies can promote ethical practice and discussion about ethics among their members. After some remarks about how engineers commonly handle ethical issues that come up within organizations, especially in instances when raising ethical issues with managers such as the Challenger Shuttle Explosion, the author goes on to discuss how engineering societies can promote continuing education in ethics, hold roundtable discussions between engineers and managers, and promote open communication in workplaces.
Address given at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. Chicago Area Combined Section Meeting, 27 September 1988.
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Title: Conflict of Interest: What's to Worry?
Creator: Davis, Michael
Date: 2008, 5/10/1994
Description: Michael Green's "Culture, Self, and Ethical Paradigms" is a daring paper. Though we must finally reject its argument and suspend judgement on...
Show moreMichael Green's "Culture, Self, and Ethical Paradigms" is a daring paper. Though we must finally reject its argument and suspend judgement on its conclusions, it has much to teach us about the possible relationships between business ethics and surrounding culture.
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Title: Technology, Values, and Ethics : A Framework
Creator: Davis, Michael
Date: 2006, 1992-02-01
Publisher: Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions, IIT
Description: Three words of my title--"technology", "values", and "ethics"--have this in common: they have all been used in enough different ways to be...
Show moreThree words of my title--"technology", "values", and "ethics"--have this in common: they have all been used in enough different ways to be dangerous. To provide the framework my title promises, I shall have to distinguish the most important of those uses, set them in context, and explain how they are (or are not) related. This conceptual housecleaning, rather boring in itself, will give me the opportunity to talk about engineering, both its history and practice. That will not be boring.
GTE Lecture University of Wisconsin Center/Fond du Lac October 13, 199
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Title: The Moral Legislature
Creator: Davis, Michael
Date: 2006, 1985-11-05
Publisher: Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions, IIT
Description: This paper is an experiment in what John Rawls recently called "Kantian constructiivism". It seeks to establish a "suitable connection between...
Show moreThis paper is an experiment in what John Rawls recently called "Kantian constructiivism". It seeks to establish a "suitable connection between a particular conception of the person and first principles of [morality] by means of a procedure of construction. Yet, it differs from Rawls' similar efforts in a number of ways. The emphasis is morality generally, not justice in particular. The construction attempts to be more "realistic" especially in substituting external procedures for Rawls' "veil of ignorance". These differences are, I hope, at least suggested by substituting "the moral legislature" for Rawls' "original position". Section I of this paper explains further what motivates the sort of construction proposed, sections II-V describe the moral legislature itself, explaining as well why it makes sense to construct it as I do and how it differs from some obvious alternatives. Section VI concludes with an example of how the moral legislature might be used, the sketch of an argument for the claim that positive law cannot in in generally be morally obliging.
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Title: Conflict of Interest : What's to Worry?
Creator: Davis, Michael
Date: 2008, 1994-05-10
Description: Michael Green's "Culture, Self, and Ethical Paradigms" is a daring paper. Though we must finally reject its argument and suspend judgement on...
Show moreMichael Green's "Culture, Self, and Ethical Paradigms" is a daring paper. Though we must finally reject its argument and suspend judgement on its conclusions, it has much to teach us about the possible relationships between business ethics and surrounding culture.
Presentation given at Holland Laboratory, Rockville, Maryland, May 10, 1994.
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Title: Methodological Missteps: A Response to Brooks' "On Retribution"
Creator: Davis, Michael
Date: 2006, 2006-05-14
Publisher: Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions, IIT
Description: Thom Brooks claims his paper has only one thesis—that, for epistemological reasons (in particular, requiring a “gold standard of desert”), ...
Show moreThom Brooks claims his paper has only one thesis—that, for epistemological reasons (in particular, requiring a “gold standard of desert”), “retributivism is impossible to enact as a practice”. I think the paper has at least two other theses as well, both unacknowledged and more or less independent of the first. One is that there is only one true retributivism (“pure retributivism” or “retributivism strictly speaking”). This claim seems to rest on an unjustified, and (I believe) unjustifiable, Platonism. The second unacknowledged thesis is that this one true retributivism suffers (and must suffer) from certain flaws, in particular: 1) moral rigorism (forbidding the criminal justice system to show mercy or to deviate in any other way from what the criminal deserves for his crime); 2) methodological individualism (requiring that desert be “a particular criminal’s desert” unaffected by “other factors, such as society’s equilibrium”); and 3) methodological absolutism (an inability to “choose punishments on account of how they might be related to each other and various crimes”). What I propose to do here is, first, briefly dispose of Brooks’ epistemological claim, then (at greater length) explain why retributivism is best thought of as a family of loosely related theories no one of which has the privilege of being “true retributivism” (even though some are certainly historically or conceptually closer to the core of retributive thinking than others) and, last, why, so understood, retributivism does not suffer from any of the three flaws Brooks claims true retributivism must suffer from.
Published as part of the Online Philosophy Conference, May 14, 2006.http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/online_philosophy_confere/
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Title: Conflicts of Interest in Engineering
Creator: Davis, Michael, Wells, Paula, Jones, Hardy
Date: 2009, 1986
Publisher: Kendalll/Hunt Publishing Company
Description: This module begins by examining the Hydrolevel case, and uses this as a way to highlight relevant principles regarding conflict of interest in...
Show moreThis module begins by examining the Hydrolevel case, and uses this as a way to highlight relevant principles regarding conflict of interest in engineering, and to discuss the importance of these principles for engineers as professionals and moral agents. The module then considers four applications of these principles drawn from the “Opinions” of the Board of Ethical Review of the National Society of Professional Engineers. The module also includes ten short cases to be used in classroom discussion. It also includes professional codes from the National Society of Professional Engineers and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
Sponsorship: Exxon Education Foundation
The Module Series in Applied Ethics was produced by the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions in under a grant from the Exxon Education Foundation. This series is intended for use in a wide range of undergraduate, graduate, and continuing education programs in such areas as science and/or technology public policy, and professional ethics courses in engineering, business, and computer science.
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Title: Assessing Graduate Student Progress in Engineering Ethics
Creator: Davis, Michael, Feinerman, Alan
Date: 2010-11-10, 2011
Publisher: Springer
Description: Under a grant from the National Science Foundation, the authors (and others) undertook to integrate ethics into graduate engineering classes...
Show moreUnder a grant from the National Science Foundation, the authors (and others) undertook to integrate ethics into graduate engineering classes at three universities—and to assess success in a way allowing comparison across classes (and institutions). This paper describes the attempt to carry out that assessment. Standard methods of assessment turned out to demand too much class time. Under pressure from instructors, the authors developed an alternative method that is both specific in content to individual classes and allows comparison across classes. Results are statistically significant for ethical sensitivity and knowledge. They show measurable improvement in a single semester.
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Title: 'Ain't No One Here But Us Social Forces' : Constructing the Social Responsibility of Engineers.
Creator: Davis, Michael
Date: 2011-04, 2011-06
Publisher: Springer
Description: There are many ways to avoid responsibility, for example, explaining what happens as the work of the gods, fate, society, or the system. For...
Show moreThere are many ways to avoid responsibility, for example, explaining what happens as the work of the gods, fate, society, or the system. For engineers, “technology” or “the organization” will serve this purpose quite well. We may distinguish at least nine (related) senses of “responsibility”, the most important of which are: (a) responsibility-as-causation (the storm is responsible for flooding), (b) responsibility-as-liability (he is the person responsible and will have to pay), (c) responsibility-as-competency (he’s a responsible person, that is, he’s rational), (d) responsibility-as-office (he’s the responsible person, that is, the person in charge), and (e) a responsibility-as-domain-of-tasks (these are her responsibilities, that is, the things she is supposed to do). For all but the causal sense of responsibility, responsibility may be taken (in a relatively straightforward sense)—and generally is. Why then would anyone want to claim that certain technologies make it impossible to attribute responsibility to engineers (or anyone else)? In this paper, I identify seven arguments for that claim and explain why each is fallacious. The most important are: (1) the argument from “many hands”, (2) the argument from individual ignorance, and (3) the argument from blind forces. Each of these arguments makes the same fundamental mistake, the assumption that a certain factual situation, being fixed, settles responsibility, that is, that individuals, either individually or by some group decision, cannot take responsibility. I conclude by pointing out the sort of decisions (and consequences) engineers have explicitly taken responsibility for and why taking responsibility for them is rational, all things considered. There is no technological bar to such responsibility.
Science and Engineering Ethics.
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Title: A Case of "Gray Plagiarism" from the History of the History of Computing
Creator: Davis, Michael
Date: 2006, 2006
Publisher: Plagiary : Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Plagiarism, Fabrication, and Falsfication
Description: Claiming as one's own what one knows to be the discovery of another is certainly plagiarism. But what about merely failing to acknowledge the...
Show moreClaiming as one's own what one knows to be the discovery of another is certainly plagiarism. But what about merely failing to acknowledge the work of another where one does not give the impression that the discovery is one's own? Does it matter how easy it was to make the discovery? This paper analyzes a case in this gray area in academic ethics. The focus is not on the failure to attribute itself but on the attempt of an independent scholar who, believing himself to be the victim of "gray plagiarism”, sought a forum in which to make his complaint. The story could be told from several perspectives. I shall tell it primarily from the perspective of the complainant, an outsider, because I believe that way of telling it best reveals the need to think more deeply about how we (acting for the universities to which we belong) assign credit, especially to scholars outside, and about how we respond when someone complains of a failure to assign credit. My purpose is not to indict individuals but to change a system. This paper updates a case I first described in 1993.
Davis, M. (2006). “Gray Plagiarism”: A Case from the History of the History of Computing. Plagiary: Cross‐Disciplinary Studies in Plagiarism, Fabrication, and Falsification, 1 (7): 1‐18.
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Title: Do the Professional Ethics of Chemists and Engineers Differ ?
Creator: Davis, Michael
Date: 2011, 2002
Publisher: HYLE - International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry
Description: This paper provides a sketch of my general way of understanding professions and then applies that sketch to a specific question, how to...
Show moreThis paper provides a sketch of my general way of understanding professions and then applies that sketch to a specific question, how to distinguish between two very similar professions, chemistry and engineering. I argue that the professional ethics of chemists do differ from the professional ethics of engineers and that the differences are important. The argument requires definition of both ‘ethics’ and ‘profession’ – as well delving into the details of chemistry and engineering.
HYLE – International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry Vol. 8, No . 1 (2002) http://www.hyle.org/journal/issues/8-1/davis.htm
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Title: Ethics in the Details : Communicating Engineering Ethics via Micro-Insertion
Creator: Davis, Michael, Riley, Kathryn, Cox, Apryl, Maciukenas, James
Date: 2009, 2009
Publisher: IEEE
Description: Work is described on a National Science Foundation grant that supports the development, assessment, and dissemination of “micro-insertion”...
Show moreWork is described on a National Science Foundation grant that supports the development, assessment, and dissemination of “micro-insertion” problems designed to integrate ethics into the graduate engineering curriculum. In contrast to traditional modular approaches to ethics pedagogy, micro-insertions introduce ethical issues by means of a “low-dose” approach. Following a description of the micro-insertion approach, we outline the workshop structure being used to teach engineering faculty and graduate students how to write micro-insertions for graduate engineering courses, with particular attention to how the grant develops engineering students’ (and faculty members’) ability to communicate across disciplinary boundaries. We also describe previous and planned methods for assessing the effectiveness of micro-insertions. Finally, we explain the role that technical communication faculty and graduate students are playing as part of the grant team, speciﬁcally in developing an Ethics In-Basket that will disseminate micro-insertions developed during the grant.
IEEE Transactions on Professional Communications Vol. 52, Issue 1, pp. 95-108.
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Title: IIT's Workshops for Integrating Ethics into Technical Courses : Some Lessons Learned
Creator: Davis, Michael
Date: 2006, 2006
Publisher: Philosophy Documentation Center
Description: In 1990, IIT's Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions received a grant of more than $210,000 from the National Science Foundation...
Show moreIn 1990, IIT's Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions received a grant of more than $210,000 from the National Science Foundation to try a campus-wide approach to integrating professional ethics into its technical curriculum; in 1996, the Center received another $100,000 to continue the project, with the emphasis on passing along to other institutions what was learned at IIT; and, in 2000, the Center received a third grant for three years, with the same emphasis, for $244,000. Between 1990 and 2004, more than 160 faculty “graduated” from the workshop and another dozen or so attended as unofficial volunteers. I was the principal investigator under all three grants, but shared the work with three co-PIs, the “we” in what follows. Though I generally prefer to emphasize what we did right, emphasizing what I now think we should have done differently should be more helpful here. There are at least three reasons why that should be so. First, I have already made many presentations, including several in Japan, arguing the (very real) merits of what we did. While repetition can help to make a point, sooner or later, though usually sooner, the effect of repetition ceases to repay the effort. I fear I may have reached that point. Second, I have nowhere before said much about what now seem mistakes —or, at least, lost opportunities. Discussing them here should add to what is known about ethics workshops. Adding to that knowledge seems worthy in itself. Third, you are already committed to ethics across the curriculum. The question before you now is how to carry out that commitment. I believe there is much to learn from our mistakes. We certainly learned much from the mistakes of those whose workshops we studied before undertaking our own. Running that workshop included the following activities: recruiting, scheduling, content, and research. For each activity, I will first briefly explain what we did and then what I now think we should have done.
Teaching Ethics, Vol. 7, Issue 2, 1-14
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Title: Replacement as a Problem for Justification of Preventative Detention
Creator: Davis, Michael
Date: 2011, 2011-04
Publisher: John Jay College of Criminal Justice of The City University of New Yor
Description: What makes Don E. Scheid’s article on indefinite detention interesting is that he thinks through many of the moral issues inherent in...
Show moreWhat makes Don E. Scheid’s article on indefinite detention interesting is that he thinks through many of the moral issues inherent in attempting to prevent (or, rather, keep to a minimum) certain kinds of violent crime, an attempt we have come to call (however unwisely) ‘‘the war on terror.’’ Scheid takes ‘‘war’’ as literally as possible, while making the reasonable assumption that this war, unlike wars generally, is not a temporary expedient responding to a moral emergency but an institution that must operate at full power for a long time, decades at least. Scheid’s argument yields a long list of preconditions for justified indefinite preventive detention: a high standard of dangerousness (‘‘mega-terrorism’’), a reasonable standard of proof of dangerousness, as good an investigation as conditions will allow, adequate resources for the defense, a hearing before a fair and independent tribunal, detention under the most comfortable conditions practical, and periodic review of the detainee’s supposed dangerousness. To these preconditions one more should be added: that detaining the persons in question will reduce the danger posed. I take this additional precondition to follow from Scheid’s own defense of indefinite detention, not from an independent argument. Scheid limits his argument to megaterrorists because the scale of destruction they have already achieved (for example, destruction of the World Trade Center) shows them to be dangerous on a scale ordinary crime is not and so to invite measures of prevention beyond what seems necessary (or proper) for ordinary criminals. Scheid explicitly declines to consider the non-consequentialist argument that preventive detention is what a mega-terrorist deserves for his character or for what he has already done. Scheid’s argument for preventive detention is consequentialist throughout: we may, and should, detain to prevent (or at least substantially reduce the probability of) the large-scale destruction of life that mega-terrorists aim at. We may justifiably deny a few, including some innocent persons, their freedom because, and only because, it makes the rest of us, the great majority, considerably safer. My additional precondition can be defended in the same way: where there is no danger posed, any detention is (all else equal) a net loss in happiness, well being, or whatever reasonable measure of consequences we adopt. A precondition of preventative detention must be a net reduction in danger posed. Where what is proposed is an institution of preventative detention, the institution must have that effect overall. What I shall argue here is that preventive detention generally fails to satisfy this condition and Scheid’s indefinite preventive detention of mega-terrorists always does. An institution to prevent terrorism by detaining terrorists cannot, in practice, significantly reduce the danger terrorism poses.
Criminal Justice Ethics. Vol. 30, No. 1, April 2011, 90-97.
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Title: The Usefulness of Moral Theory in Practical Ethics: A Question of Comparative Cost (A Response to Harris)
Creator: Davis, Michael
Date: 2009, 2009
Publisher: Philosophy Documentation Center
Description: I find myself agreeing with almost everything in Harris’s defense of moral theory except the end: moral theories can often be useful in...
Show moreI find myself agreeing with almost everything in Harris’s defense of moral theory except the end: moral theories can often be useful in resolving moral dilemmas. Both students and practitioners of practical ethics should be constantly reminded of this, because in practical ethics we need all of the help we can get. If (as it seems) these two sentences state the conclusion, Harris has committed a non sequitur. While making a good argument for the general usefulness of moral theory in practical ethics, he has not made any argument for its usefulness to students or practitioners as such. He has simply assumed that what is true of some who engage in practical ethics is true of students and practitioners in particular. In theory, of course, moral theory should be useful even to students and practitioners, helping them to identify issues they might have overlooked, to seek information they might otherwise not have thought relevant, and to formulate courses of action that might not otherwise have occurred to them. In practice, however, moral theory will seldom, if ever, be useful (or, at least, useful enough). We do not (as Harris claims) need all the help we can get in practical ethics. What we need is all the help we can get at reasonable cost. We should only invest the time and effort needed to learn and use moral theory when the investment is no greater than for an otherwise equally useful alternative. Since there is at least one equally useful alternative requiring much less investment, the time and effort students and practitioners would have to invest in moral theory will (in general) be much greater than necessary for their purposes. So, neither students nor practitioners need moral theory.
Teaching Ethics Vol. 10, Issue 1, pp. 69-78
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Title: Professionalism Means Putting Your Profession First
Creator: Davis, Michael
Date: 2007, 1988
Publisher: Georgetown School of Law
Description: Ask a lawyer what "professionalism" means and you are likely to hear that professionalism means putting your client first or acting as an...
Show moreAsk a lawyer what "professionalism" means and you are likely to hear that professionalism means putting your client first or acting as an officer of the court. Only rarely will a lawyer say that professionalism means putting justice first. Never, I think, will a lawyer even suggest that professionalism means putting your profession first. Yet this is the thesis of this paper. The paper has three parts. Section I makes certain distinctions necessary to prevent misunderstanding my thesis. Section II and III develop the thesis into a conception of professionalism. Sections IV and V use that conception to help with the most difficult of undertakings, justifying professional discipline to someone convicted of professional misconduct which harmed neither her client nor an identifiable third party.
Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics. Vol. 2, Issue 1. Summer 1988. pp.341-357.
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