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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: 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: Why Teaching Workplace Ethics Is Not As Hard As You Thought
Creator: Davis, Michael
Date: 2011-11-07, 1988-05-18
Publisher: Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions, Illinois Institute of Technology
Description: This presentation for the Illinois Vocational Education Coordinators Association is in three parts. The first seeks to make it easier for you...
Show moreThis presentation for the Illinois Vocational Education Coordinators Association is in three parts. The first seeks to make it easier for you to teach workplace ethics by freeing you from what the author calls "the four fears", namely the fear of not being value neutral, the fear of subjectivism, the fear of relativism, and the fear of impotence. After addressing these fears, Part II presents a classroom situation win which you could discuss workplace ethics, and some suggestions on teaching methods.
Sponsorship: Illinois Cooperative Vocational Education Coordinators Association
Mini-Seminar for the Illinois Cooperative Vocational Education Coordinators Association. Naperville Central High School, Naperville, Illinois. 19 May 1988, 1-5 pm.
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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: Culture, Social Psychology, and Business Ethics
Creator: Davis, Michael
Date: 2008, 1991-04-05
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 the Annual Meeting of the American Business Law Association
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Title: Four Kinds of Workplace Ethics for Discussion
Creator: Davis, Michael
Date: 2006, 1988
Description: A collection of four cases illustrating common ethical issues that come up in business settings, covering the topics of managerial ethics,...
Show moreA collection of four cases illustrating common ethical issues that come up in business settings, covering the topics of managerial ethics, drugs in the workplace, stealing from the workplace, and supervisor and worker relationships.
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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: General Contractors : Some Ethical Problems
Creator: Davis, Michael
Date: 2003, 1987-10
Publisher: Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions, IIT
Description: A series of small ethics case studies illustrating ethical dilemmas that general contractors in the construction industry are likely to face.

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: 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: 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: University Research and the Wages of Commerce.
Creator: Davis, Michael
Date: 2006, 1991
Publisher: Notre Dame Law School
Description: This is a response to a talk given by Ralph Nader on "The Relationship Between the University and Business and Industry." The author...
Show moreThis is a response to a talk given by Ralph Nader on "The Relationship Between the University and Business and Industry." The author acknowledges that a problems do come up when universities have close ties with industry. However, the author explores the reality of these partnerships through some examples of his own experience at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
Journal of College and University Law, Vol. 19, No. 2, 1991. pp. 29-38.
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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: Some Paradoxes of Whistleblowing
Creator: Davis, Michael
Date: 2006, 1996
Publisher: Philosophy Documentation Center
Description: By "paradox" I mean an apparent- and in this case, real-inconsistency between theory (our systematic understanding of whistleblowing) and the...
Show moreBy "paradox" I mean an apparent- and in this case, real-inconsistency between theory (our systematic understanding of whistleblowing) and the facts (what we actually know, or think we know, about whistleblowing). What concerns me is not a few anomalies, the exceptions that test a rule, but a flood of exceptions that seem to swamp the rule. This paper has four parts. The first states the standard theory of whistleblowing. The second argues that the standard theory is paradoxical, that it is inconsistent with what we know about whistleblowers. The third part sketches what seems to me a less paradoxical theory of whistleblowing. The fourth tests this new theory against one classic case of whistleblowing, Roger Boisjoly's testimony before the presidential commission investigating the Challenger disaster (the "Rogers Commission"). I use that case because the chief facts are both uncontroversial enough and well-known enough to make detailed exposition unnecessary. For the same reasons, I also use that case to illustrate various claims about whistleblowing throughout the paper.
Business and Professional Ethics Journal, Vo. 15, No.1. pp.3-19.
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