HU-432 Ethics Final

Desire vs. reason (Kant)

"Hypothetical Imperative: a conditional maxim based on relative means/ends in the everyday world or in every-day circumstances. The goal is not based on pure reason alone but is usually based upon DESIRE. E.g., ""If you want to be confident, then study hard."" Categorical Imperative: a rule stating what ought to be done based upon pure REASON alone and not contingent upon sensible desires. ""I am never to act otherwise than to will that my maxim should become universal law."""

Moral requirements of professions

"• Rationality: Rationality is the antithesis of traditionalism; implies a perpetual readiness to discard any portion of a system, no matter how time honored it may be, with a formulation demonstrated to be more valid. • Functional specificity: The professional's authority is confined to those specific spheres within which the professional has been educated. The professional cannot prescribe guides where his theoretical competence does not apply. • Universalism: A professional must assume an emotional neutrality and provide service to whoever requests it, irrespective of the requester's age, income, kinship, politics, race, religion, sex, and social status. • Disinterestedness: The professional is motivated less by self-interest and more by the impulse to perform maximally. They must always provide the maximum caliber service. "

Relativism: "vulgar" relativism

1. "Right/wrong" means "right/wrong" for a given society, 2. "Right/wrong for a given society" is to be understood functionally, therefore 3. It is wrong to judge the actions of other societies.

Limitations of cost/benefit analysis

1. Ignores considerations that are difficult to quantify. 2. Hidden value assumptions (including problems of justice). 3. It violates the right to self determination.

Informed Consent: conditions for

1. The consent was given voluntarily. 2. The consent was based on the information that a rational person would want, together with any other information requested, presented to them in an understandable form. 3. The consenter was competent (not too young or mentally ill) to process the information and make rational decisions.

Informed Consent: limitations of in engineering

1. Wide knowledge gap b/w the engineer and the consenter - have to "dumb down" the information, but not too much. 2. The shear quantity of knowledge - have to summarize the information, but still include the important points. 3. Cooperation with management - Can't effectively communicate the necessary information w/o management's okay, they are worried about exposing themselves to competition/lawsuits. 4. Cooperation with the consenter - Can't effectively communicate the necessary information w/o the consenter listening, sometimes they just don't care.

Universalizability

A demand for fairness: If "R" counts as a reason for "S" to do "A", then "R" counts as a reason for any similar person, to perform a similar action, under similar circumstances. **This requirement is the essence of morality.

Veil of ignorance (Rawls)

A person is selfish by nature and we cannot prevent selfishness, therefore a person must first put on a "veil of ignorance" before making a decision to prevent bias and favoritism. The veil strips away the conflicting characteristics that causes bias and favoritism. This leaves the person to make a decision that is still in their best interest, which is selfish, but because it is now unbiased the decision is actually benefiting everyone

Statistical victims

A person whose death is not preventable, because he or she is one of many people with whom a person or group of persons cannot identify or 'personalize' and help. Ex. When identifiable victims are involved, people are willing to spend dis-proportionally more resources to save a few lives rather than spending the same amount to save a much larger number of statistical victims.

Maximin principle (Rawls)

A principle about the just design of social systems (e.g., rights and duties). The system should be designed to maximize the position of those who will be worst off in it. MAXIMIZE Liberty (opportunities), and MINIMIZE Inequalities (differences, disadvantages)

Rights as valid claims

A right is a valid claim, but a claim is not necessarily valid. A claim requires proof behind it. 1. Performative - Claim to something, 2. Propositional - Claim that something.

Paternalism

Accepting that the professional is to some extent in a superior position to the client. Professional has knowledge and experience the client lacks, and since the professional was hired to further the client's best interests, it is often ethically appropriate for the professional to exercise their judgement on behalf of the client. Limiting a person's freedom for that person's own good - prima facie wrong.

Normalization of deviance

Accepting the risk of an anomaly.

Professions: consulting

Acts in behalf of an individual client, one on one professional-client relationship, and are paid for their service (self-employed).

Conflicts of Interest: potential, latent, and actual

Actual - Interests that are certain to affect adversely the advice given or services rendered the prospective client. Latent - Interests that create only a "reasonable probability" of such adverse affects (conflict is already there, requiring only a change of circumstances to become actual). Potential - Interest that can "reasonably foresee" that an actual conflict may arise (circumstances must change before for conflict to become even latent).

Rights as prima facie or defeasible

All rights are prima facie, they all appear to be right, but no rights are absolute.

Categorical imperative (Kant)

Always act in such a way that you could also will the maxim of your action to be a universal law. Always treat persons as ends, never merely means.

Direct and Oblique Intention

Direct - We directly intend the end and the meansof our intentional actions. Oblique - We obliquely intended the side effects of our intentional actions, or which we are aware.

Imperfect Duties

Duties that require us to promote or pursue certain goals e.g. to be beneficent, help others where one can, to develop one's talents, to improve oneself, and to assure our own happiness. (Note: Actions due to these duties can never be at the expense of perfect duties)

Informed Consent: reasons for requiring

Engineering can be viewed as an "experiment on a social scale", informed consent ensures the subjects' (the lay public) safety and freedom of choice to participate in the experiment. Protects autonomy.

Necessary fallibility

Explains the unpredictability of events -results in nonlinear, non-coupled, non-deterministic systems. Present in the applied sciences, in experiments in nature, and in the principle of informed consent.

Relativism: factual vs. moral disagreement

Factual: is to have different opinions on whether a statement represents a fact. Moral: is to have a shared moral frame of reference on an issue, and yet disagree on what the moral intuitions say

Ethics codes as heteronomous

Heteronomous: subject to a law or standard external to itself. It confuses ethics with some kind of externally imposed set of rules such as a code of law. Ethics must be self-directed rather than one-directed.

Conflicts of Interest: distortion of judgment and appearance of corruption as problems

How conflicts of interest are wrong

Relativism: resisted by internalization and universalization

How morality resists relativism

Relativism

I. A response to difference and distance. There is widespread disagreement about how people ought to live. i. Preferences differ. ii. Members of one culture regard their practices as correct, and the practices of other cultures as wrong. II. On reflection, we regard the practices of other cultures as appropriate for them as we regard ours as appropriate for us. Therefore, there are no objective moral standards.

Duties as "simply what is required" (Feinberg)

If one has a duty to e.g. pay the rent, then one ought to pay the rent. Duties are normative requirements: they concern what should happen, rather than what does actually happen.

infringement of rights vs. violation of rights

Infringement - May be justifiable and must weight the right against other considerations. Violation - Always wrong and it ignores the right entirely.

Intellectual property: intellectual objects as nonexclusive

Intellectual Objects: copyrights, patents, trade secrets. Non-exclusive: can be in many places at once and are not consumed by their use.

Intellectual property: intellectual products as social products

Invention, writing, and thought in general do not operate in a vacuum; intellectual activity is not creation ex nihilo. Given this vital dependence of a person's thoughts on the ideas of those who came before her, intellectual products are fundamentally social products. Thus even if one assumes that the value of these products is entirely the result of human labor, this value is not entirely attributable to any particular laborer (or small group of laborers). Separating out the individual contribution of the inventor, writer, or manager from this historical/social component is no easy task.

Professions: scholarly

May have many clients or no personal client, and receives a salary. employed as part of a staff or a member of a department - works on tasks assigned by supervisors.

Rights as trumps over collective goods

Most Important Function of Rights is to provide a strong source of justification to act contrary to a collective good.

Conflicts of Interest: gifts, bribes, extortion, and grease payments

NA

Conflicts of Interest: regulatory capture

NA

Intellectual property: benchmarking and reverse engineering

NA

Property: As functional; active vs. passive

NA

Intellectual property

Non-corporeal, intellectual objects, such as writings, inventions, and secret business information, ideas, concepts, principles, facts, knowledge.

Incommensurability

Not commensurable; having no common basis, measure, or standard of comparison. Not everything actually can be compared.There are subjective areas and factors that cannot be compared in order to calculate what action would maximize utility

Perfect Duties

Perfect Duties - Duties that require that we do or abstain from certain acts e.g. Duty to tell the truth, keep our promises, and refrain from committing suicide. It is intrinsically wrong to do the opposite of these. No matter how beneficial the consequences, the action is strictly impermissible.

negative and positive Duties

Positive duties require us to do 'good for another' (ex. alleviate suffering and to tell the truth). Negative duties prohibit us from doing something morally bad (ex. rules that forbid us to do certain things).

negative and positive rights

Positive rights - provide the right holder with a claim against another person or the state that must provide a service, good, or treatment. It is essentially a contract. Negative rights - do not require that others provide this right, but only that nobody may infringe upon them, or prevent the right holder from having them.

Rights correlativity with duties

Positive rights correlate with positive duties. Negative rights correlate with negative duties.

Trade Secrecy: privacy vs. secrecy

Privacy - Maintains control. Secrecy - Keeps something hidden. **Sometimes it takes keeping something secret to keep it private.

Trade secrecy

Procedures: 1. Contractual Restraints, 2. Internal Policies (censorship, prohibitions on consulting/moonlighting, dismemberment of knowledge on a "need to know" basis, badge access to "sensitive" areas of a plant, pension plans, retainers), 3. External Policies (Intra-industry non-hiring agreements, trade marks, patents).

Normal Accidents: Complex Interaction

Process can interact in unanticipated ways.

Normal Accidents: Tight Coupling

Processes are tightly coupled if one is known to affect another, and will usually do so in a short time.

Esoteric knowledge

Professionals have knowledge that the client doesn't (why you go to a professional) this is the basis for professional autonomy - you let the professionals do their job, this requires trust.

Commercialization of work

Profit determines the quality of work. If the quality of the work interferes with the profit, the business side of the venture supersedes the artisan side. Profit forces a craftsman to suspend his devotion to his work and commercializes his venture.

Relativism: response to disagreement as disagreement

Relativism doesn't work. By saying that "Right" and "Wrong" are subjective between societies, saying that it is "Right" or "Wrong" to judge other societies for their differences doesn't conclude anything, seeing as in the argument "Right" and "Wrong" are subjective. Relativism wants us to be tolerant but does not give us a sufficient means of doing so.

Risk vs. uncertainty

Risk - has a strong objective component. Uncertainty - seems mostly subjective. Ex. If a person does not know whether or not the grass snake is poisonous, then she is in a state of uncertainty with respect to its ability to poison her. However, since this species has no poison there is no risk to be poisoned by it. Technical Concept of Risk = (Probability of Harm) x (Magnitude of Harm)

Loyalty

Significance: 1. Unconscious threat to integrity, 2. Theoretical challenge to morality. What's Wrong: 1. Discrimination, 2. Ignores good reasons, 3. Invites irresponsibility. What's Good: It makes certain relationships possible.

Trade Secrecy: Separability of employee skills and employer property claims

Situation: Mobility of technical professionals. Ethical Problem: Conflict between the proprietary rights of the employers to knowledge generated using their resources and the rights of the employees to market their own skills.

Safety: as objective

Something is safe if its risks are fully known, and those risks are judged as acceptable.

Technical paternalism

Springs from the attitude that the issues involved are purely technical and that the public should simply step aside and let the engineers and scientist decide them. Deferring to experts.

Personal Autonomy

The capacity to decide for oneself and pursue a course of action in one's life.

Duties as prima facie

The concept of a prima facie duty is the concept of a duty, which though it is a significant reason for not doing something, is not absolute, but must be weighed up against other duties.

"Strong conception" of engineers' moral responsibilities

Though engineers are not bound by any special moral obligations, ordinary moral principals as they apply in the engineer's circumstances stipulate that they nonetheless be ready to make greater personal sacrifices than can normally be demanded of other individuals.

Informed Consent: surrogate consent

Authorizes specific individuals to give surrogate informed consent for a subject who cannot provide informed consent themselves because of cognitive impairment, lack of capacity, or because they are suffering from a serious or life-threatening disease. Protects the autonomy of the temporarily unavailable.

Broad and narrow senses of morality (Mackie)

Broad - Source of motivation. Narrow - Test of existing motives.

The "engineer's dilemma"

Conflict between professional autonomy (using your own judgement without supervision, "call your own shots") and bureaucratic loyalty (the person you have to report to, some what having to "take orders")

Conflicts of Interest vs. conflicting interests

Conflicts of Interest - Any situation involving a side interest having the potential to distort judgement owed to an employer (you can have it all, but should you?) Conflicting Interests - You can't have it all (no ethical problem - no choice).

Customary and reflective morality

Customary - Social institution, integration in our own upbringing, largely unconscious. Reflective - Concepts and theories which we apply when customary morality fails.

Necessary fallibility

Decision-making A term related to the chaos theory that explains the unpredictability of events results in nonlinear, noncoupled, nondeterministic systems. We can't be prepared for all, infinite possibilities or outcomes.

Safety: as subjective

Defining the safety of something in terms of whatever risks a person judges to be acceptable e.g. something is safe if its risks are judged to be acceptable.

Informed Consent: proxy consent

The process by which people with the legal right to consent for themselves, for a minor, or for a ward, delegate that right to another person. Protects the interests of the non-autonomous.

Principle of utility (Bentham, Mill)

The right action is that which produces at least as much utility as any other action possible under the circumstances, for all those affected.

Professional Autonomy

The right and privilege provided by a governmental entity to a class of professionals, and to each qualified licensed caregiver within that profession, to provide services independent of supervision.

ethical Egoism

We always ought to do only what is in our self interest.

psychological Eqoism

We always voluntarily do only what is in our self-interest.

Negative responsibility

We are responsible for what we fail to prevent as for what we do.

Risk aversion and risk seeking

We are risk-averse in the domain of gains, and risk-seeking in the domain of losses. Ex. 85% chance win $1000 vs. win $800 for sure --> People pick win $800 for sure even though the odds are in their favor to win the $1000 Ex. 85% chance lose $1000 vs. lose $800 for sure --> People pick 85% chance, even though these odds are greater than losing $800 for sure.

Whistleblowing (DeGeorge) (179-80)

Whistle-blowing is permitted if: 1. the harm that will be done by the product to the public is serious and considerable. 2. they make their concerns known to their supervisors and 3. if, getting no satisfaction from their immediate supervisors, they exhaust the channels available within the corporation, including going to the board of directors. The engineer is only obligated if: 1 through 3 are met as well as 4. they must have documented evidence that would convince a reasonable, impartial observer that his view of the situation is correct and the company is wrong. and 5. there must be strong evidence that making the information public will in fact prevent the threatened parties serious harm.

Psychological obstacles to risk assessment

• Voluntariness: We are much less apprehensive about the risks to which we expose ourselves voluntarily than about those to which we are exposed involuntarily. In terms of our ""engineering as social experimentation"" paradigm, people are more willing to be the subjects of their own experiments (social or not) than of someone else's. • Job-relation: Workers often take risks on their jobs. Exposure to risks on a job is in a sense voluntary since one can always refuse to submit oneself to them, and workers perhaps even have some control over how their work is carried out. But often employees have little choice other than to stick with what is for them the only available job and to do as they are told. What they are often not told about is their exposure to toxic substances and other dangers that cannot readily be seen, smelled, heard, or otherwise sensed. • Magnitude & Proximity: Our reaction to risk is affected by the dread of a possible mishap, both in terms of its magnitude and of the personal identification or relationship we may have with the potential victims. • Framing Effect: The manner in which information necessary for decision making is presented can greatly influence how risks are perceived. A change in the manner in which information about a danger is presented can lead to a striking reversal of preferences about how to deal with that danger. People also tend to be more willing to take risks to avoid perceived firm losses than they are to win only possible gains.