Australia II: A Case Study in Engineering Ethics.

Australia II became the first foreign yacht to win the America's Cup in 1983. The boat had a revolutionary wing keel and a better underwater hull form. In official documents, Ben Lexcen is credited with the design. He is also listed as the sole inventor of the wing keel in a patent application submitted on February 5, 1982. However, as reported in New York Times, Sydney Morning Herald, and Professional Boatbuilder, the wing keel was in fact designed by engineer Peter van Oossanen at the Netherlands Ship Model Basin in Wageningen, assisted by Dr. Joop Slooff at the National Aerospace Laboratory in Amsterdam. Based on telexes, letters, drawings, and other documents preserved in his personal archive, this paper presents van Oossanen's account of how the revolutionary wing keel was designed. This is followed by an ethical analysis by Martin Peterson, in which he applies the American NSPE and Dutch KIVI codes of ethics to the information provided by van Oossanen. The NSPE and KIVI codes give conflicting advice about the case, and it is not obvious which document is most relevant. This impasse is resolved by applying a method of applied ethics in which similarity-based reasoning is extended to cases that are not fully similar. The key idea, presented in Peterson's book The Ethics of Technology (Peterson, The ethics of technology: A geometric analysis of five moral principles, Oxford University Press, 2017), is to use moral paradigm cases as reference points for constructing a "moral map".

Value Change, Energy Systems, and Rational Choice: The Expected Center of Gravity Principle.

The values that will govern choices among future energy systems are unlikely to be the same as the values we embrace today. This paper discusses principles of rational choice for agents expecting future value shifts. How do we ought to reason if we believe that some values are likely to change in the future? Are future values more, equally, or less important than present ones? To answer this question, I propose and discuss the Expected Center of Gravity Principle, which articulates what I believe to be a reasonable compromise between present and future values.

The Ethics of Technology: Response to Critics.

The Ethics of Technology: A Geometric Analysis of Five Moral Principles proposes five moral principles for analyzing ethical issues related to engineering and technology. The objections raised by several authors to the multidimensional scaling technique used in the book reveal a lack of familiarity with this widely used technique.

Yes, The Precautionary Principle Is Incoherent.

This article is a reply to Thomas Boyer-Kassem's discussion of my criticism of the precautionary principle published in this journal about a decade ago. Boyer-Kassem does not question the logical validity of the theorem proved in my original article, but he brings up important questions about its scope. He also challenges the plausibility of some of the assumptions on which it is based. In this comment, I argue that each objection can be adequately dealt with. As a decision rule, the precautionary principle is (still) incoherent.

Nuclear power is neither right nor wrong: the case for a tertium datur in the ethics of technology.

The debate over the civilian use of nuclear power is highly polarised. We argue that a reasonable response to this deep disagreement is to maintain that advocates of both camps should modify their positions. According to the analysis we propose, nuclear power is neither entirely right nor entirely wrong, but rather right and wrong to some degree. We are aware that this non-binary analysis of nuclear power is controversial from a theoretical point of view. Utilitarians, Kantians, and other moral theorists make sharp, binary distinctions between right and wrong acts. However, an important argument speaking in favour of our non-binary analysis is that it better reflects our considered intuitions about the ethical trade-offs we face in discussions of nuclear power. The aim of this article is to make this argument sharp by explaining how it can be rendered compatible with, and supported by, the Capability Approach, which is quickly becoming one of the most influential frameworks for thinking about human development.

The role of non-epistemic values in engineering models.

We argue that non-epistemic values, including moral ones, play an important role in the construction and choice of models in science and engineering. Our main claim is that non-epistemic values are not only "secondary values" that become important just in case epistemic values leave some issues open. Our point is, on the contrary, that non-epistemic values are as important as epistemic ones when engineers seek to develop the best model of a process or problem. The upshot is that models are neither value-free, nor depend exclusively on epistemic values or use non-epistemic values as tie-breakers.

How to depolarise the ethical debate over human embryonic stem cell research (and other ethical debates too!).

The contention of this paper is that the current ethical debate over embryonic stem cell research is polarised to an extent that is not warranted by the underlying ethical conflict. It is argued that the ethical debate can be rendered more nuanced, and less polarised, by introducing non-binary notions of moral rightness and wrongness. According to the view proposed, embryonic stem cell research--and possibly other controversial activities too--can be considered 'a little bit right and a little bit wrong'. If this idea were to become widely accepted, the ethical debate would, for conceptual reasons, become less polarised.

Risk and mid-level moral principles.

We discuss ethical aspects of risk-taking with special focus on principlism and mid-level moral principles. A new distinction between the strength of an obligation and the degree to which it is valid is proposed. We then use this distinction for arguing that, in cases where mid-level moral principles come into conflict, the moral status of the act under consideration may be indeterminate, in a sense rendered precise in the paper. We apply this thought to issues related to pandemic influenza vaccines. The main conclusion of the paper is that on a principlist approach some acts may be neither right nor wrong (or neither permissible nor impermissible), and we claim that this has important implications for how we ought to make decisions under risk.

Can technological artefacts be moral agents?

In this paper we discuss the hypothesis that, 'moral agency is distributed over both humans and technological artefacts', recently proposed by Peter-Paul Verbeek. We present some arguments for thinking that Verbeek is mistaken. We argue that artefacts such as bridges, word processors, or bombs can never be (part of) moral agents. After having discussed some possible responses, as well as a moderate view proposed by Illies and Meijers, we conclude that technological artefacts are neutral tools that are at most bearers of instrumental value.

The moral importance of selecting people randomly.

This article discusses some ethical principles for distributing pandemic influenza vaccine and other indivisible goods. I argue that a number of principles for distributing pandemic influenza vaccine recently adopted by several national governments are morally unacceptable because they put too much emphasis on utilitarian considerations, such as the ability of the individual to contribute to society. Instead, it would be better to distribute vaccine by setting up a lottery. The argument for this view is based on a purely consequentialist account of morality; i.e. an action is right if and only if its outcome is optimal. However, unlike utilitarians I do not believe that alternatives should be ranked strictly according to the amount of happiness or preference satisfaction they bring about. Even a mere chance to get some vaccine matters morally, even if it is never realized.

The impact of dilution on intravenous therapy.

Chemically induced phlebitis continues to be an adverse reaction from the intravenous administration of infusates. The primary method used for decreasing the incidence of chemically induced phlebitis is to dilute infusates to the point where they do not cause tissue damage. The exact amount of dilution required for preventing chemically induced phlebitis is not currently known. This article describes methods for accurately determining the onset of chemically induced phlebitis and for describing the final concentration levels of infusates. Use of the tools presented could help intravenous therapy specialists refine research and, as a result, predict and possibly avoid chemically induced phlebitis.

The precautionary principle is incoherent.

This article argues that no version of the precautionary principle can be reasonably applied to decisions that may lead to fatal outcomes. In support of this strong claim, a number of desiderata are proposed, which reasonable rules for rational decision making ought to satisfy. Thereafter, two impossibility theorems are proved, showing that no version of the precautionary principle can satisfy the proposed desiderata. These theorems are directly applicable to recent discussions of the precautionary principle in medicine, biotechnology, environmental management, and related fields. The impossibility theorems do not imply, however, that the precautionary principle is of no relevance at all in policy discussions. Even if it is not a reasonable rule for rational decision making, it is possible to interpret the precautionary principle in other ways, e.g., as an argumentative tool or as an epistemic principle favoring a reversed burden of proof.

Principles of protection: a formal approach for evaluating dose distributions.

One of the central issues in radiation protection consists in determining what weight should be given to individual doses in relation to collective or aggregated doses. A mathematical framework is introduced in which such assessments can be made precisely in terms of comparisons between alternative distributions of individual doses. In addition to evaluation principles that are well known from radiation protection, a series of principles that are derived from parallel discussions in moral philosophy and welfare economics is investigated. A battery of formal properties is then used to investigate the evaluative principles. The results indicate that one of the new principles, bilinear prioritarianism, may be preferable to current practices, since it satisfies efficiency-related properties better without sacrificing other desirable properties.

The limits of catastrophe aversion.

We discuss the management of catastrophe-risks from a theoretical point of view. The concept of a catastrophe is informally and formally defined, and a number of desiderata for catastrophe-averse decision rules are introduced. However, the proposed desiderata turn out to be mutually inconsistent. As a consequence of this result, it is argued that the "rigid" form of catastrophe aversion articulated by, for example, the maximin rule, the maximum probable loss rule, (some versions of) the precautionary principle, and the rule proposed in Ekenberg et al. (1997, 2000) should be given up. An alternative form of "non-rigid" catastrophe aversion is considered.