Ethics for Professionals

Ethics for Professionals A Human Rights, Internationalist Perspective S. Ratnajeevan H. Hoole Michigan State University, USA Mariyahl Mahilmany Hoole Generations for Peace, Jordan Dushyanthi H. Hoole Michigan State University, USA Bassim Hamadeh, CEO and Publisher Mark Combes, Senior Field Acquisitions Editor Sean Adams, Project Editor Jess Estrella, Senior Graphic Designer Alisa Muñoz, Licensing Associate Gustavo Youngberg, Interior Designer Natalie Piccotti, Senior Marketing Manager Kassie Graves, Director of Acquisitions and Sales Jamie Giganti, Director of Academic Publishing Copyright © 2019 by Cognella, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including pho- tocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information retrieval system without the written permission of Cognella, Inc. For inquiries regarding permissions, translations, foreign rights, audio rights, and any other forms of reproduction, please contact the Cognella Licensing Department at [email protected]. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Cover image copyright © 2017 Depositphotos/istockdaily. Printed in the United States of America. ISBN: 978-1-63487-768-8 (pbk) / 978-1-63487-769-5 (br) Ethics for Professionals A Human Rights, Internationalist Perspective IV ABOUT THE AUTHORS Samuel Ratnajeevan H. Hoole, b. 15 Sept. 1952, DSc (Eng.) London, PhD Carnegie Mellon, MSc Eng. Distinction London, BSc Eng. Hons. Ceylon, is Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Michigan State University, where he has taught Ethics for Engineers, Engineering Electromagnetics, and Computer Aided Design for Electromagnetic Products and Nondestructive Evaluation. His work there is funded by the US Army’s Tank Automotive Research Development Center, TARDEC. Previously, he has worked at Harvey Mudd College University of Peradeniya, Drexel University, and the National University of Singapore. He is a Life Fellow of the Institution of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) with the Citation: “For contributions to computational methods for design optimization of electrical devices.” Prof. Hoole is presently on leave as a member of the three-person inde- pendent Election Commission (responsible for presidential, parliamentary, provincial, and local government elections and national referenda) appointed by the Sri Lankan Parliament’s Constitutional Council under the Nineteenth Amendment, which consists of persons from the government, opposition, and civil society. Previously, he has been on the University Grants Commission, which ran all Sri Lankan universities. He has pioneered the teaching of human rights to engineers and is the recipient from India’s Institute of Electrical and Telecommunication Engineers of the IETE Gowri Memorial Award for 2015 for his work on Professional Ethics. Mariyahl Mahilmany Hoole, b. 4 June 1985, BA Univ. of Pennsylvania, MA Columbia (in progress), is Grants Proposal Specialist at Generations for Peace, an international nongovernmental peace-building organization based in Amman, Jordan. In her work, Mariyahl is involved in program strategy and fund-raising for grassroots conflict transformation, addressing issues rang- ing from the impact of the Syrian crisis on local communities in the Middle East to gender-based sociopolitical disempowerment in Africa. Previously, she was at the National Peace Council of Sri Lanka, leading proposal development, research, and community-driven program design. Her papers and publications reflect her interests in grassroots peace building, gender, and the processes of social transformation in crises. She is presently with Global Fund for Women in San Francisco, CA. V Dushyanthi Hoole, b. 20 June, 1955, PhD Southern California, MSc Organic Chemistry Drexel, MSc Analytical Chemistry Colombo, BSc Hons. Chemistry Peradeniya, is an Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at Michigan State University, where she works on converting bio-oils into foam and depolymerizing biomass. Previously, she has been a Professor of Chemistry and Senior Lecturer in Chemical Engineering at Drexel University, the University of Connecticut, Central Connecticut State University, the Open University of Sri Lanka, and the University of Peradeniya. She was also Assistant Government Analyst for the Sri Lankan government. She has worked as Child Rights Specialist for Plan International and as Senior Program Specialist (Education) for Save the Children Fund. She has written extensively on laboratory work in distance education, child rights, women’s rights, women engineers and chemistry, and chemical engineering degrees for late starters. She has co- taught ethics for engineers with the first author and written two chapters of this book as identified. VI PREFACE/ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Ethics for Professionals is very important in Engineering Criteria 2000 from the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) listed below. That is why there are many books on ethics for professionals. So why another, one might ask. This book is unique in that it caters to the increasingly multi- cultural audience in engineering classes and the international challenges that professionals face. The most salient characteristics of this textbook are that it: 1 Presents a rights-based, internationalist perspective that moves away, as best as we can make it, from the commonly adopted US-centric perspective while we were developing this textbook for the American classroom. We hope that American students will learn to think more broadly from following this textbook and many non-US students will find the material of refreshing relevance to them for a change; 2 Uses several contemporary examples while retaining the older examples that traditional engineering courses cover in class and draw lessons from. These older examples include the Ford Pinto and Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) disasters; 3 Encourages sensitive, yet open and frank discussions of relevant topics that do not water down lessons with euphemisms. Specifically, this is in consideration that if we refuse to take the bull by the horns and write directly, we often detract from the lessons we wish to put across to the audience. That, we hope, will not be one of the weaknesses of this text; 4 Includes a broad array of new topics relevant to professionals in the modern world. Examples are outsourcing, sexuality, accents, and new human rights legal frameworks which we operate in and which we must understand to navigate successfully through their myriad rules and subtleties; 5 Brings innovative images, graphs, charts, and statistics to engage the reader’s senses; 6 Is a frank account sustained by real-world ethics issues that professionals have grappled with in different parts of the world, with names and places altered or redacted when necessary. This book is meant for all professionals but uses engineering codes to flesh out troubling ethics questions that any professional would come across in day-to-day work. A word on this too is in order. A book on ethics for VII professionals must necessarily include general ethics. Indeed, the intellectual tools and the associated moral compass that inform professionals engaging every day with general ethics issues are the same tools and compass that empower professionals to be sharp in their discernment of professional ethics challenges. So the subjects of this book include general ethics issues that come up in a professional’s life. Examples include issues that are not always black and white, such as engineers advertising services they are not competent to offer, or having to make a hiring decision about someone based on his or her sexuality, or having to offer health insurance covering abortion for employees. Professional ethics is also about writing grammatically and communicating well with the intended audience with respect. We are not grammarians, but we write for our work; actually, we write quite a lot. Therefore, this book also attempts to point to several aspects of writing of relevance to professionals and their ethics responsibilities without making them the focus of this book. The book is deliberately subdivided into 11 chapters that we hope make light reading rather than the heavy philosophical treatment of an ethics course. Just a couple of these chapters may each take two weeks of teaching—and the rest a week each. Overall, we have designed the book to be covered over a 15-week semester, with allowances for taking more than a week for some chapters and skipping those that are less relevant to the course according to the instructor’s viewpoint. This permits instructors to personalize the coverage and put their own stamp on the course they teach, as good instructors always do. The 11 chapters are also designed to be covered as reading assignments if necessary to allow the particular instructor to focus on some of the other chapters within the limitations of classroom times. The sections titled “Food for Thought” interspersed throughout the book are meant to assign homework as well as be the basis of in-class activity (where the class is broken up into small groups and each group writes a joint response). The responses to the bulleted questions at the end of each “Food for Thought” item are expected to be related to the ethics paradigms of Chapter

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