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Ethics and Ideology in Engineering Curricula

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Ethics and Ideology in Engineering Curricula Ethics and Ideology in Engineering Curricula Author: Rui M. L. Ferreira, IST, Technical University of Lisbon, Av. Rovisco Pais, 1049-001 [email protected] Abstract Engineering ethics is becoming a particularly valorised course in engineering curricula. Applied ethics educators in Anglo-Saxon universities often defend the case-study approach as the most effective way to introduce students to real-world ethical problems. In this text is pointed out that teaching engineering ethics involves constituting individuals as a social/professional group and, in that sense, is ideology conveying. The main concern addressed in this text is that engineering schools are not supplying students with the means to understand to role of ideology in the way they perceive, experience and act upon the world. Some emphasis is given on the analysis of synthetic case-studies in order to show that the case-study approach may overlook important issues concerning the production of reality. By recalling that there is no practice except by and in an ideology, it is concluded that the case-study approach is not ideology-free but embedded in the material existence of an ideological apparatus, in the sense of Althusser. It is claimed that unless these ideology-related problems are discussed in classrooms, topic h) of the accreditation criteria of ABET, “…the engineer must have… the broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global/societal context;”, mirrored in many countries, is not being properly addressed. Index Terms Engineering Ethics, Ethics, Ideology. ETHICS AND IDEOLOGY. MAPPING THE TERRAIN Ethics and the development of contemporary industrial societies In his autobiographical notes, published in 1970, J. L. Borges, assuming himself as an “amateur Protestant”, expresses his admiration for the “people in the United States” inasmuch as they are prone to “approach things ethically”. In the same paragraph, Borges confesses that he condones with “skyscrapers, television, plastics, and the unholy jungle of gadgets”, associated to the US society, only because of American’s will to “act ethically”, synonym, to Borges, of being able to supersede self convenience. The reference to Protestantism, linking ethics and industrial progress deserves further attention. In one of Max Weber’s best known works, [27], it was pointed out that there was an apparent connection between Protestantism and the rise of capitalism, a connection that could be rooted in “the rational ethics of ascetic Protestantism” ([27], p.45). Seventeenth century Calvinism proneness to pursue work with a spirit of rational enterprise that eschewed waste and purposeless adventurism, would suit the development of industrial capitalism. Weber noted, however, that such a hypothesis ought to be further elaborated and only malice would drive one to claim that he actually affirmed that Protestant ethics was a cause of mercantilism and then of capitalism. The hypothesis was soon refuted by Tawney [25], which inverted Weber's argument, advancing economic changes as a basic contribution to the religious changes. The discussion about the prolegomena of industrial capitalism in face of Protestant ethics was passed over in silence by most of 20th century historians and philosophers or, like Braudel ([4], pp. 505-507), deemed as simplistic and sterile as a basis for a model of development. De Landa [7] proposes a non-linear material history of the development of human societies. In doing so, he describes the evolution of Western societies as a complex, contingent, process where flows of mass (including biomass), energy and information intercept in time and space, sometimes “hardening themselves”, coagulating and forming structures either in the form of meshworks or of hierarchies. Industrial capitalism occurs as a particular combination of meshworks (e.g., institutions for overseas commerce, continuum of Creole dialects) and hierarquies (slave trade, administrative enforcement of colonial languages) over the different, geological, biological and linguistic strata. The fact that industrial capitalism appears to have evolved to be the dominant socio-economic mode of human organization is incidental and no conclusions regarding the future should be drawn from it. In De Landa’s words [7], p. 273 “[the] world […] does not posses a latter of progress, or a drive toward increased perfection, or a promised land, or even a socialist pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. [It] is governed not only by nonlinear dynamics, which makes detailed prediction and control impossible, but also by nonlinear combinatorics, which implies that the number of possible mixtures of meshwork and hierarchy, of command and market, of centralization and decentralization, are immense and that we simple cannot predict what the emergent properties of this myriad combinations will be”. International Conference on Engineering Education July 21–25, 2003, Valencia, Spain. 1 The easy conclusion drawn from De Landa’s non-linear materialist account of history is that human actions do not fully determine the future organization of society since initial conditions are not enough do specify a non-linear, sometimes chaotic system. Another, more important, conclusion is that the flows of energy-matter, densifications, accelerations, formation of meshworks and hierarchies can be driven by human action. It is only the outcome of the bifurcations that is unknown, not necessarily the paths that to it. For instance, Methuen treatise (1703) was desired by English and Portuguese as a way to restore trade, for which previous treatises were inefficient. It was not possible to predict that the treatise, while boosting the production of wine, would result in an inhibition to the development of the industrial revolution in Portugal. Thus, although impossible to predict the exact shape of future social organization, the drive to look back and comprehend the influence of intentional human action on the course of historical events is very strong. And this was what was actually attempted by Weber. That there are economically significant aspects associated to the conduit of a given community or, imprecisely, to a particular ethic, is a matter of little discussion, even in De Landa’s view. But it is our privileged standpoint in the timeline that allow us to look back into the past and postulate connections between communities’ particular moral practises or particular political decisions and the success of particular modes of socio-economic organization. Thus, it should made clear that any determinist thinking whose aim is to put a given moral practice as a prominent cause of the economical and technological development should be dismissed as fallacious because i) it disregards the high non-linearity of the interaction of the concurring forces and ii) presupposes the objectivity of the historical disciplines. This last point will be addressed in the next section. Ideology and the subject Discussing the objectivity of the historical disciplines would lead one to embark in a long epistemological debate. Skipping the debate and jumping to the desired conclusions, let Borges be invoked again when stating that “every author creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.” [3]. In other words, ascribing meaning to historical evidence implies using the “structures and the logic” (Laroui [16], p. 58) of the present. This is where the notion of ideology becomes necessary. According to Althusser [1], there is no practice except by and in an ideology. This is true even for scientific practice and in historic analysis, even if Althusser does not fully admits it. Thus, there is no neutral stand point while accessing historical evidence; all express particular ideological apparatuses. Ideology is thus one of the conditions for the existence of history inasmuch as any historical narrative is an expression of an ideological standpoint. Of course, producing history is but one of the fields where ideology operates. Althussser’s presentation of the role of ideology must be further explained. The key point is that the role of ideology is to provide individuals within any society with a false representation of their “real conditions of existence” [1], p.140. It is somewhat strange that the disjunction between appearance and reality, fervently opposed by most Western thinkers at least since Nietzsche [20], seems to be retrieved by Althusser. That is not exactly the case. Reality must be understood as the concrete conditions that inhere in the relations of production of a given society. The proper functioning of these relations of production, or economical basis, is a necessary condition for the survival of that society. But the way relations of production are truly organised and articulated is not necessarily the same way as these same relations are perceived by the subject. A parenthesis must be made to explain the status of the subject. According to Althusser, the subject must be understood under the thesis that all subjectivity is itself an ideological construction. The category of the subject is only constitutive of all ideology insofar as all ideology has the function of constituting concrete individuals as subjects. Ideology interpellates (calls forth into being) concrete individuals as concrete subjects. Thus, ideology displays an imaginary relation which produces false consciousness on the part of all who are constituted within it as individuals. The set of all imaginary relations is
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