[SystemSafety] Automobile Emissions "Cheat" Devices

[Les Chambers]

It is laudable that engineering organisations such as the ACM/IEEE see fit to publish codes of practice, but as I have said before, they are largely ignored. In fact any engineer conducting his/her career in strict compliance with these codes would be unemployable (especially, it seems in Germany). The ACM/IEEE code explicitly states that the public good is über alles . Publishing the odd ethical encyclical a bit like a government legislating laws that you can comply with if you feel like it. "Hey, you can pay taxes, but only if you've got a couple of bucks to spare for us." 
Which leads me to a serious issue. I think it's time the engineering profession re-evaluated its position in society. The reason being that the scope, extent and the ramifications of our actions (including our screw ups) are now remarkable. Chernobyl will still be radiating long after civilisation as we know it has ceased to exist. The half life of uranium 238 is 4.468  billion years. My initial thoughts were along the lines of a super race of engineers, virtuosos who were uncorruptable - the Elliot Ness model. But I soon came to realise how impractical this is. Everyone has kids and a mortgage, and after all Chernobyl killed less than 20 people, more people die in the UK every year by falling out of bed. It's just too easy to rationalise doing nothing. Lately though I've been thinking of the core group of virtuosos who are prepared to sacrifice - the sack cloth and ashes thing, the mortification of the flesh and so on. It's really not as silly as it sounds. Fundamentally the planet needs an organisation staffed with highly competent and internationally respected engineers, independent of government and commercial interests that can intervene when an organisation of any kind is about to do something immoral with technology. In fiction we have the Jedi, in religion we have the Jesuits who were/are very successful in spreading the doctrine of the Catholic Church (I note that the current Pope is a Jesuit). Our modern analogue is Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) who intervene when innocent life is at risk. MSF have a code documented in the Chantilly Principles that is directly transferable to our profession. I doubt if he could find anything more conservative than a doctor in our society. Yet here they are risking their lives to help the innocent. And they get killed for their pains. Witness the incident in Iraqi where an American C 130 took off without the GPS coordinates of a MSF Hospital. They mistook it for a Taliban stronghold then proceeded to shell it for an hour, killing 17 people I think. The difference between them and us is that we talk, and they act. Talk is cheap, words on the page are useless. I think it's time we considered intervention.

-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Bernard Ladkin [mailto:ladkin at rvs.uni-bielefeld.de] 
Sent: Tuesday, June 21, 2016 10:54 PM
To: Les Chambers; 'The System Safety List'
Subject: Re: [SystemSafety] Automobile Emissions "Cheat" Devices

On 2016-06-21 14:14 , Les Chambers wrote:
> ... sociologist Diane Vaughan calls this phenomenon “normalization of 
> deviance” and classifies it as a pathological behaviour particularly prevalent in engineering organizations.

I think you're right about this being an example of normalisation of deviance, but whether it is a pathology is, I suggest, culture-specific.

British engineers belong to a professional society, which has a code of practice, which includes a duty of care to the public as a whole (in some form of words), which includes another duty to call practices inconsistent with that duty of care to the attention of people with the power to act on that knowledge (with their own duty of care).

Put more simply:
* you musn't screw the public over;
* you should inform others of violations of a duty of care to the public, if they occur and are known to you.

As became clear to some people during the Volkswagen scandal, that is not necessarily the way in which all organisations work. Anglo-Saxon commentators found that Volkswagen runs a strong authoritarian culture. As an engineer, you do what you are told to do by those who assign you your work. As an employee, you do not go to a rival, or an outside person or organisation, and tell them what (you consider to be) bad things are going on at your company.

It's not just Volkswagen. It should be clear that those are two different ethical approaches to engineers' duties.

> As for the keepers of the secret of the "defeat device", it might be instructive to find one and look into his/her eyes. 
> I think one would find something missing.

You'll find a proud engineer, doing exactly what heshe is expected as an engineer to do.

Me, I prefer the extended duty-of-care/duty-to-inform ethic over the corporate-hegemony model. It ensures to some extent a form of professional behaviour which is not solely determined by one's employer or client and therefore less subject to those narrow, not necessarily social conformant, interests

If Britain exits the EU, any chance of extending that duty-of-care/duty-to-inform ethic more broadly within Europe would be lost.

PBL

Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Faculty of Technology, University of Bielefeld, 33594 Bielefeld, Germany Je suis Charlie
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs-bi.de