Responsibility of Engineers

Passive responsibility

Backward looking responsibility, relevant after something undesirable occurred; specific forms are accountability, blameworthiness, and liability

Active responsibility

Responsibility before something has happened referring to a duty or task to care for certain state

Role responsibility

The responsibility that is based on the role one has or plays in a certain situation

Moral responsibility

Responsibility that is based on moral obligations, moral norms or moral duties

Professional responsibility

The responsibility that is based on one’s role as professional in as far it stays within the limits of what is morally allowed.

Accountability

Backward-looking responsibility in the sense of being held to account for, or justify one’s actions toward others

Blameworthiness

Backward-looking responsibility in the sense of being a proper target of blame for one’s actions or the consequences of one’s actions.

Wrong

doing

Causal contribution

A person must have made a casual contribution to the consequences for which they are held

Foreseeability

One must have been able to know (Or reasonably trace out) the consequences of their actions.

Freedom of action

One was be free (enough) to do otherwise—not coerced or under duress

Ideals

Ideals or striving which are particularly motivating and inspiring for the person having them, and which aim at achieving an optimum or maximum.

Professional ideals

Ideals that are closely allied to a profession or can only be aspired to by carrying out the profession

Technological enthusiasm

The ideal of wanting to develop new technological possibilities and taking up technological challenges

Effectiveness

The extent to which an establish goal is achieved.

Efficiency

The ratio between the goal achieved and the effort required to achieve it.

Separatism

The belief that scientists and engineers should apply the technical inputs, but appropriate management and political organs, on the other hand, should make the value decisions.

Tripartite model

A model that maintains that engineers can only be held responsible for the design of products and not for wider social consequences or concerns.

Hired gun

Someone who is willing to carry out any task or assignment from his employer without moral scruples.

Technocracy

Government by experts.

Paternalism

The making of (moral) decisions for others on the assumption that one knows better what is good for them than those others themselves

Whistle

blowing

Actor

Any person or group that can make a decision how to act and that can act on that decision.

User

People who use a technology and who may formulate certain wishes or requirements for the functioning of a technology.

Regulators

Organizations who formulate rules or regulations that engineering products have to meet such as ruling concerning health and safety, but also rulings linked to relations between competitors

Interests

Interests are things actors strive for because they are beneficial or advantageous for them.

Stakeholders

Actors that have an interest (“a stake”) in the development of a technology.

Technology Assessment (TA)

Systematic method for exploring future technology developments and assessing their potential societal consequences

Collingridge dilemma

This dilemma refers to a double-bind problem to control the direction of technological development. On the one hand, it is often not possible to predict the consequences of new technologies already in the early phases of technological development. On the other hand, once the (negative) consequences materialize it often has become very difficult to change the direction of technological development.

Constructive Technology Assessment (CTA)

Approach to Technology Assessment (TA) in which TA-like efforts are carried out parallel to the process of technological development and are fed back to the development and design process.