Good.
For context, air pollution kills 200,000 in the US and 40,000 in UK every year.
You have to consider ethics in your work as an Engineer. Refusing an unethical task is your moral duty.
For context, air pollution kills 200,000 in the US and 40,000 in UK every year.
You have to consider ethics in your work as an Engineer. Refusing an unethical task is your moral duty.
Rather, we know from epidemiological data that certain pollution, foods etc. shorten your life by a given amount. Let's say life expectancy is 100 years, living near a coal plant subtracts 5 years from that, and living near a nuclear plant 0. That would mean that out of 20 people living there there was 1 death equivalent a year.
Other times, people measure life in "quality-adjusted years". So a coal plant that kills a young person every 20 years is worse than one that kills 78-year-olds regularly. This is a more rigorous method, measuring quality*years instead of deaths, which is why you almost never see it in activist claims. It's too rigorous to be manipulated.
Other times, people just look at the immediate cause of death (e.g. lung cancer) and extrapolate to the cause of that cause (e.g. air pollution). But this imports a lot of assumptions and is easy to game. For example, I've seen cases where hundreds of thousands of deaths have been attributed to a given cause, but it turns out that those people were dying just a few years short of average life expectancy, and would've died for other reasons very soon regardless - quite different from the image of people in their prime dying needlessly.
It's good to question these figures. As they are currently presented, we don't know the methodology, which makes them meaningless.
It's easy to say, but ethics isn´t always so black and white. What about yourself. Do you drive a car? Then you are guilty of contributing to the air pollution that kills 200,000 in the US ever year, and you also endanger others' life by participating in traffic and making it more dangerous. You are also contributing to sponsoring the salaries of the car industry overall, which means you are indirectly sponsoring the development of more lethal machines, which also by the way enables murderers to transport themselves more rapidly to their victims.
Did you post a helpful comment on HN or stackoverflow, and this comment helped a programmer in North Korea to develop their nuclear weapons just a little bit further, is that ethical?
You have to consider ethics, but an "unethical task" depends so much on context.
Consumer behaviour is an entirely different thing.
The VW engineers intentionally designed a system meant to defraud tests and avoid regulations, misleading consumers and regulators about the product. This was an order from on high, I dont doubt, but it's still an intentiknal decision. I do this knowing the direct result is fraud and pollution. My intent is to commit fraud, and I do not care about the side effect of pollution. And it's not really possible to not know what the intent of such a system is.
I think we do need to be aware of the impact of our decisions and our choices, and we cannot just dismiss unethical choices on the basis of "everything could be bad.". That's just eschewing responsibility.
The engineering management team is pretty good at making sure that such orders are almost never given explicitly. If they absolutely must to be given explicitly, then they are never ever given in writing. Most of the time, though, they don't need to be.
All you need to do is to create a culture where even the smallest failure is not acceptable, where employees are regularly abused by aggressive managers; where individuals are put under immense pressure to achieve the impossible, and where questions about how those results were achieved are simply not asked.
There is an unrelenting pressure to conform; to demonstrate outstanding results; to make it look like everything is running smoothly, and to hide failings and faults, even if that means lying to your manager, lying to your customers, lying to your colleagues, lying to everyone.
I have seen project managers lie in the most brazen way to customers and to auditors. I have seen more than one test engineer who would rather fake a test passing than show that the product does not work.
The automotive industry is to a large extent a moral vacuum, and there are dozens if not hundreds of managers and engineers across the industry who should by rights be behind bars and by whose continued freedom we not only damage the moral fabric of an industry, but also endanger the health and safety of innocent people all around the world.
Leaving such company or not having much career is ethically much higher then participating at fraud. And engineers do such decisions and earn less money because they did such decisions.
Another contributing factor is larger culture that treats such people as losers or "makers of excuses" for lesser success and excuses or celebrates those who merely did not get caught.
And from that rule we are of course all guilty but some are more guilty than others. I assume I'm kind of stating obvious stuff though?
Other such organizations might include software engineering guilds but I don't think such guilds generally act to protect the interests of software engineers collectively or individually.
For various historical and professional reasons, software developers have not seriously considered unionization as a means of advancing their interests. However, unions typically do protect their members from arbitrary and unfair work termination.
YMMV
EDIT: change indirect object of first sentence in last paragraph.
* http://www.bbc.com/news/health-35629034
* https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2017/03/06/air-pollution-ca...