On the morality of engineers
I remember having a guest speaker come in for one of my classes last year talking about the field of forensic engineering and some of the legal aspects of the profession. Forensic engineers are called in after a structure or something that was designed by engineers experiences a failure and they are responsible for determining exactly what happened. Usually they are called in for professional expert testimonies in the resulting court cases and asked to report their findings.
The speaker went on to say that this is usually the most engineers get involved in the legal system and somehow it came up that engineers are almost never picked for jury duty because we tend to “see things in black and white” and miss the “shades of gray” that most lawyers try to work their cases off of. This presumably stems from our background in mathematics and empirical data.
Personally, I partially agree with this; while I understand that two parties could be responsible for an incident that brought them to court and that they could have varying degrees of responsibility, I still see them as either “guilty” or “not guilty.” But while I consider someone only partially responsible and someone mostly responsible as both being guilty, that doesn’t necessarily mean I think they deserve the same punishment. It’s just that I perceive guilt (in the legal sense) as being a condition of a person: either they are guilty or not guilty.
Maybe that’s where the physicist in me comes into play? While my mathematics side sees things as on or off; Correct or incorrect; 1 or 0; the physics part of me says “to what degree?”. Realising how little we know about the universe (even the “Law” of Gravity might not be totally correct, nor do we know WHY it occurs!?) makes me think about all the shades of grey out there.
And, from the few engineering-oriented courses I’ve taken I’m surprised engineers don’t have this view, as well. My engineering experience was more about approximations and generalisations and less about strict formulas that gave back exact answers (usually be over-estimating a value for security’s sake).
