This book takes us beneath the banality of business as usual where technoscientific professionals routinely make judgments that impact the lives of others. Be it the safety of engineered systems, the speed and accuracy of medical diagnoses, or the wellbeing of animals subject to genetic modification, mindful, ethical choices contribute to the society we want to live in.
In these decision making moments, professionals working in laboratories, clinics, offices and data centers weigh what constitutes ethical action in the face of ambiguity and uncertainty. This navigation is highly social and messy. The impact may be distant in time and geography and, as our cases show, professionals dont always get it right. Making ethical choices in a given context is not readily codified, which is a critical observation in the context of escalating trends to automate decision making.
We show how engineers, doctors, nurses, synthetic biologists, and other technoscientific professionals work through conflicting values, complex social organization, and societal expectations, grasping always for a hold on the potentially big consequences of everyday decisions.
Chapter
1. Introducing professional ethics in practice (Jan Hayes and
Sa-rah Maslen).
Chapter
2. Keep as VERY CONFIDENTIAL!!!!: How the
behavior of technical professionals contributed to the Grenfell Tower
disaster (Jan Hayes, Orana Sandri and Sarah Maslen).
Chapter
3. The
in-visible influence of expert consultants in engineering risk-based decision
making (Jan Hayes).
Chapter
4. Industrial development, invisible haz-ards,
and bringing to light their entanglements: Lessons for ethics from the 2014
Kaohsiung propene explosions in Taiwan (Bono Po-Jen Shih, Wen-Ling Hong and
Jr-Ping Wang).
Chapter
5. Technology and micros-copy in biomedical
education: navigating the ethical landscape (R. Claire Aland, Rebecca Lush
and Nicole Shepherd).
Chapter
6. The limits of eth-ical engineering actions:
the Titan case (Jan Hayes, Rune Storesund and Sarah Maslen).
Chapter
7. What
does it take to settle a scandal? The ethics of hearing and acting on
safety concerns (Dawn Goodwin and Daniel Taylor).
Chapter
8. Divergent
attitudes towards ethics and collec-tive responsibility in Canadian
engineering discourse (Kari Zacharias and Robyn Mae Paul).
Chapter
9.
Industry and geopolitical tensions: Ethical dilemmas when safety meets
security (Sissel Haugdal Jore, Ole Andreas Hegland Engen, Susanne Therese
Hanse and Øyvind Midttun).
Chapter
10. Ethical licensing in practice: the
case of CRISPR gene editing technol-ogy (Alison McLennan and Sarah Maslen).-
Chapter
11. The price of safe-ty: The ethics of occupational risk
monetization in Brazil (Carolina Bonemer Cury and Caio Caesar Dib).
Chapter
12. AI as an epistemic technology: Navigating ethics in practice in cases of
distributed decision making (Sarah Maslen and Jan Hayes).
Jan Hayes is a sociologist with 35 years experience in safety and risk management. Her research interests are all connected to organizational accident prevention and include professional ethics, expertise, decision making and use of standards.
Sarah Maslen is a sociologist working on expert decision making in critical contexts, with a particular focus on the cultivation of embodied and other tacit forms of knowledge. She is the author of Learning to Hear: The Auditory Bases of Excellence in Practicing Medicine, Climbing Mountains, Making Music, and Communicating in Morse Code (Columbia University Press).
