Professional Ethics & Human Values

•   Individuals are ready to assume voluntary risks than involuntary risks. •   The difficulty here is generally in assessing personal risks which are involuntary. •   The problem of quantification of risk raises innumerable problems. •    For example, how to assign a rupee value to one’s life. There is no over the counter trade in lives. •   Even for a sale, it has to be clear under what conditions the sale is to take place. •   If one buys a kg of rice it matters whether it is just one additional purchase one makes Regularly or it is the first rice purchase after quite sometime. •    Even when compensations are made to people exposed to involuntary risk, the basis on which it is made or even the intensity of risk could be different for different people. •    As of now, the one suggestion could be to employ an open procedure, overseen b y trained arbiters, in each case, where risk to individuals is to be studied and remedied.

Both risks and benefits lie in future heavy discounting of future because the very low present values of cost/benefits do not give a true picture of future sufferings.     Both have related uncertainties but difficult to arrive at expected values     What if benefits accrue to one party and risks to another?     Can we…

Ethical Implications When is someone entitled to impose a risk on another in view of a supposed benefit to others? Consider   the   worst   case   scenarios   of   persons   exposed   to   maximum   risks While they are reaping only minimum benefits.          Are their rights violated? Are they provided safer alternatives? Engineers should keep in mind that risks to…

This  approach  systematically  examines  the  failure  modes  of  each  component,  without however, focusing on relationships among the elements of a complex system. Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) A system  failure  is proposed  and  then  events  are  traced  back  to  possible  causes  at  the component level. The reverse of the fault-tree analysis is ‘event – tree analysis’. This method most effectively illustrates the disciplined approach required to capture as much as possible of everything that affects proper functioning and safety of a complex system.

Some commonly used testing methods: Using the past experience in checking the design and performance. Prototype testing.  Here  the  one  product  tested  may  not  be  representative  of  the population of products. Tests simulated under approximately actual conditions to know the performance flaws On safety. Routine quality assurance tests on production runs. The above testing procedures…

A decision on maximizing profit or maximizing the return on investment. Uncertainties about applications  like dynamic  loading instead  of static loading, vibrations, wind speeds. Uncertainties regarding materials and skills required in the manufacturing. Changing economic realities. Unfamiliar environmental conditions like very low temperature. The available standard data on items like steel, resistors, insulators, optical glass,…

Robert Stephenson writes that all the accidents, the harms caused and the means used to repair the damage should be recorded for the benefit of the younger Members of Profession.    A faithful account of those accidents and the damage containment was really more valuable than the description of successful work.    Hence it is imperative that  knowledge  of risks will definitely help  to attain better safety.    But it should be borne in mind, that still gaps remain, because i) there are some industries where information is not freely shared and ii) there are always  new applications  of old technology  that  render  the available information less useful.

Absolute safety is never possible  to attain and safety can be improved  in an engineering product only with an increase in cost. On the other hand, unsafe products incur secondary costs to the producer beyond the primary (production) costs, like warranty costs loss of goodwill, loss of customers, litigation costs, downtime costs in manufacturing, etc. Figure indicates that P- Primary costs are high for a highly safe (low risk) product and S- Secondary costs are high for a highly risky (low safe) product. If we draw a curve T=P+S as shown, there is a point at which costs are minimum below which the cost cannot be reduced. If the risk at Minimum Total Cost Point is not acceptable, then the producer has to choose a lower acceptable risk value in which case the total cost will be higher than M and the product designed accordingly. It should now be clear that ‘safety comes with a price’ only.

The optimistic attitude that things that are familiar, that have not caused harm before and over which we have some control present no risks. The serious shock people feel when an accident kills or maims people in large numbers or harms those we know, even though statistically speaking such accidents might occur infrequently.

Many workers are taking risks in their jobs in their stride  like being exposed  to asbestos. Exposure to risks on a job is in one sense of voluntary nature since one can always refuse to submit to the work or may have control over how the job is done. But generally workers have no choice…