Ethical questions of safety

As an Industrial Engineer, our primary job is to lower costs so that companies can make more money; simple enough. This can be done in many ways. For instance, money can be saved by increasing productivity, decreasing waste, or possibly changing the product itself. While all of these can be very good things for not only the producer but the consumer as well, sometimes changing the product can be a bad thing.

When making any sort of product, often times management will demand that the product costs under X amount of dollars and that the company makes X amount of money. This can easily lead to subpar products that are not safe to the consumer. As an Industrial Engineer, it is my job to make sure that all products made are safe for the people using them. If not, it is ethically and morally right for the engineer to say something to management so that the product is not released to the public. However, it can be a very difficult situation to be in if the engineer would possibly lose his job by bringing the product defects to public attention.

 

Imagine a situation where as an engineer, you believe your company has a made a product you deem unsafe. The product has been long overdue and management is putting a large amount of pressure on the design team to make sure the product is finished as soon as possible. This has now lead to short cuts in the how the product was designed and it was made using inferior quality materials. You as an engineer are in a position where you know that the product should not be released to the public but if you bring this information to management, you will likely be fired.

It is a difficult situation to be in, on one hand you have a family to provide for and your job is very important. On the other hand, you have knowledge that a product you helped design is not safe and could hurt people who use it. I pose the question what would you do? One good bit of news is that life is not often this black and white. Many people would say that they would try to come up with a compromise. To try to find some way in which the product can be made safe and they can keep their jobs and thus not harm innocent individuals.

Some people may say that a situation like this is not realistic, but that is not true. Toyota had to recall thousands of cars because of faulty brakes which could have seriously hurt thousands of people by causing many car accidents. It is very possible that there were people in the company that new that the brakes were not made to Toyota quality standards but either did not say anything, or were ignored when they did bring the information to the attention of the managers. This problem might have been prevented sooner and saved Toyota a large blow to their reputation and pocket books.

 

It is hard to always know what to do in a tough ethical situation, but engineers are asked to make tough decisions all the time, and it comes with the territory.