Learning from failure: terrorism and ethics in engineering education

Engineers strive for safety. This has been true for all of engineering's history. The issue in question is not whether engineers value safety, but rather how safety is defined, what its limits are, and who is responsible for ensuring it. The answers lie in the context rather than the technology of design. The events of September 11th are, like the disasters before them, the latest in a series of crises stirring discussion of the meaning of safety and responsibility. What remains to be seen, in the wake of the terrorist attacks, is whether the disasters of that day will be sufficient to cause not only a rethinking, but a reshaping of the primary canon of engineering ethics-that engineers' first and foremost obligation is to hold the public safety paramount. Whatever we take to be the lessons of September 11th for engineering design, there is an important lesson for engineering education. As we rethink the meaning of ethics codes, we must also rethink the meaning of our educational goals. The terrorist attacks may well require expansion from preventing failures that result from "human fallibility" toward also preventing failures that result from human maliciousness. What will not change is humans' essential role in engineering; technology, by definition, cannot exist without human intervention. Both the cause and prevention of technological failures must therefore rest in human hands as well, and our students require and deserve the broad education necessary to cope with this reality.