Abstract
Recent attempts by American colleges and universities to teach ethics for scientists and engineers deserve strong praise. They represent a shift away from the idea that questions about ethics and morality are best left to humanists or to elder statesmen of science, a recognition that such matters ought to be an important part of education in the technical professions. One can hope that through these efforts a new generation of men and women will obtain a firm grounding in the ethical aspects of their vocations early enough to make a difference.
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Notes
See, for example, Stephen H. Unger, Controlling Technology: Ethics and the Responsible Engineer (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982 ).
For a defense of this method see C. Roland Christenenet al., Teaching and the Case Method (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1987).
David F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York: Knopf, 1977 ).
Max Weber explores a similar issue in “Science as a Vocation,” in H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946).
Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), chapter 9.
I discuss this topic in “Techne and Politeia,” in The Whale and the Reactor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), chapter 3.
An early but overly optimistic attempt to portray computer scientists in this light can be found in Robert Boguslaw, The New Utopians: A Study of Systems Design and Social Change (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965 ).
Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Knopf, 1964 ).
An exception is John Tirman, ed., Empty Promise: The Growing Case against Star Wars (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986).
Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth (New York: Knopf, 1982 ).
An excellent discussion of Reagan’s rhetoric here is Janice Hocker Rushing, “Ronald Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ Address: Mythic Containment of Technical Reasoning,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 72 (1986): 415–433.
See Martin Kenneth Starr, ed., Global Competitiveness: Getting the U.S. Back on Track (New York: Norton, 1988).
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring ( Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962 ).
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© 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Winner, L. (1990). Engineering Ethics and Political Imagination. In: Durbin, P.T. (eds) Broad and Narrow Interpretations of Philosophy of Technology. Philosophy and Technology, vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0557-3_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0557-3_6
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