One of the most exciting technological projects at the present moment is the development of driverless cars, which are commonly regarded as the future of humanity. Having fully automated vehicles will completely remove the factor of human error on the roads and eliminate accidents caused by driver fatigue, inattention, distraction, or inebriation. Furthermore, traffic congestion and parking issues will be positively affected since they can serve multiple people throughout the day. However, self-driving cars also present serious ethical concerns since they will have to be programmed to make moral judgments. For example, they will have to choose whether to swerve off the road and potentially risk the passenger’s safety or hit a large group of people standing on the road. Analyzing the 2004 Abu Ghraib Scandal and the 1986 Space Shuttle incident highlights the distinction between professional and general ethics, both of which are relevant to the dilemma of self-driving cars.
The 2004 Abu Ghraib Torture and Prisoner Abuse Scandal is an example of perpetrators following professional standards of behavior even if it betrays their personal beliefs. Abu Ghraib was a notorious U.S. military prison complex located in Iraq with torture, rape, sodomy, weekly executions, and inhumane living conditions (Hersh, 2004). Most of the prisoners were civilians who had been randomly captured at checkpoints and suspected of being terrorists, including women and teenagers. In 2004, CBS News published photographs of American soldiers laughing and showing a thumbs-up in front of Iraqi corpses and naked prisoners forced into humiliating positions. They felt no guilt over brutalizing potentially innocent civilians because the other soldiers around them were doing the same thing.
The 2004 Abu Ghraib incident illustrates the difference between professional and general ethics. The soldiers adhered to the professional, ethical standards established by the U.S. military administration, even if they violated general ethics and individual beliefs. A culture of violence developed in the prison complex because official state policy considered abuse as appropriate treatment for detainees. Torture, rape, and sexual abuse were justified, and personal standards of morality were suspended in the long-term professional interest of quickly obtaining the necessary information to complete military operations against Iraqi terrorists successfully. The soldiers at Abu Ghraib believed they were operating according to the ethical principle of the lesser of two evils and committing human rights abuses to avoid greater harm coming to U.S. citizens and fellow soldiers.
The 1986 Space Shuttle incident is an example of science/engineering ethics because it concerns the professional duty of engineers to the public. NASA management wanted to launch the Challenger shuttle with minimal delays to make a case for increasing their budget allocation. The night before the launch, the temperature dropped, but potential safety concerns were dismissed by the launch director and other key personnel. The elasticity of the rocket seals was reduced by the cold, and the shuttle ended up exploding 73 seconds into the flight, killing all seven crew members aboard (Haghighattalab et al., 2018). The NASA engineers and managers encouraged launching despite the lack of data about how low temperatures affected the shuttle’s integrity and undermined the safety of their fellow engineers and the public.
The 1986 Space Shuttle incident is an example of engineers compromising their professional duty to the public in favor of their ethics. Engineers must verify that the products they are creating are safe and align with the interests of society, their clients, and the profession at large. The NASA employees allowed upper management to override their safety concerns regarding the unprecedentedly low temperatures and thus prioritized the company’s financial well-being over public safety. In this case, the professionally ethical action would have been to blow the whistle and attempt to delay the launch, even if it clashed with their personal belief that it is better to obey management. While NASA engineers may have adhered to their code of ethics, they violated the standards of their profession.
After analyzing the similarities and differences between the 2004 Abu Ghraib Scandal and the 1986 Space Shuttle Incident, my opinion on the ethical dilemma of self-driving cars has changed. Initially, I believed that automated cars should be programmed to choose the option that saves the most lives because that fits my conception of general ethics. Therefore, they should always swerve to avoid hitting a large group of people even if it puts the passenger’s life at risk. However, now I have a more nuanced understanding of the issue. Engineers have a professional code of ethics that obliges them to prioritize the interest and safety of their clients and the public. It is ethically ambiguous, if possible at all, to program a machine to calculate the value of human life. This ethical dilemma is similar to the 2004 Abu Ghraib scandal and the 1986 Space Shuttle incident when employees had to choose between workplace norms and personal ethical beliefs.
In conclusion, the dilemma of self-driving cars requires a thorough analysis of all the relevant nuances, particularly the difference between professional and general ethics. Engineers need to understand that they have a professional duty to protect the public’s interests, health, and safety, not merely impose their standards of morality onto machinery. At the Abu Ghraib prison, soldiers compromised their ethics and followed the norms of behavior established by the U.S. military administration. At NASA, engineers forewent their professional duties to the public and adhered to upper management decisions. Both cases had catastrophic results that illustrate the importance of acknowledging the ethical dimensions of work instead of concentrating on the results.
Works Cited
Haghighattalab, Sakineh, Chen, An, and Saghamanesh, Mohammadreza. “Is Engineering Ethics Important for Aerospace Engineers?” MATEC Web of Conferences, vol. 179, 2018. Web.
Hersh, Seymour M. “Torture at Abu Ghraib.” The New Yorker, Web.