Preventive Responsibility: Responsive Adjustment
- Responsibility to adjust future actions in response to what has been learned from the past
- Scenario One: Past actions that have led to untoward results. Failure here to adjust future actions to avoid repetition of untoward results leads to reassessing the original action and retrospectively blaming the agent.
- Scenario Two: Past actions have unintentionally and accidentally led to positive, value-realizing results. Here the agent responsively adjusts by being prepared to take advantage of being lucky. The agent adjusts future actions to repeat past successes. In this way, the agent captures past actions (past luck) and inserts them into the scope of praise.
- Nota Bene: The principle of responsible adjustment sets the foundation for responsibility in the sense of prevention of the untoward.
Responsibility as a Virtue or Excellence
- Virtues are excellences of the character which are revealed by our actions, perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes. Along these lines, responsibility as a virtue requires that we reformulate responsibility from its reactive, minimalist sense (where it derives much of its content from legal responsibility) to responsibility as an excellence of character.
- Aristotle situates virtues as means between extremes of excess and defect. Can you think of examples of too much responsibility? (Does Fred try to take on too much responsibility in certain situations?) Can you think of anyone who exhibits too little responsibility? (Does Fred take on too little responsibility or shift responsibility to others?) For Aristotle, we can have too much or too little of a good thing. From the "too much" we derive vices of excess from the "too little" we derive the vices of defect.
- Virtues are more than just modes of reasoning and thinking. They also consist of emotions that clue us into aspects of the situation before us that are morally salient and, therefore, worthy of our notice and response. Two emotions important for responsibility are care and compassion. Care clues us into aspects of our situation that could harm those who depend on our actions and vigilance. Do Wally and Fred pay sufficient attention to the early batch leakages in the Morales plant? If not, does this stem from a lack of care ("Let operations handle it") and a lack of compassion ("Manuel can take care of himself")? Care and compassion help to sensitize us to what is morally salient in the situation at hand. They also motivate us to act responsibility on the basis of this sensitivity.
- Responsibility as a virtue manifests itself in a willingness to pick up where others have left off. After the Bhopal disaster, a worker was asked why, when he saw a cut-off valve open, he didn't immediately close it as safety procedures required. His response was that shutting of the value was not a part of his job but, instead, the job of those working the next shift. This restriction of responsibility to what is one's job creates responsibility gaps through which accidents and other harms rise to the surface. The worker's lack of action may not constitute moral fault but it surely signifies lack of responsibility as a virtue because it indicates a deficiency of care and compassion. Those who practice responsibility as a virtue or excellence move quickly to fill responsibility gaps left by others even if these tasks are not a part of their own role responsibilities strictly defined. Escaping blame requires narrowing the range of one's role responsibilities while practicing responsibility as a virtue often requires effectively expanding it.
- Finally, responsibility as an excellence requires extending the range of knowledge and control that one exercises in a situation. Preventing accidents requires collecting knowledge about a system even after it has left the design and manufacturing stages and entered its operational life. Responsibility requires that we search out and correct conditions that could, under the right circumstances, produce harmful accidents. Moreover, responsibility is a function of power and control. Extending these and directing them toward good results are clear signs of responsibility as a virtue.
Responsibility as Virtue
- The Incident at Morales provides us with a look into a fictionalized disaster. But, if it is examined more carefully, it also shows opportunities for the exercise of responsibility as a virtue. The following table will help you to identify these "responsibility opportunities" and allow you to imagine counterfactuals where had individuals acted otherwise the "incident" could have been avoided and moral value could have been realized.
- Think of virtuous or even heroic interventions that could have prevented the accident. These represents, from the standpoint of the film, lost opportunities for realizing responsibility and other virtues.
Characteristic |
Relevance to Incident at Morales |
Change goal from avoiding blame to pursuing professional excellence. |
Could this have led participants to look for more creative responses to EPA environmental regulations? |
Develop a flexible conception of your role responsibilities and move quickly to extend it to fill responsibility gaps left by others. |
Could this have structured differently the relation between those responsible for plant design/construction and those responsible for its operation? |
Extend the scope and depth of your situational knowledge, especially regarding accumulating information on the operational history of newly implemented technologies. |
Would this have led to further follow-up on the early signs of leakage of the couplings? |
Extend control and power. This includes finding ways of more effectively communicating and advocating ethical and professional standards in the context of group-based decision-making. |
Could Fred have handled more proactively the last minute change in the chemical formulation of the paint remover? |
Section Conclusion
Integrate the retroactive and proactive senses of responsibility into your group's presentation for the public hearing. Don't just work on the reactive approach, i.e., try to avoid blame and cast it on the other stakeholder groups. Think proactively on how to prevent future problems, respond to this accident, and turn the events into positive opportunities to realize value.
Questions to Get Started
- Is Fred (blame) responsible for the accident and even Manuel's death? (Use the conditions of imputability and the excuse table to get started on this question.)
- Did Wally and Chuck evade their responsibility by delegating key problems and decisions to those, like plant manager Manuel, in charge of operations? (Start the answer to this question by determining the different role responsibilities of the stakeholders in this situation.)
- What kind of responsibility does the parent French company bear for shifting funds away from Phaust's new plant to finance further acquisitions and mergers? (Looking at the modules on corporate social responsibility and corporate governance will help you to frame this in terms of corporate responsibility.)
- Do engineering professional societies share responsibility with Fred? (The CIAPR and NSPE codes of ethics will help here. Try benchmarking corporate codes of ethics to see if they provide anything relevant.
- Look at the positive, proactive moral responsibilities of professional societies. What can they do to provide moral support for engineers facing problems similar to those Fred faces? Think less in terms of blame and more in terms of prevention and value realization.
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