Moral Conflicts and Full and Honest Disclosure

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Consider this Analogy

You are a physician on call for Saturday night in a remote country hospital. You receive an emergency call to come immediately and perform, life-saving surgery on a patient in critical condition. The surgery is routine for someone of your skills but the situation for the patient is critical. You can save his life if you act quickly. You speed to the hospital, scrub, suit up and walk into the operating room. There lying unconscious on the operating table is your worst enemy. This is a person whose entire life has been devoted to making you miserable. You have no doubt that if you save his life he will continue to inflict even more suffering on you. You hesitate. You could botch the operation and probably get away with it. But no one else can perform the surgery. You successfully execute the operation and save the patient's life. After all, as a physician you have the obligation to set aside personal issues and feelings and do your duty as a professional to the best of your abilities.

The general consensus is that the doctor is morally, professionally, and even legally obligated to perform the operation. Professionalism, most argue, requires that we set aside personal issues and personal morality and do our duties as professionals. Samuel Florman argues that engineers as professionals have the same duty by analogy. If society asks an engineer to carry out a task that is socially sanctioned and politically validated, then the engineer has the duty to set aside whatever moral or conscience-based objections he or she may have and carry out the engineering activity. So even those who are pacifists and object to weapons projects may have, under the right conditions, the obligation or duty to set aside personal morality and work on the project. Do you think Florman's analogy holds? Put yourself into the position of Jorge? Does he have the obligation to set aside his pacifism as a merely personal belief and carry out his orders as an engineer? Here is the central part of Florman's argument from analogy quoted from his article, "Moral Blueprints" (Harper's, October 1978, pp. 0-33):

Here is the central part of Florman's argument from analogy quoted from his article, "Moral Blueprints" (Harper's, October 1978, pp. 0-33):

If each person is entitled to medical care and legal representation, is it not equally important that each legitimate business entity, government agency, and citizens' group should have access to expert engineering advice? If so, then it follows that engineers (within the limits of conscience) will sometimes labor on behalf of causes in which they do not believe. Such a tolerant view also makes it easier for engineers to make a living.

What do you think Florman means by "within the limits of conscience"?

Nathaniel Borenstein a widely respected expert on intelligent systems found himself under just this kind of situation. A committed pacifist, he assiduously avoided getting involved in military projects, even when asked repeatedly by representives of the military. But something said to him by one of these military representatives led him to reassess his position. Borenstein was asked to develop a training simulation to teach individuals how to work with the nuclear missile launching system. When he found that it involved "embedded training" he became very concerned. To appreciate the full extent of his concern and the reasons that persuaded him to get involved in this project, it is best to turn to his own words:

Borenstein on Embedded Training

Embedded training, in particular, struck me as a very poor idea. Training by computer simulation has been around for a long time. Embedded training takes this one step further: it does the simulation and training on the actual command and control computer. To exaggerate slightly, whether or not anyone actually dies when you press the "launch missiles" button depends on whether or not there is a little line at the top of the screen that says "SIMULATION."

Borenstein continues

Such a system seems almost designed to promote an accidental nuclear war, and this thought was what persuaded me to attend the workshop in the first place. One can all too easily imagine human error "I could have sworn it was in the 'simulation' mode as well as frightening technical possibilities. Perhaps, due to some minor programming bug, the word "SIMULATION" might fail to disappear when it was supposed to. Someone approaching the computer would get the wrong idea of what it was safe to type.
These quotes are taken from: Nathaniel S. Borenstein, "My life as a NATO collaborator" in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, April 1989: 13-20.

A Thought Exercise