Conclusions and Looking to the Future

Abstract

One of the underlying themes of this book has been the need for engineers to adopt an ethical approach to their work and its impacts. There is a quote attributed (satirically) to World War II German rocket engineer Wernher von Braun: ‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?’ It was actually a 1960s fabrication by US comedian (and mathematician) Tom Lehrer, but although extreme, it does capture the risks associated with divorcing technical means from social ends. In von Braun’s case, he was presumably solely interested in rockets and space exploration and not too concerned about who paid him, or their aims or what death, injury and other damage the rockets inflicted. Certainly there is a sense in which some engineers like to work on purely technical problems, although most also have wider concerns, often seeing engineering as a socially orientated activity, making the world a better place. Whether this is always achieved is less clear. As this book has illustrated, some technologies arguably do not benefit humankind, or else only some parts of it, at the expense of others, or of the planet. As argued throughout the book, engineers need to be concerned with the overall ethical merits of projects they are working on in addition to ethical professional practice. They therefore need to become more proactive in assessing the ethical merits of the projects they are asked or choose to work on.