Abstract
This chapter engages with one dominant thought in Western engineering ethics: engineering ethics is ethics of professional engineers; when there are no engineers in charge, it is not a substantive issue of engineering ethics. Taking a linguistic philosophical approach to engineering, I start with a brief etymology of “engineering” in English, and describe how its closest equivalent in the Chinese language, gong cheng, despite carrying selected senses of Western “engineering,” has retained in large part its traditional meanings that concern a wide scope of technological activities much broader than the narrow, technical purview of a professional engineer. Based on the interpretations of engineering in the Chinese language, my study demonstrates how engineering ethics in Taiwan encompasses all the relevant participants that have an influence on engineering work. In enlisting non-engineers into the engineering profession, engineering ethics in Taiwan fosters a community of “engineering personnel” that are expected to work collectively to make engineering work better and safer for the public. This inclusive genre of engineering ethics not only reconciles the assumed antagonism between engineers and non-engineers by including what is often a professional engineer’s “environment” in the proper field of engineering and its ethics. It is also inherently aligned with contextual approaches to engineering ethics, presenting a strong case for the relevance of “macroethics” and science and technology studies (STS), which are sometimes played down by engineering ethicists. My hope is that engineering ethics in Taiwan as presented here could serve as one paradigm of engineering ethics for the global engineering community and Western engineering ethics.
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Notes
- 1.
That Michael Davis thought Hurricane Katrina was not a good case for teaching engineering ethics in a classroom setting might not necessarily mean he would say it was not a good case for teaching engineering ethics elsewhere or doing engineering ethics research. But his arguments, as noted, precluded any constructive relevance of the disaster to engineering and engineers at large.
- 2.
In 1891, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) required full members to have accumulated ten years of active professional practice and five years of responsible charge, making its regulation of membership since 1869 even more stringent. Similar standards were adopted by the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE) in the late 1890s (Layton 1971, pp. 30, 39). The professionalization of engineering societies was roughly mirrored both by the proliferation of land-grant schools and private technical colleges as the dominant ways of training engineers since the 1860s and by the trend of making engineering more scientific in American universities since the 1870s (Noble 1977, p. 26; Rae 1975, p. 415). The changes had been slow, partial in scale, and sometimes reversed in a state of tensions. But the 1950s would mark an overall shift of engineering curricula from hands-on practice to engineering science and research due to federal military grants and the expansion of graduate education (Seely 1999).
- 3.
If an applicant has no degree in engineering, a professional engineer license with a decade of responsible charges is a substitute. However, to become a licensed professional engineer, a Bachelor’s degree approved by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) is a requirement. These basically make it impossible for non-engineering professionals to get recognized as a formal member in the professional society. The closest membership for them is an affiliate member.
- 4.
Conversely, this study would also help Chinese-speaking scholars to renew an inclusive understanding of engineering implicitly based in our native language, which is somewhat at odds with Western ways of understanding we have very often unreflectively translated, borrowed and mixed into ours when we are “catching up” with powerful nations. Due to the scope and my intended goals of this chapter, a parallel reflexive analysis is left for future work.
- 5.
Carl Mitcham (1978, p. 229) wrote that “ingeniare” means “to create,” “to implant in,” or “to produce,” and it “readily connotes making or producing.” The dictionaries I read and used here showed otherwise, including The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia (Smith and Whitney 1911) and the Oxford English Dictionary Online (2010).
- 6.
Joseph Worcester, Webster’s former assistant who became his rival, described in his own 1830 dictionary that civil engineer is “one who constructs canals, docks, rail-roads, &c” (Worcester 1830). In his next major dictionary in 1860, he expanded on civil engineering as “the science and the art of constructing works of public utility, as roads, canals, bridges, &c” (Worcester 1860). Here actions like “construct” and “build” are metaphorical, downplaying manual work that is also needed from other participants in the context where physical labor is necessary.
- 7.
- 8.
As a word, “engineering” was once in rare use. Luke Herbert’s The Engineer’s and Mechanic’s Encyclopedia in 1836 and William Grier’s The Mechanic’s Pocket Dictionary in 1837, both published in Britain, only made three and two references to engineering, respectively, throughout a total of more than 2200 pages of the technical text combined. The five occurrences are in “military engineering,” “an extensive engineering establishment,” “an engineering point of view,” “those engaged in engineering,” and “forms of bodies used in engineering.” The two authors were more comfortable with “science” and “arts” as in mechanical/chemical science, the science of hydraulics/mechanics, applied science, mechanical/chemical arts, useful arts, etc. A number of books started to use engineering in 1840s in their titles, referring to engineering as a field, including William Whewell’s The Mechanics of Engineering in 1841, Henry Moseley’s The Mechanical Principles of Engineering and Architecture in 1843, and Julius Weisbach’s Principles ofThe Mechanics of Machinery and Engineering first published in 1848. While these books did not often use engineering in the main text and they preferred terms like construction and mechanics in addition to science and arts (“practical science,” “science rules of their arts,” etc.), they nonetheless made “engineering” more popular. In the meanwhile, Quarterly Papers on Engineering, edited by John Weale between 1844 and 1849, saw contributors frequently use expressions like engineering skill, engineering works, civil engineering and hydraulic engineering.
- 9.
Note that modern engineers also use a variety of engineering software tools to “build,” “construct,” or “create” objects in virtual environments. In mathematics, “construct” could simply mean drawing geometrical figures, a process that finds its engineering use when it comes to making something on paper or in software.
- 10.
According the online English-Chinese translation reference (2019) by the National Academy for Educational Research in Taiwan, out of 1376 entries that have “engineering,” 1121 have gong cheng either as a noun or an adjective for translations.
- 11.
While the archaic use of engineering in English once referred to forces of production, or “physically large machines or structures for civil or military use” as documented in the OED Online, engineering in the Chinese context is more concerned with the side of activity and process.
- 12.
This is a finding different from Qin Zhu (2010, p. 89), who found that “the combination of these two han zi occurs no earlier than the Song dynasty (c. 1060 CE).”
- 13.
The quotes are my translations from Shuowen Jiezi, which was written in Classical Chinese. I have consulted the book’s annotation, Shuowen Jiezi Zhu (namely “Annotated Shuowen Jiezi”), from the philologist Duan Yucai (段玉裁, 1735–1815). The facsimile of Shuowen Jiezi and its text reflow are widely available on the Internet.
- 14.
The dictionary organizes compound words under the entry of its first character and provides explanations.
- 15.
The explanations are available in both the entries for gong and cheng.
- 16.
These include An Analytical Chinese-English Dictionary by F. W. Baller (1900), A Chinese-English Dictionary by the Chinese publisher Commercial Press (1918) and A New Chinese-English Dictionary by the Chinese author Yuwen Li (1918). The last dictionary by Li was more specific, defining gong cheng as “[c]onstruction work.”
- 17.
Robert Morrison’s A Dictionary of the Chinese Language defined “engine” in 1822 exclusively as fire engine, noting in English it is “to throw water on burning houses” with corresponding Chinese words. The exclusive association with fire engine was followed by Samuel Wells Williams in his A English-Chinese Dictionary of 1844. The first English-Chinese dictionary that expanded the meanings of engine is Walter Henry Medhurst’s English and Chinese Dictionary between 1847–1848, where he described engine in English as “a machine … a fire-engine … an engine for throwing stones …” with corresponding native Chinese words in-between.
- 18.
None of these Chinese translations are still in use today. He also seemed to incorrectly place the Chinese text intended for “engineer” under the entry of “engineering,” by saying “engineering” is, literally in Chinese, a person who manages streets and a person who draws (a diagram).
- 19.
P. Giquel, a contributor to the American missionary Justus Doolittle’s Vocabulary and Handbook of the Chinese Language in 1872, translated the French words ingénieur as jian gong yuan (監工員, i.e. work supervisor) in Chinese and as “civil engineer” in English, and mécanicien as guan che (管車, i.e. a foreman of spinning mills) in Chinese and as “engineer” in English. John Macgowan’s 1883English and Chinese Dictionary of the Amoy Dialect, translated “engineer” as ji qi si fu (機器司傅, i.e. machine master).
- 20.
The Chinese-speaking lexicographer, Yu-Wen Lee (1918), translated gong cheng shi exclusively as “engineer” in his A New Chinese-English Dictionary. During the same period, a few Western dictionary makers translated “civil engineer” (instead of “engineer”) as gong cheng shi, due to the fact that gong cheng relates to work and procedures in the activities of building and construction. In comparison, an “engineer” was understood by these Western lexicographers as someone attending steam engines or machines. Examples are A Dictionary from English to Colloquial Mandarin Chinese (1905) and English-Chinese Dictionary of the Standard Chinese Spoken Language (1916) by Karl Hemeling, and An Anglo-Chinese Conversational Dictionary by F. Warrington Eastlake (1910).
- 21.
Ciyuan (Lu 1915) defined gong cheng shi, in Chinese, as “experts that direct and take charge of the work of road construction, mining, and other buildings.” The Chinese dictionary had been compiled since 1908, implying that the modern word gong cheng shi have been well recognized no later than the 1900s in the Chinese language. The entry was deleted in the revised edition of 1979, because the scope of the dictionary was shifted to only cover premodern terms up to 1840.
- 22.
- 23.
Ciyuan (Lu 1915) and its supplement in 1931 did not include an entry for either word. Nor did any of the two words enter Xian Dai Han Yu Ci Dian (现代汉语词典, namely Contemporary Chinese Dictionary) in its various versions in 1965–2016, or The Hanyu Da Cidian (1988) and its supplementary and errata volume in 2010. The exception is The Revised Mandarin Chinese Dictionary from the Ministry of Education in Taiwan (2015), which has an entry for gong xue.
- 24.
According to The Draft History of Qing (ca. 1928), Sheng Xuanhuai (盛宣懷, 1844–1916) founded a school in 1895 that taught gong cheng xue. Liang Qichao (梁啟超, 1873–1929), in his political commentaries Bian Fa Tong Yi (變法通議, ca. 1896), called for scholars conversant with gong cheng xue. The Qing pioneers of modern engineering education during the Self-Strengthening Movement (ca. 1861–1895) and the Hundred Days’ Reform (1898) provided precedents of gong cheng xue as an academic subject for its successor, the Republic of China.
- 25.
The Japanese word kougaku is comparable to gong cheng xue and was widely used in the context of engineering in higher education when Taiwan was under Japanese rule. After the Retrocession of 1945, when Taiwanese people were now required by the Kuomintang to speak Chinese, kougaku (工学) was quickly adapted to gong xue (工學) due to their linguistic similarity and would be replaced by gong cheng over time.
- 26.
For this reason, when Taiwanese textbook writers referenced “engineering ethics” from Western ethics literature, they unreflectively transferred it to the context of Taiwan and the Chinese language. Contemporary engineering ethics in Taiwan is therefore a jumble of traditional ethics now adapted and applied to the context of gong cheng, on one hand, and professional engineering ethics mainly drawn from the United States, on the other.
- 27.
My study of the case studies discussed and issued by the NSPE’s Board of Ethical Review (BER) concludes that between 1998–2017, only five out of the 240 cases applied a similar ethical question to a company: Case 16–4, Case 12–5, Case 11–6, Case 01–2 and Case 00–9. All the cases since 1958 are available online at the NSPE’s website.
- 28.
In a rare and more extreme case, textbook writers like Fleddermann (2012, p. 19) would openly state that engineering technicians are not a profession because “the length of time one works at an engineering-related job, such as an engineering aide or engineering technician, does not confer professional status no matter how skilled a technician one might become.”
- 29.
As of 2019, the list includes the Chinese Institute of Civil and Hydraulic Engineering, the Chinese Institute of Environmental Engineering, the Chinese Institute of Industrial Engineers, and the Taiwan Institute of Chemical Engineers. Some other societies require their full members to have an engineering-related degree, but the minimum requirement is a degree from vocational high schools, such as the Chinese Institute of Electrical Engineering and the Chinese Society of Mechanical Engineers.
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Shih, B.PJ. (2021). Towards an Engineering Ethics with Non-engineers: How Western Engineering Ethics May Learn from Taiwan. In: Pirtle, Z., Tomblin, D., Madhavan, G. (eds) Engineering and Philosophy. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 37. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70099-7_8
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