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Full-Text Articles in Engineering
By Design: Ethics, Theology, And The Practice Of Engineering, Brad Kallenberg
By Design: Ethics, Theology, And The Practice Of Engineering, Brad Kallenberg
Religious Studies Faculty Publications
Both engineering and human living take place in a messy world, one chock full of unknowns and contingencies. "Design reasoning" is the way engineers cope with real-world contingency. Because of the messiness, books about engineering design cannot have "ideal solutions" printed in the back in the same way that mathematics textbooks can. Design reasoning does not produce a single, ideally correct answer to a given problem but rather generates a wide variety of rival solutions that vie against each other for their relative level of "satisfactoriness." A reasoning process analogous to design is needed in ethics. Since the realm of …
The Theological Origins Of Engineering, Brad Kallenberg
The Theological Origins Of Engineering, Brad Kallenberg
Religious Studies Faculty Publications
Knowledge of our roots can sometimes help us figure out how we ought to proceed. Many claim that engineering began in ancient antiquity with the Egyptian pyramids, Archimedes' inventions, or the Roman aqueducts. Others give contemporary engineering a more recent history, tracing its origins to the Industrial Revolution or the Enlightenment. Yet what is often overlooked is the fact that contemporary engineering owes part of its identity to medieval monasticism.
The advantage of remembering this history is the bearing it has on the questions "What is engineering for?" and "How ought engineering be practiced?"
Michael Davis makes the claim that, …
A Systems View Of Time-Dependent Ethical Decisions, Hamid A. Rafizadeh, Brad Kallenberg
A Systems View Of Time-Dependent Ethical Decisions, Hamid A. Rafizadeh, Brad Kallenberg
Religious Studies Faculty Publications
Every ethical situation has a "system" characteristic with a group of human and nonhuman elements linked in a variety of interactions and interdependencies. The system allows the elements to act in part or as a whole towards achieving a spectrum of goals, objectives, or ends. The systems view asserts that any local and bipolar understanding of an ethical situation would be deficient as it would neglect certain interactions and interdependencies as well as overlook differing orientations of agents towards different goals and objectives. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the need for a systems-based view of ethics.