EG2401 Engineering Professionalism

Tutorial 1 (2010/11, Semester 1)

The following cases have been presented extensively by Dr. Krishnamurthy in class.
Lots more comments and discussions are available in many books (including your
recommended text books) and journals, and in numerous websites on the internet.
You should find and read them for yourself. You should be ready to respond to any
part from either of the questions listed, as your tutor decides. Mere repetition of
slide material from class will not get you much credit. We want to be convinced you
have personally, individually, understood and analysed the case.

1 Space Shuttle Disasters

(a) Discuss the ethics concerns in the Challenger disaster.
(b) Discuss the ethics concerns in the Columbia disaster.
(c) Compare and contrast the Challenger and Columbia disasters, in terms of their ethics
factors and consequences – do not merely repeat the answers in (a) and (b).
(d) How do you think the cases would have been handled by the persons involved, if
instead of a Government Space Agency, equivalent ethical deficiencies had occurred
in residential housing construction?
(e) How much of the lessons learned from the Challenger disaster could have been
applicable to the Columbia event? Did the people involved behave any better or
worse in the second than in the first?
(f) At what stage would you have called off the launch, in each case? How would you
have justified it?

2 Citicorp Case
(a) Analyze the background to the case, only so far as it concerns the ethics problems and
their resolution.
(b) If LeMessurier had not found out the problem, what would have been the
consequences, and what ethics problems would have arisen?
(c) Discuss the ethics problems and solutions from the public’s point of view, say the
Corporation of the City of New York.
(d) Could LeMessurier have acted differently, more proactively? Explain.
(e) If LeMessurier had informed the pubic about the consequences, and the resulting
panic had caused injuries and other losses, how would you evaluate his ethical
behaviour?
(f) Of all the violations of norms in the design, which was the worst, ethically? Why?
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