Engineering Case Studies: Bridging Micro and Macro Ethics

The literature leaves little doubt that case studies were central to the new discipline of engineering ethics when it was established in the 1970s. Early conferences and sourcebooks focused on hypothetical scenarios, and many of the cases from that decade came to comprise a litany of disasters in engineering ethics. These cases include the DC10 crashes in Paris and Chicago, the Ford Pinto gas-tank fires, and the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island. Cases of corporate corruption include the testing of Goodrich brakes for the Air Force and the firing of whistle-blowing engineers at the Bay Area Rapid Transit system in San Francisco.