A central component of my Engineering Ethics course, which you can read more about in the Blog of the APA’s Syllabus Showcase series, is the use of case studies to illustrate certain concepts. I supplement some of the case studies from the book with videos that add information and give a personal account of the event that happened. One of the videos I use is a twenty-minute New York Times Retro Report on the Challenger (1986) and Columbia (2003) space shuttle disasters. The video supplements the information provided in the book and provides footage from the event and from the investigations that followed, along with interviews with some of the major players. All of this allows students to see people involved in the events grapple with the repercussions of their actions; it makes an abstract case study more personal to the students.
Many students are not familiar with the disasters since they’re too young to have lived them. I have had students audibly gasp as the shuttles explode. I think seeing the explosion may reach students in a way that is less hypothetical and more real, less cognitive and more emotional. It sets a sobering tone in the classroom that I think opens up the space for more grounded discussion.
The first part of the video covers the space shuttle program and the 1986 Challenger disaster. I pause it around 13:30 to discuss the technical failure and the decision process prior to launch. Regarding the decision process, there are a number of ways to take discussion, but I start with risk, expertise, and role responsibilities (responsibilities one has as a result of occupying a certain role, e.g., parent, student, firefighter, etc.) in the emergency teleconference meeting the night before the launch. The engineers at Morton Thiokol, who were subcontracted by NASA for the rocket boosters, recommended no launch. They thought there was enough uncertainty to postpone. For the engineers, their concern was about the risk that something could go wrong. NASA pushed back against the no-launch recommendation. They wanted evidence that it was unsafe. This shifted the burden of proof from determining if it was safe to launch to proving that it was not safe to launch. Roger Boisjoly, the expert on O-rings at Morton Thiokol, could not prove that it was going to explode—they had never tested the O-ring seal on the rocket boosters at low temperature. Morton Thiokol left the teleconference to have a thirty-minute meeting between managers and engineers. Ultimately, the managers overruled the no-launch recommendation of the engineers. Morton Thiokol’s senior vice president, Jerald Mason, told Bob Lund, Boisjoly’s manager, to “take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat,” which illustrates separate, conflicting responsibilities an individual may have. This leads to a discussion of what responsibilities engineers have, such as engineering expertise and safety of the public, and what responsibilities managers have, such as the well-being of the organization, which leads to considerations of safety versus profit (which is a recurring theme in the course). One could also talk about uncertainty—what data they had versus what data was missing—and making decisions based on uncertainty—considerations for those who are risk-prone versus risk-averse and the impact that may have on the organization (Morton Thiokol, NASA) or the space program in general (public trust, government funding, national security).
Another thing I discuss is the normalization of deviance, where anomalous behavior comes to be accepted as the norm, even though the system was not designed to behave in that way. We talk about the O-ring erosion, what the engineers knew about it, when they knew about it, and what they were doing to address it.
At this point, I resume the video. The second part of the video covers the 2003 Columbia disaster. After the video is over, we start with the technical failure, and discuss how it’s another case of normalization of deviance (the shuttle was not designed for insulating foam to break off during launch). This allows us to think about other normalizations of deviance in our own lives. My example is speed limits (it’s more of a guideline than a rule, right?). Speed limits were not designed to be ignored, but, as a society, many of us treat them as mere recommendations.
Finally, I bring up a point that sociologist Diane Vaughn makes about how individuals are constrained by their organizations—another recurring theme in the course. There was institutional pressure at NASA to keep up an impossible launch schedule in order to monetize the program to make it self-sufficient. For the Challenger case, Morton Thiokol was under pressure to OK the launch in order to keep the contract with NASA. Employees in those situations may be discouraged, explicitly or implicitly, from dissenting and may feel pressure to proceed against their better judgment—against their expertise. This can lead to opening up a conversation about whistleblowing: should Roger Boisjoly (for the Challenger case) or Rodney Rocha (for the Columbia case) have done something more? I usually cover whistleblowing in more detail later, but it’s another topic that’s good to return to a few times throughout the course.
Resources and Possible Readings
My lesson was designed around chapter 2 in Martin Peterson’s Ethics for Engineers (2020, Oxford University Press) and the instructor’s supplementary material, but many engineering textbooks I’ve come across include the Challenger case study. A similar presentation of the case study and associated issues is in chapter 1 of Ibo van de Poel and Lambèr Royakkers, Ethics, Technology, and Engineering: An Introduction (2011, Wiley-Blackwell).
On role responsibilities, see the postscript of H. L. A. Hart’s Punishment and Responsibility: Essays in the Philosophy of Law (1968, Oxford University Press), “Postscript: Responsibility and Retribution” (pp. 210-237).
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