By Design: Ethics, Theology, and the Practice of Engineering PDF
Preview By Design: Ethics, Theology, and the Practice of Engineering
By Design James Clarke & Co and The Lutterworth Press Click on the links above to see our full catalogue for more excellent titles in Hardback, Paperback, PDF and Epub! By Design ISBN: 978 0 227 90181 6 C L By Design Ethics, Theology, and the Practice of Engineering Brad J. Kallenberg C James Clarke & Co James Clarke and Co P.O. Box 60 Cambridge CB1 2NT www.jamesclarke.co [email protected] ISBN: 978 0 227 17417 3 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A record is available from the British Library First published by James Clarke and Co, 2013 Copyright © Brad J. Kallenberg, 2013 First Published, 2013 This edition is published by arrangement with Cascade Books All rights reserved. No part of this edition may be reproduced, stored electronically or in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Publisher ([email protected]). In memory of Karl J. Kallenberg, master practitioner, local genius, and my dad Contents Preface · ix 1 The Messy World We Inhabit · 1 2 Ethics as Design · 31 3 Arguing about Good Design · 53 4 Reading Professional Codes of Ethics through Design · 80 5 Design Reasoning · 101 6 Design Can Change Your Life · 121 7 So Be Good for Goodness’ Sake! · 147 8 Design as a Social Practice · 182 9 Cross-Domain Transfer and Design · 208 10 Engineering as Christian Vocation · 248 Appendix: Following the Rules in Design · 277 Bibliography · 299 Index · 311 Preface A preface is a short section of a book to tell readers something before the author tells them other things. In this preface, I want to prepare my readers for possible disappointment! This book is about Christian ethics and engineering. It does not cover U.S. law, federal regulations, lawsuits, or state and city codes. This book does not cover complex, convoluted conundrums. Nor does it offer detailed suggestions for a method for deciding when faced by technologi- cal moral quandaries. Nor does it offer a systematic account of right and wrong. Nor does it give much advice about deriving moral duties from moral axioms or natural law. Nor does it contain a catalogue of divine commands. Nor will readers find here any extended treatment of what Catholics call Catholic Social Teaching or of what Protestants call the Social Gospel. What then remains? What remains is everything else, of course. In fact, there is much, much more to what remains than to what I have elected to leave out. But describing all that remains is neither straightforward nor easy. In fact, many of the things I have elected to skip over (e.g., moral quandaries, decisionism, legal positivism, etc.) are the very things that trick us into believing that “ethics” is on the whole quite well defined, just needing a little tidying up around the edges. Not at all! The entire field of Christian ethics is as complex as human living. In a word, ethics is our ongoing quest for the less and less trivial.1 For that reason, if I do my job, my read- ers are apt to perceive me as pesky: just when they think they’ve got “it” (whatever “it” is), I sharply prod them to move on. Of course, we have to start somewhere. So I will introduce a topic and describe it in simple enough terms for us to sink our teeth into. However, just when my read- ers think some topic or other has been nailed down, I may flit off to the margins and ask, “Okay, but what about this?” There are ten different and progressive “thises” that frame the scaf- folding of the book. Once a reader comes to see the interconnections among these ten, “the light will begin for them to dawn over the whole.” ix
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