Understanding Engineering Design and Its Social, Political, and Moral Dimensions (2022) Philip Brey
Brey’s text analyses the ethical, social, and political considerations that are at stake in contemporary design. He attempts to foreground the ethical and social implications of design focusing particularly on the discipline of engineering design.
He begins his analysis by giving a broad overview of the term ‘design’ describing its broad remit and application across a range of different disciplines and practices. He states how engineering design is often considered to rely on specialist expertise in mathematical and the natural sciences and what is often overlooked is how it is determined by its practical requirements.
In the first two sections he notes not only the different branches of engineering but also the shared reliance on different symbolic systems and software that are intrinsic to the design process. Additionally, Brey reflects on the term ‘innovation’ noting how it exceeds mere invention through its requirement to be of use through implementation. Engineering design and innovation “involves subsequent product realization, marketing, and diffusion into society.” (Brey, 400)
Of interest to AoC is Brey’s ethical evaluation of engineering design. He begins his analysis through a form of virtue ethics questioning the ‘goodness’ inherent to, for example, a ‘good technological product’. He notes how products that may succeed in terms of prudential goodness do not equate a moral goodness that contributes to society. It is the consideration of both (as well as functional and requirement goodness) that determines the value of a good technological product. Brey rejects the theory that technology is neutral and notes how all technologies imply consequences and generate recurrent effects. Such notions have consequences for society and can/should be embedded in good design. Following Winner (1980) and Valor (2016) Brey affirms that technological artefacts have a politics.
For AoC Brey’s analysis is a useful overview of the ethical and by extension the aesthetical implications of design and the values that inhere to technological products. It reaffirms the importance of ethical responsibilities that are implicit in engineering design and the wider social responsibility that need to be integrated explicitly into the philosophy of engineering design.
Mick O’Hara
TU Dublin
Brey, Philip “Understanding Engineering Design and Its Social, Political, and Moral Dimensions” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Technology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022