Department of Humanities, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ 07101, USA.
Sci Eng Ethics. 2011 Sep;17(3):571-82. doi: 10.1007/s11948-010-9229-z. Epub 2010 Sep 16.
Engineers, architects, and other technological professionals designed the genocidal death machines of the Third Reich. The death camp operations were highly efficient, so these technological professionals knew what they were doing: they were, so to speak, good engineers. As an educator at a technological university, I need to explain to my students-future engineers and architects-the motivations and ethical reasoning of the technological professionals of the Third Reich. I need to educate my students in the ethical practices of this hellish regime so that they can avoid the kind of ethical justifications used by the Nazi engineers. In their own professional lives, my former students should not only be good engineers in a technical sense, but good engineers in a moral sense. In this essay, I examine several arguments about the ethical judgments of professionals in Nazi Germany, and attempt a synthesis that can provide a lesson for contemporary engineers and other technological professionals. How does an engineer avoid the error of the Nazi engineers in their embrace of an evil ideology underlying their technological creations? How does an engineer know that the values he embodies through his technological products are good values that will lead to a better world? This last question, I believe, is the fundamental issue for the understanding of engineering ethics.
工程师、建筑师和其他技术专业人员设计了纳粹德国的种族灭绝死亡机器。死亡集中营的运作非常高效，因此这些技术专业人员知道自己在做什么：可以说，他们是优秀的工程师。作为一所技术大学的教育工作者，我需要向我的学生——未来的工程师和建筑师——解释纳粹德国技术专业人员的动机和伦理推理。我需要教育我的学生了解这个地狱般的政权的道德规范，以便他们能够避免纳粹工程师使用的那种伦理辩护。在他们自己的职业生涯中，我的前学生不仅应该在技术意义上成为优秀的工程师，而且应该在道德意义上成为优秀的工程师。在本文中，我考察了关于纳粹德国专业人员伦理判断的几个论点，并试图进行综合，为当代工程师和其他技术专业人员提供一个教训。工程师如何避免纳粹工程师在接受其技术创造背后的邪恶意识形态时所犯的错误？工程师如何知道他通过技术产品所体现的价值观是将导致更美好世界的良好价值观？我认为，最后一个问题是理解工程伦理的根本问题。
