TY - JOUR
T1 - Repentance as Rebuke
T2 - Betrayal and Moral Injury in Safety Engineering
AU - Dekker, Sidney W.A.
AU - Layson, Mark D.
AU - Woods, David D.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - Following other contributions about the MAX accidents to this journal, this paper explores the role of betrayal and moral injury in safety engineering related to the U.S. federal regulator’s role in approving the Boeing 737MAX—a plane involved in two crashes that together killed 346 people. It discusses the tension between humility and hubris when engineers are faced with complex systems that create ambiguity, uncertain judgements, and equivocal test results from unstructured situations. It considers the relationship between moral injury, principled outrage and rebuke when the technology ends up involved in disasters. It examines the corporate backdrop against which calls for enhanced employee voice are typically made, and argues that when engineers need to rely on various protections and moral inducements to ‘speak up,’ then the ethical essence of engineering—skepticism, testing, checking, and questioning—has already failed.
AB - Following other contributions about the MAX accidents to this journal, this paper explores the role of betrayal and moral injury in safety engineering related to the U.S. federal regulator’s role in approving the Boeing 737MAX—a plane involved in two crashes that together killed 346 people. It discusses the tension between humility and hubris when engineers are faced with complex systems that create ambiguity, uncertain judgements, and equivocal test results from unstructured situations. It considers the relationship between moral injury, principled outrage and rebuke when the technology ends up involved in disasters. It examines the corporate backdrop against which calls for enhanced employee voice are typically made, and argues that when engineers need to rely on various protections and moral inducements to ‘speak up,’ then the ethical essence of engineering—skepticism, testing, checking, and questioning—has already failed.
KW - Accident
KW - Betrayal
KW - Boeing 737MAX
KW - Engineering ethics
KW - Federal Aviation Administration
KW - Moral injury
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85141938196&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s11948-022-00412-2
DO - 10.1007/s11948-022-00412-2
M3 - Article
C2 - 36374398
AN - SCOPUS:85141938196
SN - 1353-3452
VL - 28
JO - Science and Engineering Ethics
JF - Science and Engineering Ethics
IS - 6
M1 - 56
ER -
