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>>Taft Broome: what i'm gonna talk about in the end will be narrative ethics, but I will
also use narrative as a means to an end. I will use storytelling as a means of making
my points. I'll start with this very first story uh... in 1986, this article that you
see here came out in the Washington Post, and it was entitled “The slippery ethics
of engineering” and in that article, the author claims that um, lethality is part and
part of the nature of engineer that what we need to do is to study more about what engineering
is, how it is like and how it is distinct from science and what relationships it actually
has, if any to law and medicine uh... I wrote that article and no sooner than I wrote it
I was invited to, um, defend my honor in uh in a meeting with uh... uh... uh... the professor’s,
I’m sorry uh... the Presidents of the Engineering Professional societies in America, about fourteen
of them that constituted what is now known as the American association of engineering
societies and that meeting began with past president of the american society of mechanical
engineers pointing to me saying: Taft, what you have just done has done more damage to
the engineering profession than any other single act in history. we stayed in that meeting
for two-and-a-half hours and they had the uh the good judgment to take me out for a
beer afterwards when i got back to the university i have a call in from the dean, he said said
you have a call in from the president of the university I call the president he said the
captains of of industry have just demanded your head. I said mr. president what did you
tell em? He told me that I had tenure and there was nothing to do about It. Not long
after that, I got another call inviting me coming to come down to the national science
foundation uh to a brown bag lunch and that what we were going to do is talk about this
article. I walked into the uh... brown bag lunch early the people in there didn't know
who I was. I sat down and enjoyed a little discussion among some of them about how it
was that they were worried if they would still have their jobs after having that brown bag
uh... then something incredible happened an incredible *** on the door came, the door
burst open in came these people there were news people with camcorders all around the
place and they took over the meeting for a few minutes while one of them got up and said
that they ... that this group had just read this book but they it addressed drexler and
they did not see any point in spending federal money on research that was going to tell...
teach machines how to replicate themselves and that's god's work uh... I thought that
somehow another there lessons in these this story, how this thing fits together and i'm
going to tell you or uh... some stories that put all of this together in the hopes that
some good advice maybe some insight will come to uh... researchers and students who have
to deal with the america competes act the nightmare of that act for any researcher is
that he or she will have to teach ethics or at least be responsible for teaching ethics
to their students the greater nightmare at all is that the students will have to be taught
ethics by their research professors I've changed my title a little bit uh... excuse the small letter on mentoring i don't know
how that would happen all but uh... such as but not life of uh... researchers uh... good
ideas come up come to us in the middle of the night and those tend to have to tend to
bet the better ones uh my outline is as follows I’ve already given the introduction and
i'm gonna ask myself some questions about, uh what it is we are going to start with at
the beginning if we're going to start at the beginning of the story it is going to wind
up being helpful to people who have to deal with this america competes act uh... just
where do we start and one question, one one answer might be the one that uh HLA Heart
who was a legal uh scholar uh... started with when he developed his uh theory of law, positive
law and that was if we're going to talk about a society then we have to talk about the principles
that hold it together intact otherwise society disintegrates, we have nothing to talk about
so if we're going to talk about society then one way to talk about it is to talk about
three principles One is that a society’s held intact in so far as its members see that
it is in their interests uh to maintain their memberships in that society self-interest
principle. the second is the common higher cause and that is that the society has leaders
presiding over a common cause the members put higher than self-interest and lastly that
the leaders that leaders command that the leaders command regulatory and defensive forces
the the great works on that the come to mind uh... at first all that when- that in the
uh... self-interest principle uh... we might want to read again Locks, the second treatise
on civil government the higher or the higher cause principle we might want to read a gain
um Rousseau’s the social contract and in the fourth principle we might want to read
again Leviathan uh hobson's leviathan. Machiavelli’s the trips and Vardmann God of War. now all
of these books and others like them give us understanding of those principles now let's
talk about what they mean what could they mean how do you get the meaning from understanding
and i would argue that we can get meaning from understanding by taking understanding
in the context of a story so i want to tell a story and in telling that story i want to
put that story in even a larger context that we will call mythic i'm gonna tell a story
about my grandparents now when i say and start this story off, and say that it began in 1917,
right after right during around the time of the uh first world war uh... my students occasionally,
undergraduate students will ask me what was the world like then but they were not talking
about political circumstances they were not talking about these uh... what it is like
to get along without the technologies they have today mainly blackberries and uh... other
devices that uh... intrigue them uh... they really wanted to know if they were any dinosaurs
left uh... and uh... if it had any meaning for them personally so I told them that this
story begins with two of my granddaughters who were...I'd have to make it clear to them
that i was not in that war and who had come back home from europe defined somehow the
males to get through that the parents were dead and that the house was full of their
brothers and sisters and that one of the uh oldest who was one of the sisters had come
back to take care of the others and brought two of her kids so the question for them was
incidentally not survival because when these boys came back that was my Uncle Roy and my
Uncle Thornton or Granduncle Thornton the issue was well we are have gotten the taste
of the good life we all want p_h_d_’s how can we do that taking care of all of these
kids so my grandmother matriarch as she was at that young age uh said alright here’s
what we’ll do there is such a place called a college and there's one in Oberlin, Ohio
that will let you boys in why don't you go down there come back then-- i'll hold the
house together I’ll keep food in the kids stomach roof over their backs but when you
come back instead of making your riches you help the others go to college. well they agreed
to do that uh the first problem they encountered was one of the younger brothers Uncle harry
insisted on going with them. he wasn't old enough to go to college they took him anyway
and they got to Oberlin and they discovered the most amazing thing for them that before
you could go to college you had to have tuition they didn’t know about that so they decided
to work, save their money and then go to college well they worked they saved their money and
they weren’t making enough money to go to college so they came over this brilliant idea
they bought a horse they took the horse over to the college got an appointment with the
academic dean he let them in and said ok what do you boys want they said well dean, look
out the window, what do you see? He said, well I see a horse. and they said we've noticed
that you have a lot of rich kids at the school but you don't teach horseback riding he said,
well that's true um what you plan- propose to do about this and they said well we’ll
teach horseback riding he said how much would you charge? They said “tuition”. roy came
out of there eventually with a degree in engineering he became the first african-american to become
a registered professional engineer in Pennsylvania uh... he also became the first uh... african-american
to become member about the uh... engineers club of Philadelphia harry went on and got
a p_h_d_ from the university of chicago Thornton became the first african-american to be a
hunt big game hunting guy in Canada they all came back and they helped most of the others
almost all of them uh... get out and go to college now, look at that story from probably
uh one of definitely one of the I would say the top five researchers that i uh... would
know or know of, his name is Joseph Campbell and there's a pattern in that story the joseph
campbell calls the individual way it's convenient for me to call it the regal way and that is
when the hero hears a call the hero then decides to answer the call but in doing so has to
go away to unfamiliar places places that are very unfamiliar but and and a little exotic
he finds that there is something fair that that will help everybody we can call it the
holy, the holy grail and that but that it is protected by a terrible dragon before the
hero takes on the dragon normally he runs into an old person person my age, somebody
who are usually is bedraggled sometimes a witch sometimes uh... uh... an old person,
an crony of some other kind who tells the hero that look, the dragon has a weak spot
maybe there’s a missing scale under his tail if you stab him in there you've got a
good chance and then the hero takes on the dragon hero wins the hero then brings back
the booms to share with everyone maybe you see his attitude as a pattern and that that
follows overlying story pattern question is where is the dragon? Question, where was the
old person, the older person isn’t there, what was the function of all this Uh Campbell
says the function of of the old person who was the hero helper is to make sure that by
uh... virtue of obedience to him or her you have learned to make your, make your journey
in harmony with nature the old are at harmony with nature not all of them but none of the
young and uh... the dragon in the their story may well have been the fear of failure uh
and so that story has uh... psychological significance to us because when we face that
terrible problem that’s in our lives sometimes we hear a call from the um the twilight state
of mind that uh... that not for the student Carl Young talked about uh... also uh... Rob
Sorling talked about with the twilight zone that this is the phase between the conscious
and unconscious state where the unconscious state is trying to tell you that a missing
part of of the problem you're trying to solve is a truth is down here in the unconscious
that your conscious mind does not want to hear to get it out you have to fight a real
dragon and when you fought that dragon the question then is can you bring that truth
back to consciousness without damage after all it's down there for good reason and the
big problem with bringing it back to consciousness is can you find a moral resting place for
it did you do something that's really bad that you don't want to remember did your parents
do something awful that was really bad that you don't want to remember and by shar- by
by sharing the goods with everybody you sort of compensate for all of that because that's
good to share with everybody so these mythic stories uh this mythic story is very important
let's look at uh... Irene, his sister who stayed home uh... and took care of the kids
now joseph campbell calls that way of life the way up the primary mask that's where an
individual male or female not just the females um kills herself and therefore transforms
herself into some other person called mother where you care about everybody and you can
bring everybody together and commit them to a higher cause than self when you do that
In Irene’s case the higher cost was family and that kind of hero then and is the kind
of hero that put that provides that particular way of life you can see it with men playing
it think a uh person who gave it a good shot fictional person uh was uh... in um Fail Safe
you remember when the president of united states discovered that we had bombed moscow
by accident the question is what to do about it the answer was to bomb new york city his
family was in new york city his wife and his kids us I say to my students think of that
character as a person who was in the way of the primary math he loved his kids as much
as he did you and me uh then the popular way this is the way of life where a person can
become a hero uh by uh... advancing their self-interest sounds like a contradiction
but i think you'll see it when you study the life of Socrates. He did not look out for
his own self interest in that sense that he wanted to gain something he decided he's not
fully a human being if he had to live the ill conditioned life so we do have heroes
in three different ways of life and these heroes are personifications of the three principles
of social order the king, the the person who slayed the dragon and brought the grail back
is a personification of the force principle the person, who in my case, Irene and ask
if we have time to talk about I can give you more mythic stories all the way back to what
cyrus horace and isis they're telling the same stories uh Irene was the uh personification
of the hero of the higher cost principle and Harry, a belligerent sort who belong to a
faculty since he was about fourteen years old all was they uh... professor from day
one uh... he died in the position of professor at howard university uh... now in mentoring
i gave a thought to giving a talk on this when invited to do so back in the academic
year of 2005/2006 uh... in that year uh... i was teaching at MIT, I was teaching the
doctoral level course called engineering and ethics and a graduate student council invited
me to come in to talk to the grad students I said, ok I’ll talk to them And I went
in and I told them that well if you are a person who lives in the way in the popular
way you are an individual respectively over over the wheel and if in that position then
you will probably choose a style what I call the german research model uh... if that fails
to uh... live up to what the german research model really is, it does live up very much
to what it represents today in the united states that is a professor who says alright
we’ll agree on your research topic now you're on your own and there are many people who
don't want to be bothered by a professor wants to call the professor when he or she has a
question every now and then, wants to present results and get that thing all out of the
way a person who is in the uh way of the primary mask will probably likely collaborative style
uh... let's you'll the student leader professor sit-down and be more or less equal in this
project we're going to work together maybe every day from that uh... you'll call me when
you have problems i'll call you when i have problems we’ll sort of work that thing out
and the last is the master apprentice style where the professor says okay you come in
here today and do problem number one next week you’ll show me the solution to problem
number one and i'll give you a problem number two and after that somewhere along the line
the dissertation is done and you've got your degree that's a nightmare for a lot of people
i've met many people who can see it no other way the professor is the master and i have
learned from him and now i can be like him and take his place and i'm about ready to
close that one and i must tell you that after giving that lecture, the place I think pandemonium
is too strong a word but it became highly animated because the students pointed to each
one of these and they showed where they were one of those and how the professor was a different
one and that was the cause of the night nightmare you want a collaborative relationship and
that professor don't see me but once a month at most that was the nightmare, was that an
ethical problem well it looks like i'm running out of time but I’ll just give you the uh
brief look at the bullets and if Q&A will be happy then fine otherwise the good news
is that I’ve got the full paper here in uh suzanne's hands also we are mentoring processes
where you don't have to just use one of the styles you can arrange different styles in
an orb towards the developmental uh... uh... in uh another one isn't it that the uh...
greek approach uh... is one that's going to put when you start teaching ethics you can
use a greek approach which puts reason above the real you can use roman approach which
is more concerned about the codes of ethics and regulations and compliance with codes
of ethics and regulations, not so much theory and the non-western ethics which actually
says that you put a person in your position worked that person out in your position and
do with that person would do uh... in the greek tradition that's a person who just has
an instinct for the right or the wrong way all what i did was to use a tradition tree
keeper out of africa to talk about high ideas that that's what each years do and lastly
i made reference to a paper by a person named j schoenberg's and another person is at the
same person is here with us today uh... burn? uh... where uh with the kind of story that
you use was a uh... science fiction story and uh... in the science fiction story therefore
you could talk about hypothetical cases and analyze them uh... uh uh... ethically uh what
i was interested in doing is i'm interested in doing is putting a mystic character in
there particularly one who does not start correspond exactly all up to what the greeks
think is rational someone who might put the real above reason and show that that's the
way things work out for engineers i call that numbers and with that ladies and gentlemen
i think you see the pattern that i was looking for all of these are different phases of the
first three