Brief Comments on Moral
Exemplars
William J. Frey
College of Business Administration
UPRM
Corruption Moral Ecology
• In Town Z, a young engineer is trying to win a
government contract in a competitive and
corrupt bidding environment. An experience
friend informs him that it is necessary to
provide under-the-table campaign funds to
the mayor in order to win the bid. These
funds can recouped by inflating the bid or by
inserting mistakes into the plans that will
eventually create the need for change orders.
Narrative Form
• Maintaining integrity in the face of political and
economic corruption.
• To prevail, engineers must develop ethical
strategies to compete on an uneven playing field,
resits the temptation to give in to corrupt
practices and develop effective opposition to
large scale systemic corruption
• External corruption must not duplicate itself in
the character of the young engineer.
Social and Environmental Justice
• Social and environmental justice cases in Puerto
Rico like the Copper Mining Case have received
extensive media coverage.
• From the 1950’s to the early 1990’s, international
mining companies sought permission to mine
gold and copper in central Puerto Rico
• Grass roots opposition organized by an engineer
led to legislation converting the mining sites into
a “public forest”
Social Justice Narrative Form
• Engineers use specialized skills and knowledge to
recognize the potential for social and
environmental injustice in the mining projects.
• Then they take on the role of reformers,
organizing public hearings, testifying before
decision makers, lobbying against mining, and
organizing grass roots opposition.
• The opposition to the Via Verde (a proposed gas
pipeline) is being framed as opposition to social
injustice
Craft Context
• Computer ethics students worked with a
hypothetical case supposing that the
government distributed laptop computers to
all public school students.
• Their assignment: identify potential problems
and develop solution alternatives
One take on the problem
• Propose a government-private industry
consortium to develop recycling/disposal
infrastructure to guarantee effective and safe
laptop disposal
• Exercise political, technical, and communication
to get buy-in to this consortium.
• Persuade computer users to pay
recycling/disposal fee as a part of socially
responsible computer use (and disposal)
Another take on the problem
• Redesign the computers by reopening the “black box”
(=the current computer design which closed earlier
“interpretive flexibility”)
• Participatory Observation (How do children interact
with computers differently than adults?)
• Design for environment
– Choose materials, develop specifications, and organize
constraints to include not just the manufacture and use of
the computer but also its breakdown and recycling
– Internalize disposal instead of making it an externality
Narrative for Craftspersons
• Focus on users and customers and their needs
• Take on role of the provider of a service and
product
• View/frame barriers as problems or puzzles to be
solved (through creative designing)
• Work confidently to be effective within social and
professional role
Lessons
• There are multiple ways of being good
– Maintaining integrity in the face of corruption
– Democratically opposing social injustice (manufactured in
unjust engineering practice)
– Be a good craftsperson
• Actions take on meaning as they are integrated into
one of these larger narrative or context forms
• Working with moral exemplars encourages us to take
the broader picture; what virtues lead to a moral
career within a given social/political/professional
context
PRIMES
• Moral Exemplars integrate four different components
into a sustainable moral career
– Personality Traits (We are all born with them but we use
them to set us on a moral career)
– Self System (We integrate our traits within a larger, more
comprehensive set of habits, goals, projects, and core
commitments. These help shape, steer, and guide our
traits)
– Moral Ecology (We carry out our careers within broader
communities or social contexts; these offer us roles,
enable and constrain, support and thwart.)
– Skill Sets (reasonableness, moral imagination, moral
creativity, and perseverance)
Examples from Pritchard
• In the late 1930’s a group of engineers from General
Electric worked to develop a “sealed beam headlight.”
Safer, more reliable, and made possible night driving
• An engineer worked nights without pay to redesign a
safety belt for raising and lowering a scaffolding used
by high rise window washers
– “You have to do the best you can—and that’s usually
inadequate”
• A Puerto Rican engineer worked through bureaucratic
levels to get a storage tank full of chlorine gas moved
to a safer location away from a crowded urbanization.
– Did not see his action as particularly noteworthy. It was
what had to be done.
Project by Pritchard and Jaksa
• Interview engineers and develop little news / good
news cases to counter balance the big news / bad news
cases that dominated the engineering ethics classroom
• Difficulties getting good engineers to say nice things
about themselves (Is it virtuous if I do it to draw
attention to myself?)
• Asked engineers for qualities they would look for in job
candidates for engineering positions.
• The result: a list of engineering virtues
So you want to be an engineer…
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Integrity
Honesty
Cooperativeness
Courage
Ability to communicate
Habit of documenting
Openness to correction
Willingness to
compromise
• Commitment to quality
• Perseverance
• Creative engineering
imagination
• Willingness to make selfsacrifice
• Not being too ambitious
• Caring about engineering
per se
• Macroscopic vision
• Civic-mindedness
• Competence
Some business exemplars
• Cabel Brand (Some Do Care): Provided entrepreneurial
services to the poor
• Aaron Fuerstein: Rebuilt textile mill, regained market share,
and preserved the jobs of loyal employees (Malden Mills.
Reported by Werhane in Moral Imagination)
• IKEA: Environmentally responsible policy and contribution
to Save the Children’s Fund (after negative publicity on
supplier using child labor)
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Damon and Colby. Some Do Care
Patricia Werhane. Moral Imagination and Management Decision Making
Lawrence and Weber: Business and Society, 13: 25.
How do moral exemplars help in
drawing up virtue tables?
• Look at the life story
• Influences—positive (mentors) and negative
(heels)
• What contributed to the formation and
incorporation of their moral commitments ?
• What was the obstacle they had to overcome
to do good? (Ordinary or extraordinary)
• How do their deed “fit” their community?
Sources
• See bibliography of this module for sources.