The Prime Responsibility of Safety

This chapter explores the nature of safety, beginning with an examination of Hurricane Katrina—how it constitutes a case study for engineering ethics, as safety is a matter of degrees and comprised by engineering and nonengineering factors. Based on principles from Chapter 4 , readers are asked to carry out the case-study procedure on issues related to the Katrina case. The chapter goes on to discuss engineering as a type of “social experimentation,” outlining the responsibilities of engineers that follow from this analogy and their relations to safety. Safety is explained in terms of risk, its objective and subjective dimensions, and its relation to other responsibilities engineers might have. Returning to Hurricane Katrina, readers are encouraged to reconsider their previous work from the perspective of safety. The chapter ends with the Uber Rape Scandal, exploring the responsibilities technology companies have for the safety of their users in international environments.