RISK & LIABILITY

IN ENGINEERING
L EC T U RE 5 – EN G I N EERING ET H ICS
 RISK IS INHERENT AND DYNAMIC IN
ENGINEERING

• The concern for safety is ever-present in engineering

• How should engineers deal with issues of safety and risk,
especially when they involve possible liability or harm?
• Engineering involves risk…and risk changes as technology
changes
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• New technology involves risks that may not be well
understood …but, without new technology, there is no
progress: a bridge or building is constructed using a new
material or design, new machines and chemicals are created
without full knowledge of their long-term effects on humans or
the environment
• Even new hazards can be found in existing technologies that
were once thought to be safe
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• CONCLUSION: risk is inherent and dynamic in engineering 2
 SAFETY AND RISK

• Safety and risk are closely related: engineers work to make their
designs safe
• However, no activity or system is perfectly risk-free or 100% safe
• Reducing risks and making any engineered system safer often
means more $$$
• Cost constraints in engineering are real and engineers must
operate within them
• To determine acceptable levels of safety, we instead try to
identify the risks of harm and find ways to quantify those risks
• Acceptable levels of safety are codified in specific design codes
and the engineer has to adhere to them…
• But when a new design deviates from accepted practice, new
risks need to be identified and managed 3
THE ENGINEER’S APPROACH TO RISK

To objectively assess risk:

• Identify it
• Quantify it
• The engineer’s definition of risk:

the likelihood of an event occurring

X
the magnitude of the resulting harm

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 What is HARM?

Harm is:
• An invasion or limitation of a person’s physical
and/or economic well-being
• Example: The faulty design of a building can
cause it to collapse, resulting in economic loss to
the owner and perhaps death or injury to the
building’s residents
• This harm can then be measured in terms of the
numbers of lives lost, the cost of rebuilding and
repairing, etc.
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 What is Acceptable Risk?

• To determine if risk is acceptable, engineers

often use the utilitarian approach of cost-benefit
analysis (CBA)
• An engineer’s criterion of acceptable risk =
• If the total cost of preventing harm is greater than
the total cost of the resulting harm, then the
current level of risk is acceptable
• If the total cost of the resulting harm is greater
than the total cost of preventing the harm, then
the current level of risk is unacceptable

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 What is Acceptable Risk? (cont.)

Limitations to the Utilitarian Approach:

• It may not be possible to anticipate all of the
effects associated with each option…so the CBA
will inherently lead to an unreliable result

• It is not always easy to translate all of the risks and

benefits into monetary terms
 Example: How do we assess risks associated with
a new technology?
The most controversial issue here is the monetary
value that is placed on a human life 7
 What is Acceptable Risk? (cont.)

Limitations to the Utilitarian Approach:

• CBA makes no allowance for the distribution of
costs and benefits
• Example: Suppose more overall benefits could be
produced by exposing a few workers in a factory to
serious illness or death…As long as the good of the
majority outweighs the costs associated with the suffering
or death of a few workers, the risk is justified. Yet most of
us would find this calculation of ‘acceptable risk’ to be
unacceptable!
• CBA gives no place for informed consent to the
risks imposed by technology
• Example: The Ford Pinto case

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 What is Acceptable Risk? (cont.)

• Despite these limitations, CBA does have a legitimate

place in risk evaluation and may be decisive, when no
serious threats to individual rights are involved

• CBA is systematic, offers a degree of objectivity, and

provides a way of comparing risks and benefits using a
common measure (i.e. monetary cost)
• Risk-cost-benefit analysis The social costs for risk
reduction are weighed against the social benefits

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 What is Acceptable Risk? (cont.)

An important ethical consideration in accepting risks is the

degree to which risks and benefits of risky activities are
justly distributed.

Personal Risks: Risks that only affect an individual and not

a collective. For example, the risk of smoking.

Collective Risks: Risks that affect a collective of people

and not just individuals, like the risks of flooding.

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 Engineer’s Responsibility for Safety

• During the design process, engineers can follow different

strategies for ensuring safe products, such as:

• Inherently Safe Design An approach to safe design that

avoids hazards instead of coping with them, for
example by replacing substances, mechanisms and
reactions that are hazardous by less hazardous ones.

• Safety Factor A factor or ratio by which an installation is

made safer than is needed to withstand either the
expected or the maximum (expected) load.

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Engineer’s Responsibility for Safety (cont.)

• Negative Feedback Mechanism A mechanism that if a

device fails or an operator loses control assures that the
(dangerous) device shuts down.

• Multiple Independent Safety Barriers A chain of safety

barriers that operate independently of each other so
that if one fails the others do not necessarily also fail.

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 Risk Assessment

Risk assessment A systematic investigation in which the

risks of a technology of an activity are mapped and
expressed quantitatively in a certain risk measure.

A Risk Assessment usually consists of four steps:

1. Release assessment
2. Exposure assessment
3. Consequence assessment
4. Risk estimation
(Cov ello and Merkhofer, 1993)

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 Risk Assessment (cont.)

• Release Assessment
Releases are any physical effects that can lead to harm
and that originate in a technical installation.
Examples are shock waves, radiation, and the spread of
hazardous substances.

• Exposure Assessment In this step the aim is to predict the

exposure of vulnerable subjects like human beings to
certain releases, through certain mechanisms
Example: inhalation of toxic substances by humans, the
intensity, frequency, and duration of the exposure.

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 Risk Assessment (cont.)

• Consequence Assessment In the third step, the focus is

on determining the relationship between exposure and
harmful consequences.
- Acute harm or number of direct fatalities.
- Long-term effects on health
An important part of this step is usually the determining
of dose-response relationships.

• Risk Estimation In this step we determine in what

measure the risk is expressed, for example, the reduced
lifespan of people that work or live in the neighborhood
of an installation.

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 Reliability of Risk Assessment

The Risk of Dioxin case after a dose of 0.006 picogram/kg

per day in humans would lead to an individual risk of less
than 1 in 1 million. That means one fatality per million
people exposed. In Canada, it was assumed that Dioxin
was not an initiator of cancer but a promoter.
• Type I error The mistake that one assumes a risk when
there is actually no risk.
• Type II error The mistake that one assumes that there is
no risk while there actually is a risk.

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 Informed Consent

Informed consent: Principle that states that activities

(experiments, risks) are acceptable if people have freely
consented to them after being fully informed about the
(potential) risks and benefits of these activities
(experiments, risks).
• The Ford Pinto and Informed Consent:
Do you think ford gave that choice to customers?
Do you think it would have been better for instance if
Ford could have given consumers the choice to have
an improved tank installed at limited costs or keep the
original tank?

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 Risk Communication & Public Policy

Different groups have different approaches when it comes to

risk. Three agendas: the public, the government regulators, and
the engineers.
• The public does not evaluate risk strictly in terms of
death/injury or cost/benefit
• The government has a special obligation to protect the
public that goes beyond cost-benefit considerations
• The engineer prefers the quantitative, utilitarian approach

Social policy must take these different agendas into

consideration

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 Risk Communication & Public Policy

Q: So what is the professional obligation of engineers

regarding risk?
A: Engineers need to adopt a critical attitude toward risk
assessment; this means they should be aware of other
perspectives and the limitations in their own ability to
assess risk
According to some professional codes of conduct,
engineers must inform the public about risks.
In some cases specialists are used, who are called risk
communicators: Specialists that inform, or advise how to
inform, the public about risks and hazards

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 Responsible Engineer Regarding Risk

• Engineers need to be aware of the fact that risk is often

difficult to estimate
• Engineers need to be aware that there are different
approaches to the determination of acceptable risk
 Engineers have a strong bias toward quantification in
their approach, which may make them ‘insensitive’ to
the concerns of the public and even government
regulators
• Engineers must assume their responsibility, as experts in
technology, to communicate issues regarding risk to the
public

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 Responsible Engineer Regarding Risk

We can construct a general principle of acceptable risk:

People should be protected from the harmful effects of

technology, especially when the harms are not
consented to or when they are unjustly distributed. This
protection must sometimes be balanced against
1) The need to preserve great and irreplaceable
benefits and
2) The limitation on our ability to obtain consent

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 Responsible Engineer Regarding Risk

• Protecting people from harm’ cannot mean that people

are assured that a form of technology is risk-free. At best,
‘protection’ can only be formulated in terms of probabilities
of harm, and even this probability is subject to error

• What constitutes harm? People have different

interpretations….

• The criterion of unjust distribution of harm is also difficult to

apply

Example: The risks associated with coal mining might be

considered as unjustly distributed, but the energy derived from
coal is also considered a ‘great and irreplaceable benefit’
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 Responsible Engineer Regarding Risk

• What constitutes a great and irreplaceable benefit?

Example: A food additive, that makes the color of foods
more appealing, is found to be a carcinogen. This food
additive is not a ‘great or irreplaceable benefit’ and should
be eliminated…But most people highly value their cars and
would not want them eliminated, despite the possibility of
death or injury from accidents

• Obtaining informed consent at all times is difficult or

impossible
Example: How would a plant manager obtain consent from
everyone in a nearby town for his plant to emit a substance
into the atmosphere that causes mild respiratory problems in
a small percentage of the population?

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 Engineering as a Societal Experiment

For a variety of reasons, it is often not possible to

completely predict the possible hazards of new
technologies before they enter society

• Societal Experiments
the introduction of new technology in society as a
societal experiment if the (final) testing of possible
hazards and risks of a technology and its functioning
take place by the actual implementation of a
technology in society.

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 Engineering as a Societal Experiment

• Unlike traditional scientific experiments, Societal

Experiments are usually difficult to terminate if something
goes wrong. Moreover, in Societal Experiments with new
technologies, the consequences can be much larger
and can have an impact on third parties.

• A crucial question then is under what conditions it is

acceptable to carry out Societal Experiments with new
technologies. One important principle that has been
proposed to judge this is informed consent.

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 Engineering as a Societal Experiment

• Since World War II, informed consent has become the leading
principle for experiments involving human subjects
• Few issues with informed consent:
One issue is whether it makes sense to ask people to consent
to uncertain hazards … experiment which has an unknown
risk amount.
A second Issue is the principle not too restrictive? As soon as
one individual objects to a certain societal experiment, it
should be abandoned even if this experiment might bring
large benefits to the rest of society. This seems unfair, at least
in some cases,
for example if the actual hazard for the person objecting to the
experiment is small and the social benefits are large.
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 Engineering as a Societal Experiment

A third issue is how to deal with people who are

indirectly involved in the experiment but are not able to
give their informed consent.
One specific example is future generations: Introduction
of nuclear energy in society amounts to a societal
experiment that involves future generations because
nuclear waste that remains radioactive (with current
technology) for thousands of years.

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 Engineering as a Societal Experiment

More specifically, one could think of a set of principles:

• Experimental subjects are to be informed about the
experiment, its set-up, risks and potential hazards,
uncertainties and ignorance, and expected benefits.
• Societal experiments should be approved by
democratically legitimized bodies. This can for example
be parliament but also a governmental body that is
controlled by parliament or the government.
• Experimental subjects should have a reasonable say in
the set-up, carrying out, and (rules for) stopping of the
experiment.

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 Engineering as a Societal Experiment

• Experimental subjects that are especially vulnerable to

the hazards involved in the experiment should either not
be subject to the experiment or be additionally
protected.
• The experiment should entail a fair distribution of risks
and benefits among different groups and among
different generations.

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