Lessons for scientists and engineers

In a facsinating piece, the author, Roger Forsgren, draws lessons from the life of Albert Speer for the modern day scientists and engineers.

He begins by noting dryly that "someone designed the furnaces of the Nazi death camps. Someone measured the size and weight of a human corpse to determine how many could be stacked and efficiently incinerated within a crematorium. Someone sketched out on a drafting table the decontamination showers, complete with the fake hot-water spigots used to lull and deceive doomed prisoners. Someone, very well educated, designed the rooftop openings and considered their optimum placement for the cyanide pellets to be dropped among the naked, helpless men, women, and children below."

The fact is that this person was an engineer, an architect, or a technician. 

The technical professions occupy a unique place in modern society. Engineers and architects possess skills most others lack — skills that allow them to transform dreams of design into reality. Engineers can convert a dry, infertile valley into farmland by constructing a dam to provide irrigation; they have made man fly; and architects have constructed buildings that reach thousands of feet into the sky. But these same technical gifts alone, in the absence of a sense of morality and a capacity for critical thought and judgment, can also make reality of nightmares. Ferdinand Porsche, the engineer who designed the Volkswagen — an automobile that revolutionized personal travel for the common man — also designed a terrifying battle tank that helped kill millions of Russians on the Eastern Front. Wernher von Braun, who would later design the Saturn V rocket that brought American astronauts to the Moon, designed the V-2 rockets with which the Nazis terrorized Antwerp and London in the waning months of the Second World War. 

Few men better exemplify this danger than Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler’s chief architect. From bold, looming edifices, to giant swastika banners, to the intimidating searchlights of the “cathedral of light” piercing the night sky around one of the Nazi Party rallies at Nuremberg, Speer’s designs became icons of Nazi megalomania. Albert Speer did not, as far as any historians know, personally design any death chambers, nor did he personally kill another human being. But Speer did use his brilliant technical expertise and talents to enable the war efforts of the most evil regime in history, allowing it to murder millions of human beings.

But even as we condemn him, we engineers and technicians must ask— is Speer so different from us? How many of us would be willing to compartmentalize our emotions, suppress our consciences, almost to sell our souls, for the opportunity to work on the grand projects that Speer was involved in? How many of us are so focused on solving a technical problem that we fail to contemplate where that solution might lead?

To many engineers, Speer and his experiences during the war may seem irrelevant today. But although there seems to be little chance (we hope) of a highly industrialized power again waging a war of world conquest, the essential questions that Speer faced still pertain to the work of many engineers today. Almost every engineer in the course of his career will face moral decisions that are similar to, if less weighty than, the ones that Albert Speer faced. 

You may be an engineer sitting in front of a computer-aided design screen, creating a seemingly benign component that will become part of some sophisticated weapons system that will be sold to unknown people in a far-off land. You may be a computer security researcher, or a virologist, and discover some new potential weapon or security vulnerability, and have to decide how to make the information public to shield against such attacks, but without helping those who would launch them. Or you may design automobile parts, and be faced with a compromise between saving your company production costs and protecting the lives of customers. The challenge today’s engineer must confront — as, by extension, must each of us who is wrapped up in the modern scientific-technical project — is to wear Speer’s shoes and to ask honestly, without the benefit of historical hindsight, “What would I have done?”

In our culture at large, but starting with the education of the practitioners of the technological and scientific enterprise, there is an absence of the moral structure in which life must operate. Insofar as they are concerned with discovering truths about nature, scientists can argue that knowledge of the truth, regardless of its implications, is better than ignorance. But engineers, as they convert these scientific truths into technical capacities, must concern themselves with the moral consequences of where their engineering creativity may lead. Should they not?

Today’s engineers really need a more well-rounded education — one that stresses not only the analytical skills necessary to be a good engineer but also the liberal arts that are necessary to teach these good engineers the wisdom of history, to provide the foundation for young students to grow and mature as citizens with responsibilities beyond the immediate technical concerns of their work. And the liberal arts can train a young mind to think critically and discriminately about moral questions — aiding in the ability to determine what is right and what is wrong. Most engineers are gifted in math and science; but this alone is not sufficient to make them responsible or moral human beings.

First, engineering educators must lead those they instruct by changing the prevailing attitude toward the humanities. They can admit that, although they can create wonders, they don’t know everything and don’t have all the answers — that there is far more to wisdom than being able to design an aircraft or create a microprocessor. They must admit that the responsibilities of the engineering profession are far greater than they can easily apprehend when they are lost in a computer screen, enraptured with the expansive yet still critically limited view of the act of technical creation. And they can admit and openly discuss that, in the past, engineers have been responsible for creating many of the problems that we struggle with as a society every day.

Second, we can collaborate with our colleagues in the humanities to structure engineering ethics courses that will interest engineers. Perhaps we need to relate ethics in a way that focuses less on universals and abstractions, and that makes sense to the practical and pragmatic mind. Engineers needn’t become great philosophers to appreciate the power, influence, and responsibility they possess as engineers. An engineering ethics course centered on case studies, such as Albert Speer’s, could drive home this point. And of course there are many others, of countless kinds: the creation of napalm and the atomic bomb; the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters; the I-35W Mississippi River bridge and Hyatt Regency walkway collapses; innumerable product-safety recalls; and on and on.

Teaching about the specific personalities involved in these disasters may also allow the student to see that there’s much more involved in engineering than science and technical skill — that social ramifications, and personal responsibility for them, are integral to everything they design and create.

There are many engineers who, like Speer, had extraordinary technical skills but lacked or neglected their capacity for critical judgment. Students could study Henry Ford or Howard Hughes to realize that their true technical genius wasn’t enough to make either of them complete men, and that efficiency, pragmatism, and utility all have their limits outside of engineering where, after all, we spend most of our lives.

But while culture and education are surely important for making decent citizens of engineers, one of the essential lessons that we can learn from the story of Albert Speer is that it is the individual technician himself who bears the ultimate responsibility for his work. The need for this responsibility only deepens as society and technology become more complex, allowing the engineer to become progressively more insulated and isolated from the effects of his creations. “I forgot,” Speer later said, shortly before the end of his own life, “that humanity is the most important part of life.”

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