Determining Negligence in Engineering Failures

In Determining Negligence in Engineering Failures, you'll learn ...

• What the terms, "safety" and "risk," mean
• Factors that influence the determination of the expected standard of care that should be exercised by a prudent engineer
• Two common biases that may arise in a failure investigation when judging the actions of people well after an event has occurred and has been publicized
• Four case studies that illustrate the concepts outlined in the course

Overview

Credit: 2 PDH

Length: 20 pages

In creating products for clients or the general public, engineers have an ethical duty to strive to prevent the products from harming anyone. Thus when a product fails and someone is injured or killed, the question always arises whether the engineers responsible for the product were guilty of negligence.

Negligence may be defined as the failure to exercise the standard of care that a prudent engineer would exercise under the same circumstances. Thus to determine if negligence was the cause of a failure, the expected standard of care existing before the failure must first be determined. This can be difficult. The purpose of this course is to describe factors that influence the determination of the expected standard of care. Factors considered are the maturity of the technology, the public’s belief that absolute safety can be attained, the magnitude of the risks and their obviousness, prior knowledge of failure modes, biases that might be present in any investigations of the failure, and the public’s desire to identify and blame wrong-doers. Based on these considerations, a list of possible causes of engineering failure can be constructed. Negligence is one of these causes, and the only one that involves a moral failing of the engineers involved with the failure.

These concepts are illustrated with a description of four case studies illustrating failure causes ranging from gross negligence to absolutely unforeseeable events:

This course is intended for engineers concerned with ethical behavior in engineering practice. This course is based on the paper, "Determining Negligence in Engineering Failures," by Mark Rossow, July, 2015.