2.3 Socio-technical systems in professional decision making  (Page 9/10)

Exercise 1: make a table that describes the socio-technical system

Directions: identify the constituents of the socio-technical system. use the broad categories to prompt you.

1. What are the major hardware and software components?
2. Describe the physical surroundings.
3. What are the major people groups or roles involved?
4. Describe any procedures in the STS.
5. Itemize the laws, statutes, and regulations.
6. Describe the data and data structures in your STS. Use the two templates below that fill in this table for energy generation systems and for engineering ethics in Puerto Rico.

Exercise 2: identify value mismatches in the sts

Directions: identify the values embedded in the sts. use the table below to suggest possible values as well as the locations in which they are embedded.

1. Integrity : "Integrity refers to the attributes exhibited by those who have incorporated moral values into the core of their identities. Such integration is evident through the way values denoting moral excellence permeate and color their expressions, actions, and decisions. Characteristics include wholeness, stability, sincerity, honesty to self and others, suthenticity, and striving for excellence.
2. Justice : Justice as fairness focuses on giving each individual what is his or her due. Three senses of justice are (1) the proper, fair, and proportionate use of sanctions, punishments and disciplinary measures to enforce ethical standards (retributive justice), (2) the objective, dispassionate, and impartial distribution of the benefits and burdens associated with a system of social cooperation (distributive justice), (3) an objectively determined and fairly administered compensation for harms and injustices suffered by individuals (compensatory justice), and (4) a fair and impartial formulation and administration of rules within a given group.
3. Respect : Respecting persons lies essentially in recognizing their capacity to make and execute decisions as well as to set forth their own ends and goals and integrate them into life plans and identities. Respects underlies rights essential to autonomy such as property, privacy, due process, free speech, and free and informed consent.
4. Responsibility : (Moral) Responsibility lies in the ability to identify the morally salient features of a situation and then develop actions and attitudes that answer to these features by bringing into play moral and professional values. Responsibility includes several senses: (1) individuals are responsible in that they can be called upon to answer for what they do; (2) individuals have responsibilities because of commitments they make to carrying out the tasks associated with social and professional roles; (3) responsibility also refers to the way in which one carries out one's obligations (This can range from indifference to others that leads to minimal effort to high care for others and commitment to excellence)
5. Free Speech : Free Speech is not an unlimited right. Perhaps the best place to start is Mill's argument in On Liberty . Completely true, partially true, and even false speech cannot be censored, the latter because censoring false speech deprives the truth of the opportunity to clarify and invigorate itself by defending itself. Mill only allows for a limitation of free speech based on harm to those at which the speech is directed. Speech that harms an individual (defamatory speech or shouting "fire" in a crowded theatre) can be censored out of a consideration of self-defense, not of the speaker, but of those who stand to be harmed by the speech.
6. Privacy : If an item of information is irrelevant to the relation between the person who has the information and the person sho seeks it, then that information is private. Privacy is necessary to autonomy because control over information about oneself helps one to structure and shape one's relations with others.
7. Property : According to Locke, we own as property that with which we have mixed our labor. Thomas Jefferson argues that ideas are problematic as property because, by their very nature, they are shared once they are expressed. They are also nonrivalrous and nonexclusive.