5.1 Theory building activities: "responsibility and incident at  (Page 5/7)

Reponsibility as virtue

• The Incident at Morales provides us with a look into a fictionalized disaster. But, if it is examined more carefully, it also shows opportunities for the exercise of responsibility as a virtue. The following table will help you to identify these "responsibility opportunities" and allow you to imagine counbter-factuals where had individuals acted otherwise the "incident" could have been avoided and moral value could have been realized.
• Think of virtuous or even heroic interventions that could have prevented the accident. These represents, from the standpoint of the film, lost opportunities for realizing responsibility and other virtues.

Section conclusion

Questions to get started

• Is Fred (blame) responsible for the accident and even Manuel's death? (Use the conditions of imputability and the excuse table to get started on this question.)
• Did Wally and Chuck evade their responsibility by delegating key problems and decisions to those, like plant manager Manuel, in charge of operations? (Start the answer to this question by determining the different role responsibilities of the stakeholders in this situation.)
• What kind of responsibility does the parent French company bear for shifting funds away from Phaust's new plant to finance further acquisitions and mergers? (Looking at the modules on corporate social responsibility and corporate governance will help you to frame this in terms of corporate responsibility.)
• Do engineering professional societies share responsibility with Fred? (The CIAPR and NSPE codes of ethics will help here. Try benchmarking corporate codes of ethics to see if they provide anything relevant.
• Look at the positive, proactive moral responsibilities of professional societies. What can they do to provide moral support for engineers facing problems similar to those Fred faces? Think less in terms of blame and more in terms of prevention and value realization.