Engineering Ethics Problems in a Developing Country - Ethical Engineering for International Development and Environmental Sustainability - page 228

considerations. However, when these embargoes are motivated by the self-interest
of, for instance, wealthy elites in the countries applying them, they are not ethical.
From the perspective of positive utilitarian ethics, benefits should be assessed
against risks and costs, whereas negative utilitarianism requires present or future
harms to be offset or mitigated. The embargoes resulted in disadvantage to Poland
and its leading ICT designers. Discussion of the Cold War is clearly beyond the
scope of this paper. However, it can be noted that despite the real concerns that
motivated actions such as embargoes in some cases, the embargoes of technical
equipment to Poland should be considered counter to both deontological and utili-
tarian ethics. After successful completion of the design and implementation, the
POPs in charge of the firm generally intervened to make it very difficult for the
designers to continue working in ICT and automation in any significant way. This
is very unprofessional and counter to most ethical principles (see Chap. 2 ) and
resulted in disadvantage to society as a whole, as well as the designers and poten-
tial users of the system. Their behaviour was also hypocritical, since they claimed
to be acting on behalf of society as a whole.
It might be thought that a change in political and economic system to a capitalist
one with a similar type of pseudo-democracy to those prevalent in the West would
have led to the lifting of embargoes. However, this did not happen following the
political and economic changes in Poland at the end of the 1980s. The position of
ICT pioneers in Poland did not improve, and political embargoes were replaced by
economic and technical persecution by the large corporations supplying advanced
technology to Poland. These firms even implemented unethical and illegal bullying
and harassment actions against the pioneers, whom they feared as possible competi-
tors. For instance, none of the Western firms involved in the technology transfer
process employed these ICT and automation pioneers. A number of unsubstantiated
reasons were given for this, but in practice bullying and harassment was used to
exclude them. As well as being unethical and harming a number of highly skilled
individuals, this was counterproductive. Removal of some of the most highly edu-
cated and experienced people naturally resulted in implementation problems for
new technologies and a number of technology transfer projects failed (Wojsznis
2013, private communication). This problem could only be resolved by ICT tech-
nology providers realising that successful projects required the involvement of the
best available local ICT people to solve the implementation problems associated
with technology transfer.

3 Case Studies

The following case studies involve discussion of the negative experiences of several
typical leading designers of this period. The information for these case studies
comes from the direct knowledge of the first author of the chapter, who was one of
the successful leading designers at Elwro in this period. The leading designers
selected played a very important role in the development of computers and com-