Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
In general, allowing disabled individuals the same opportunity to participate
as others when their functioning involves technology reduces the underclass
of deficient individuals, leaving normal people a smaller number to whom
they can feel superior.
There, thus, is a widespread social habit of rejecting individuals with dis-
abilities based on their intimate ties with the products of technology. Assis-
tive technology professionals ought to be aware of this familiar reaction, and
most are. They also ought to understand this prejudice for what it is and be
committed to facing and dealing with it. Unfortunately, the sources available
from which to draw guidance in professional ethics for assistive technology
do not prepare them to do so.
1.3 Sources of Assistive Technology Ethics
1.3.1 Engineering Ethics
Codes of engineering ethics
5
began to be developed early in the twentieth
century, coincident with engineers organizing as a profession suciently re-
sponsible to regulate itself. Unlike medical ethics, where individual patients
are regarded as the primary beneficiaries, engineers are held first of all to pro-
mote the public or general good. They must protect public health, safety and
welfare, sometimes against the interests of employers, to whom they have an
obligation of loyalty. Harm caused by structural failure sometimes, although
not always, arises from design or construction failure to which ethical fail-
ures, such as conflict of interest or bribery or deflection of responsibility or
absence of respect for other humans, have contributed.
As the twentieth century drew to a close, engineers found themselves work-
ing with structures of kinds unimaginable to their predecessors at the begin-
ning of the century - not only in electrical engineering but most prominently
in bioengineering. Because the structures bioengineers create enable individ-
ual humans to achieve biological functioning, albeit through mechanical or
electrical means, for bioengineers, including designers of assistive technology,
the ethics of bioengineering resides at the intersect of medical and engineering
ethics.
For example, contrary to some prevailing practice, the medical devices they
design should be tested on human subjects, with the risk-benefit standards
and safeguards common to human subject research, such that subjects:
5
For examples of engineering codes of ethics and discussions of ethical dilemmas specific
to engineering, see the excellent website of the National Academy of Engineering, On-
line Ethics Center for Engineering and Research [
4
]. See also the Code of Ethics of the
Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology Society of North America [
6
].
