A BSTRACTEngineering draws guidance from many disciplines for its teaching and practice. The evolution of engineering as a response to societal and personal needs has created, together with technical challenges, ethical dimensions akin to more service-oriented professions. Several frameworks of ethics have been suggested to incorporate and address these dimensions. In this paper, the ethic of care is singled out due to the natural analogy between engineering and care: they both respond to a need and are oriented towards action. The suitability of care to provide guiding principles is supported by highlighting the distinguishing features that make the ethic of care especially relevant to engineering. Finally, it is shown through examples that the benefits from applying principles of the ethic of care vary from helpful reminders to valuable insights and guidelines in teaching and practicing engineering.
An expert knowledge site-screening methodology has
been developed to evaluate naturally occurring reductive
dechlorination as a remedial option for sites with TCE-contaminated groundwater. This methodology combines a
causative model for the reductive dechlorination of TCE
and expert knowledge within a Bayesian Belief Network.
The knowledge base for this expert system was obtained
from 22 experts via an expert elicitation protocol. The
resulting expert system can be used to aid environmental
decision making by evaluating the adequacy of reductive
dechlorination at TCE-contaminated sites. Comparisons
between this expert system and a commonly used screening
tool show that this expert system produces predictive
models that may better discriminate between locations that
were sampled. The 22 elicitations revealed different
beliefs and assumptions among experts about the biochemical
processes involved in reductive dechlorination. The decision-making value of some types of evidence is a matter of
dispute; however, findings about biodegradation daughter and/or end products have high decision-making value for all
of the experts. The methodology demonstrated herein can
provide insights for other environmental decision-making
challenges.
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