Applying a “do no harm” mindset to engineering decisions and system design.

I’ve been thinking about this topic for quite a while now. Doctors take an oath as part of their qualification ceremony known as the Hippocratic Oath. The most famous part of the oath can be paraphrased as “First, do no harm” or, in Latin, primum non nocere. Is there a need for a similar commitment on the part of engineers?

In a recent talk Professor Raffaella Ocone, president-elect of the Institution of Chemical Engineers, explored the topic of engineering ethics by drawing on the teaching of ancient philosophers and bringing their thinking into the 21st century context. Professor Ocone noted that the Greek philosopher Archilochus had written about hedgehogs and foxes, saying that “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” This idea was adapted in the 1950s by Isaiah Berlin in his essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” which categorizes writers and thinkers into two groups: those who focus on a single defining idea and those who have a much broader world view. Engineers, according to Professor Ocone, tend to be hedgehogs. In the modern world, however, and particularly in order to cope with increasingly complex societal and environmental issues, we need to assimilate a much wider range of information sources into our thinking. We need to become more foxy.

In the refrigeration sector, we have been struggling with a barrage of wide-ranging issues since the 1980s, and we have done some fantastic work to keep ahead of the curve. The response of the sector to the Montreal Protocol is a shining example of achieving significant beneficial change within a remarkably short timescale. Unfortunately it also highlights the engineers’ hedgehog-like behavior. The entire objective was reduced to a single-number metric, in that case the ozone depletion potential, and the whole development map was configured around it. Soon this was replaced by another single-number metric, the global warming potential, and the cycle repeated. This was then superseded by total equivalent warming impact and then by life cycle climate performance. Always pursuing the goal, hedgehog-style, of minimizing a single number.

Ethics, in the context of engineering, is not about ticking boxes to confirm that the proposed solution is going to be socially acceptable. It is rather about assessment of the box itself to see whether it is addressing the right issues and is fit for purpose. To do this, we need to be broad-minded enough to see whether our proposed solution answers not only the questions that have already been posed but also those that have not yet been thought of so that we can anticipate the consequences of our present actions on the future world.

This is where primum non nocere comes into the picture. As we consider the developments necessary to take us beyond the fourth generation of refrigerants, we need to consider more than just any single number metric. All consequences of the technical decisions being taken need to be weighed to see whether the proposed solution will stand the test of time or will only be another short-lived detour along the way.

The physician must be able to discern the history, know the present, and foretell the future.” – Hippocrates, Of the Epidemics, Book 1, Chapter 2