Story:
Incident at Morales involves a variety of ethical issues faced by a company that wants to quickly build a plant in order to develop a new chemical product to gain a competitive edge over the competition.
Potential technical and ethical issues arise from choices of designs, including valves, piping, chemicals, etc. The process to develop the product is designed to be automated and controlled by computer software. The process also involves high temperatures and pressures and requires the use of chemicals that need special handling.
Because of environmental considerations related to the chemicals used in the process, the company decides to construct their plant in Mexico. Technical, environmental, financial, and safety problems arise that involve ethical issues.
Cast of Characters:
Fred: ………….Chemical Engineer hired by Phaust to design a new plant to manufacture a new paint remover
Wally: ………..Fred’s supervisor at Phaust
Chuck: ……….Vice President of Engineering at Phaust
Dominique: …Corporate liaison from Chemistré (parent company in France) to Phaust
Maria: ………..Fred’s wife, a compliance litigator for U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Hal: ……………Market Analyst at Phaust
Jen: …………….Research Chemist at Phaust
Peter: …………Project Manager of the construction firm that builds the new plant in Morales
Jake: ………….Plant Manager for the SuisseChem plant in Big Spring, Texas
Manuel: ……..Plant manager for the new Phaust plant in Morales, Nuevo Leon, Mexico
Synopsis:
Phaust Chemical manufactures “Old Stripper,” a paint remover that dominates the market.
On learning that Phaust’s competitor, Chemitoil, plans to introduce a new paint remover that may capture the market, executives at Phaust decide to develop a competing product.
To save money in manufacturing the product, Phaust decides to construct a new chemical plant in Mexico and hires chemical engineer Fred Martinez, a former design engineer for the consulting company Chemitoil, to design the plant.
Problems arise when Chemistré, Phaust’s parent company in France, slashes budgets 20% across the board. In response, Chuck, the vice president of engineering at Phaust, strongly encourages Fred to reduce construction costs.
Fred confronts several engineering decisions in which ethical considerations play a major role:
-Whether to use expensive controls manufactured by Lutz and Lutz, which has an inside connection at Phaust
- Whether to line the evaporation ponds to prevent the seepage of hazardous substances in the effluents into the groundwater
- Whether to line the evaporation ponds to prevent the seepage of hazardous substances in the effluents into the groundwater, although local regulations may not require this level of environmental protection.
- Whether to purchase pipes and connectors made with stainless steel or a high pressure alloy.
When samples of Chemitoil’s new paint remover, “EasyStrip,” become available, it is clear that to be competitive with “EasyStrip,” Phaust must change the formulation of its new paint remover, which requires higher temperatures and pressures than originally anticipated.
Some unexpected problems arise:
- Leakage occurs in one of the connections
- The automatic control system fails so the plant manager offers to control the process Manually
After the plant goes into full operation, an accident occurs, and the plant manager is killed while manually controlling the manufacturing process.
Ethical Issues:
A wide variety of ethical issues surface in Incident at Morales, including:
- Ethical responsibilities and obligations don’t stop at the U.S. border
- Ethics is an integral (and explicit) component of ordinary technical and business decision-making in engineering practice. Engineers impact people and should be more concerned about people than objects
- Technically competent, ethically sensitive, reasonable people may have different perspectives and can disagree when faced with complex ethical issues
- Negotiations resolve some of the conflicts in the video, but some ethical conflicts remain unresolved. Ethical problems are sometimes resolved by rational methods and compromise
- Market stresses arise from competition with other companies and from pressures to advance a design and construction schedule
- It is sometimes necessary to make decisions under pressure with incomplete data, insufficient time, and insufficient information
- Guidance to help resolve ethical problems is available in the form of codes of ethics and actual case studies from professional and technical engineering societies and engineering licensing boards. Consideration of consequences of technical, financial, and ethical decisions is an important element of the video Purpose:
The video is designed to help viewers become more aware that:
- Ethical considerations are an integral part of making engineering decisions
- A code of ethics will provide guidance in the decision-making process
- The obligations of a code of ethics do not stop at the United States border
- The obligations of engineers go beyond fulfilling a contract with a client or customer