Incident At Morales Essay

The incident at Morales: An Engineering Ethics story provides a great insight at the different ethical difficulties encountered in the engineering practice. The video provides various scenarios in which a person has to make many ethical choices and has to take many ethical responsibilities. It shows how a person, who wants to be ethical towards his work, can unintentionally get into situations, where his ethics are put up for questioning.
The main characters in the story are Fred, the chemical Engineer, Wally, Fred’s supervisor and Chuck, Vice President of Engineering at Phaust. These three characters had played a major role in the process and these characters will be allotted points based on their unethicalness. The other players in the story

Being an Engineer, he has a moral obligation towards the safety of the plant, the byproduct and the people concerned with the product. Manuel, the plant manager, was killed due to the negligence of the Fred and other authorities. Fred knew all the way that the plant was not safe for production and even then he gave the permission for the production to take place.
An Engineer’s work is to provide complete and genuine information about his work to the authorities and let the higher officials know if there any ambiguity with the process. One must stay by his rules at all time. But in the story, when Chuck said that they have to cut the plant size to balance the slashed budgets, Fred, instead of just getting convinced by Chuck, should had warned them about the consequences and should had convinced Chuck.
When there is a lot of dangerous substance (super-heated corrosive sludge in this case) being handled inside the plant, it is of utmost importance that the best quality materials be used. According to the story, Fred had to settle down for low quality metals instead of high pressure alloys, which was because of the low budget cuts. Fred did his work by warning Wally and Chuck regarding the consequences but he did not put much pressure on them. He settled for those degraded materials and may be this was the reason why Manuel got

From the story it can be observed that the temperatures and the pressures were almost doubled considering the product, which was already launched by the competing company. This lead to applying more pressure and heat on the valves and control systems which in turn lead to more hazardous consequences. Each and every time Fred was getting convinced and was settling for whatever the higher officials were saying. Fred is the Engineer here and he is the only one to know about what effect would double the pressures and temperatures would make on the total process. He should have raised his voice then.
Fred had a chance to stop everything when he was going through the plant with Wally. Fred saw what was happening with the coupling and Flanges and even had the chance to see the control systems malfunctioning. Even after all this, Fred and other officials made some small arrangements here and there and at last gave a go on the production to start. It should have been Fred who must have acknowledged the seriousness of the situation and should have temporally halted the production to fix all the bugs. But he