Buy essay on Improper design and installation of TV antenna led to a tragedy

The aim of this essay is to consider ethical issues arising for Case 42 (Harris, Pritchard and Rabins, 2008, p. 281) where improper design and installation of TV antenna led to a tragedy, identify the conceptions of responsibility that are prevalent in this case, suggest other responsibility conceptions that might help avoid the tragedy and discuss other ethical issues arising in this case.
In order to understand and analyze this case, it is necessary to mention that besides basic responsibility for their job, engineers are expected to satisfy a more demanding norm, referred to as “the standard of care” (Harris, Pritchard and Rabins, 2008, p. 31). This concept might be explained in the following way: engineer’s work suggests the existence of errors – for which the engineer should not be liable, and when hiring an engineer, the customer needs to take this into account; however, “if the error is shown to have been worse than a certain level of error” (Harris, Pritchard and Rabins, 2008, p. 32), the engineer’s liability takes place. The border between negligent and non-negligent error level is “the standard of care”. In the case “TV antenna” there were at least two negligent errors both from the side of design firm and rigging company: the former ignored the requests of the riggers and did not bother to give them advices or consider a compromise solution, and the latter did not plan their work properly from the very beginning, and did not hire a professional to check their model (and did not provide other means of ensuring that their model is flawless).
Concerning the questions of responsibility, there certainly appears professional responsibility (“the standard of care”) for the design engineer who refused to look at the lifting plans. Also, there exists the other side’s responsibility – obligation responsibility of the supervisor, the company executive who ordered the design engineer not to examine the plans. While the engineer is in charge for the engineering project itself, the person occupying a position or playing a role in supervision, needs to provide careful oversight of the current project, and holds obligation responsibility for it (Martin and Schinzinger, 2005, p. 113) In the regarded cases, significant violation of engineering ethics by both sides led to a tragedy, and this case emphasizes the importance of professional ethics and its implementation by all participants.
Sources
Charles E. Harris, Michael S. Pritchard, Michael J. Rabins. Engineering Ethics: Concepts and Cases. Cengage Learning, 2008.
Mike W. Martin, Roland Schinzinger. Ethics in engineering. McGraw-Hill, 2005.