Etika Keteknikan

1. Distinguishing factual, conceptual, application and moral questions and issues
Although the terms "question" and "issue" are often used interchangeably, we might distinguish them as follows.
An issue arises when there is controversy over what the answer to a question is, and it matters, practically speaking, how the question gets answered.
Thus "How many trees were there in Brazos County on January 1, 1444?" is a question, but it is hardly an issue, whereas "Is elective abortion murder?" is both a question and an issue.
In the lecture on chapter two, we already began to distinguish among the four kinds of questions and issues mentioned in the title of this section. To help nail down the distinctions more clearly, so that you can put them to better use in analyzing cases, we should say a bit more about what makes something a factual question vs. a moral question.
Factual questions
The textbook authors do not give an explicit definition of "factual question," but we can fairly characterize what they mean in terms of a standard definition of what counts as an empirical question:
A question is empirical if and only if it could, at least in principle or under ideal conditions, be resolved through observation or experiment.
So we might say that factual questions concern "data." But note the following related points:
1. "Observation or experiment" covers a very broad range of things, all the way from simply going and looking around the house or listening to what a person says, through taking photographs outside of the visual wavelengths and measuring the chemical content of water with instruments, to tracing the trajectories of subatomic particles in a cloud chamber.
• For this reason, not all empirical questions are properly characterized as "scientific" questions. The latter term is best reserved for the subset of empirical questions which formal scientific training and practice would be required to answer.
2. And thus, not all factual questions are about things that are directly observable; sometimes the data we rely on in resolving them are indirect indicators of the things in question.
• For instance, just as physicists make inferences about the presence and causal properties of subatomic particles from their trajectories in cloud chambers, we make inferences about the presence and causal properties of mental states using "folk psychology," the common sense way of explaining the behavior of people [and some animals] in terms of their beliefs and desires.
• In saying this about mental states, we need not commit ourselves to any very specific answers to complex questions in the philosophy of mind. All we are committing outselves to is the claim that there is a fact of the matter about what beliefs, desires, etc., people have, and that what they do and say is at least normally a reliable indicator of these.
• If you want some background on the philosophy of mind, you could begin by visiting these links:
 four on-line lectures on the philosophy of mind by Colin Allen, or
 the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on The Identity Theory of Mind.
3. A special instance of the foregoing are causal claims, for these are not just about what in fact occurred and was thus observable. Causal claims are also about what did not in fact occur, but would have, under certain (counterfactual) conditions.
• Thus statements about causal relationships have a special, and philosophically interesting, status. For to say that, generally, "Xs cause Ys" is to say not only that whenever an X occurs, a Y follows, but also that if an X had occurred (when it in fact did not), then a Y would have occurred too. And to make the singular claim that "X was the cause of Y in this case" is to say that if (contrary to fact) X had not occurred, then Y would not have occurred.
• If you want some background on the meaning and logical status of counterfactuals, you could begin by visiting this link:
 The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on counterfactual theories of causation.
(Note: If you followed more than one of the above links for optional background information, then you should seriously consider changing your major to philosophy. For information on that, click here.)
(sumber: Unless indicated otherwise, quotations and page references are to the textbook: Harris, Pritchard and Rabins, Engineering Ethics, second edition (Wadsworth 2000). )