An Ethical Argument

    There are plenty of ethical arguments to take a look at in a field with as large of an impact as mechanical engineering. Many times mechanical engineers have to make a decision which will have a direct impact on people's lives and the environment either directly or indirectly. The two sides of most of these arguments can be summarized money versus safety.  The fact that there even has to be this kind of choice is that engineers have to work for businesses, and as such there has to be a profit or that business won' t around very long.

    Contrary to what is generally thought of people, the average person wants everyone to be as safe as possible. This is the same with mechanical engineers. If it were up to them, everything they ever designed would be made with the best materials available and would probably be a little overkill just to make sure it never even had a chance of breaking.

    

    On the opposite side of this spectrum, the average person also wants to make the most money for any given product they sell. This is the same for mechanical engineers. They also would like the greatest amount of money for each product they design. As such they would like every product they are involved with to have the greatest possible margin. This means minimizing costs. In order to do this, the mechanical engineer would want to have the product made from the cheapest material that barely gets the job done while barely not breaking. 

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    As you can see there is a contradiction within every choice that a mechanical engineer has to make. Even if they are not the one with the final say, they have to show that they are not being a greedy mechanical engineer who is skimming by on safety just to maximize profits, but also that they are not being an overly-cautious mechanical engineer who is over spending way too much on materials just to make sure that the product won't break.  

    These two sides of a mechanical are balanced out by factors of safety. These are used to act as buffers in almost every calculation computer. The higher the factor of safety the more cautious the engineer is being. The lower the factor of safety the more frugal the engineer is being. Normally the factor of safety for a project or calculation is not left to the engineer performing the calculation. It is usually left to some form of management since it is a very important decision. 

     If ever something actually does go wrong in a product, everything will get reviewed. Therefore the engineer has to be able to back up all of his/her choices in design with logical calculations. They have to be able to say that while they were paying attention to cost, they also left a reasonable margin of safety by using a factor of safety in their calculations.  Therefore the problem in the product is coming from somewhere else, and they should not be sued for some form of negligence that resulted in loss of property or even a death. 

Introducing the Mechanical Engineering Field

    The field of mechanical engineering is a very broad and old field.  Its origins can be traced back as far as Archimedes and his water screw in the third century BC. However, it came into its own as a field during the industrial revolution when it was possible to start separating the engineering fields. In its broadest sense, mechanical engineering is the field responsible for designing, analyzing, and maintaining machines and mechanical systems.  These machines and mechanical systems can be anything from airplanes to robots or artificial heart valves and giant air conditioners. Its focus is anything that can in the loosest way be described as a machine.

    Since mechanical engineering is such a broad field, there is a lot of room for specialization. This allows people with many different interests to work in the same field. However the common thread for these engineers tends to be an inclination towards mathematics, science, and problem solving.  The curriculum for mechanical engineers is chalk full of math and physics which is also lots of math. In fact, most mechanical engineers are two classes away from getting a minor in math by the time they graduate. As for the science, there are many different forms of physics in which you are taught general formulas and are expected to use your problem solving abilities to apply them in unrelated situations. So mechanical engineers have to be interested in the challenges of solving unfamiliar problems.

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     In general, mechanical engineers are viewed as poster boys/girls for engineering to people outside of engineering because the field is so broad. As such, this leads to the creation of some assumptions about mechanical engineers and engineers in general. One of these is that they are capable of fixing any random piece of machinery. While it may have been a mechanical engineer who designed it, that does not mean any mechanical engineer will immediately know how to fix it: e.g. a mechanical engineer who has specialized in refrigeration will most likely not know all of the intricacies of a tractor's transmission. 

    The mechanical engineering field aims to improve the populations quality of life through the use of machines by minimizing input and maximizing output, with the inputs and outputs viewed as money, resources, energy, or effort. In this way, that statement is nearly all-encompassing. The various specializations all aim to accomplish goals by spending the least amount of money and using the smallest amount of resources. They also want to maximize their outputs of energy or resources. And the most important part of the fields aim is improving quality of life, never ending it. The worst part of mechanical engineering is that there are often cases where people's lives end up on the line, e.g. they're designing an important airplane part. In theses situations, it becomes an ethical issue in balancing lives versus cost and practicality. This seems like a coldhearted thing to do, but in the end it is an unfortunate but necessary thing to do in order to get anything done.