Caroline Baillie Shares Thoughts on Social Responsibility, Charity and Justice

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Baillie05_socialJustice

The idea of accepting responsibility means having the ability to respond and that means knowledgeably. You cannot respond appropriately if you don't have the knowledge and the students are really being, I think underserved if we don't prepare them adequately. This notion of common sense is really paramount. What is common sense to many engineering students or to many engineers actually... is often not necessarily common sense to some other person. When I went to Canada I was quite fascinated by what I was expected to think like and how I was expected to think like just because I was an engineer and I was reminded of when I first started in engineering and I used to think that I thought differently from the people around me because I was female. I really did. I thought oh, my values are different from them because they're men. And it wasn't until many years later that I realized there were men that thought like me too, and it was actually the value system that I didn't agree with. I wasn't actually going to spend my life worrying about power, status and money. I'm standing up here so that's kind of embarrassing but ... nevertheless you know, they were not the values that I would live by and I didn't understand a system which credited those. But I ... you know, I've since realized that that somehow is the way in which society rewards things and that tends to start to become common sense and when you get a profession, an engineering profession, whose common sense it is to actually produce and produce and produce without thinking about why, then we have a problem. I think then we really have problem. Ursula Franklin again, she has a wonderful way of looking at this and she thinks we should do bookkeeping, typical sort of sustainability, triple bottom line, social, economic and environmental but lets look at whose benefit and whose cost, who pays and who benefits for each of the social environmental and economic. I ask my students to do this exercise. They were to design a socially just engineering something and then I got them to do that cross benefit analysis and one of them said to me, it doesn't work. I said what do you mean it doesn't work? Said well, the only people that are benefiting of it are the local people and the only ... we can't find people that pay except the big company down the road and that's it. Well maybe you have social just then. But the cost benefit analysis really needs to be done. I think one of the key things for students is to understand the difference between justice and charity. That's something again, which is fairly alien to people to really know what do we mean by that. Surely it's a good thing to be charitable; surely it's a good thing to be just. We have to start to be really critical about what we mean. Charity generally keeps things the same. Justice means we actually want things to be changed so that there's more equity and when we follow each of those paths, we do different things.