As inflation, supply chain issues and global uncertainties persist through 2023, (human factors) engineers might be asked to do more with less; to shore up legacy systems and patch up accumulated technical debt; to compromise on design principles, tests, or even safety margins in order to achieve production or financial goals. Of course, as Petroski reminds us, an engineering design is always a compromise among fundamentally irreconcilable goals, but some have recently led to notorious disasters, such as the Boeing 737 MAX accidents and the 2021 Texas energy infrastructure failure (and earlier ones such as the 1980s Space Shuttle SRB design).

It is increasingly recognized that such compromises may inflict ‘moral injury’ on professionals, whose ethical framework gets violated by the dilemma it puts them in. Moral injury can be triggered by a self-accusation for something one did or failed to do, particularly something related to a professional role or expectation. In this talk, I want to highlight three aspects of engineering compromises and moral injury: (1) the reality of ‘unruly technology’ and need for resilience in addition to robustness and reliability; (2) professional guilt, self-blame and the role of outcome and hindsight; (3) and organizational betrayal—not only in asking engineers to either sacrifice their professional ethic or their career, but in the expectation of ‘cheap grace’ afterward, which does not entail an organizational commitment to live according to the lessons learned.

All three have deep implications for engineering management and leadership—demanding a poise of humility, an understanding of the impacts, needs and obligations that come from moral compromise or bad events, and forward-looking accountability. When calls for enhanced employee voice are made, and engineers need to rely on protections and moral inducements to ‘speak up,’ then the ethical essence of engineering—scepticism, testing, checking, and questioning—has already failed.