Everything happens for a reason. A reason that engineering disasters happen would be because the leaders failed in the execution of their tasks, or led unethically by letting power get to their heads.
Disasters caused by human neglect are blame-full occurrences. If a rocket crashes because a part on it was out of order, this was the fault of a member on the team that did not ensure it was fixed, especially if they did not tell anyone. If a leader of a team finds out that there is a problem that could threaten the mission, the leader should always halt the launch and ensure that any problems are fixed first.
If the leader knows about the technical difficulty and presses on, that means that they are unethical. This unethical behavior is caused either due to the greed of time and money, or lack of prudence shown by ignorance and neglect. In the rocket explosion case, the leader either did not care about the human’s life as much as the timeline of the mission, or they were neglecting the knowledge they should have had for the position that they held in order to see the potential impending damage.
This shows that engineering disasters are not merely technical accidents, but they are failures of leadership. This then leads to the thought of someone, or some group, below the leader making the decision of actually launching the rocket at the given moment, because they, in this case, knew of the problem and the extent of it.
These engineers, software developers, or technology workers should have come forth with more details to back up the danger of the problem to the leader, and if the leader continued to ignore, they should have not gone through with the launch (against orders, but saving lives). They did the first thing right, by informing NASA of the probable impending doom, but going through with the launch was not an ethical move on their part.
This relates to “whistle blowing,” the concept of, in a broad view, an employee not following company rules with the intention of serving the greater good. These rocket-launchers, I believe, should have practiced whistle-blowing. They should have stopped the launch if they knew something bad could happen. Though this may have cost them their jobs, it would have saved lives. In other cases of whistle blowing, it is hard to tell whether it is more ethical to always speak the truth or to follow company policy no matter what.
Whistle blowing is good if it uncovers issues that a corporation was trying to hide from the public when in reality those issues should be public-knowledge and not withheld from anyone. On the other hand, if sensitive information was leaked to the public that should have only been seen by some of the public, say one sided war content, then the whistle blower is at fault because although their actions may have seemed right to them, they were only half-ethical and could have been thought through more with the good of the company and the privacy of the data leaked in mind.
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