Ethics and Phenomenology

Phenomenology is, generally speaking, a discipline that examines
questions of metaphysics and epistemology. Insofar as ethics is
usually seen as a topic apart from metaphysics and epistemology, it is
thus not typically addressed by philosophers in the phenomenological
tradition. However, there are important areas of overlap between
ethics, metaphysics and epistemology, which may be fruitful points of
departure for exploring a phenomenologically-oriented notion of
ethics. In particular, metaphysics and epistemology seek to consider
the validity of, among other ideas, analysis and wonder. An
exploration of analysis and wonder can reveal the importance of ethics
in this context. Once we have seen what follows from this standpoint,
further consideration of ethics in terms of engineering will show how
this standpoint can inform upon the world of praxis.

1. Theoretical Concerns

a. Ethics Underlies Wonder and Analysis

Ethics can be seen as the foundation of wonder and analytic thought.
First, existentialists accept wonder and deemphasize analysis, though
phenomenologists tend to be more open to wonder and analytic thinking.
Logical positivists and linguistic analysts see wonder as reducible to
logic. Existentialists and phenomenologists are comfortable with
ethics associated with wonder and analysis. Positivists and analysts
deny ethics as an irreducible field of study. Ethicists would look at
wonder to see if people need drugs in order to achieve states of
euphoria or peace. Additionally, ethicists would take the same view
about computers and analytic method.

In both instances, the question of ethics enters concerning more than
the validity of wonder and analysis in the traditional philosophical
sense (Kazanjian, 80; Buber, p. 11). Traditionally, existentialists
and phenomenologists see wonder as revealing what "is." Analysis has
almost no place in much of existentialism, and varying degrees of
validity in phenomenology. Traditionally, linguistic analysts and
logical positivists see nothing to be gained with wonder. Reality is
language, and is to be analyzed, never something about which to
wonder.

Ethics brings in a deeper issue in both instances. Even if wonder
alone is valid, ought people use drugs to feel a sense of awe? Even if
analysis alone can give access to reality, ought people simply resot
to computers, the higher the speed the better, to understand what is?

Existential and phenomenological thinkers tell us that awe or wonder
is the basis of analysis, or as pure wonder, may stand alone without
cognition. Ethicists may argue that awe or wonder is a human trait and
ought not require or involve drugs and surgical stimulation of the
brain to induce a sense of wonder (Campbell, p. 163). Awe is basically
the social, intersubjective reality of living in the world.
Phenomenology calls the world the lived world instead of just the
material, quantifiable world. This wonder is consciousness in the
unaltered state. In this unaltered state, wonder is part of normal,
lived, reality or existence.

Ethicists would say that linguistic analysis or logical positivism
changes or distorts reality. Drugs and brain stimulation are not lived
reality. They develop a state of artificial awe or wonder. If the
unaltered mind uses logic alone to access reality, it may mean
altering reality from what ought be to what artificially exists. If
the person uses mind altering drugs to achieve awe or wonder, then the
awe or wonder itself is altered, artificial, and unlived. We then see
not the lived world, but the artificial world.

Phenomenology says we should not excarnate or take analysis out of the
lived world. Phenomenological ethicists would say we should not
excarnate wonder itself from the lived world. Thus, phenomenologists
and existentialists would be medically, pharmaceutically, or
biologically excarnating wonder or awe from the lived world, even if
they refute positivism and analytics' portrayal of awe or wonder as
wrong and insist on wonder or awe as revealing reality. The ethical
position becomes a sociological view (Bryant, p. 1).

Paul Ricoeur (p. 217) looks at Cartesian dualism and says that we must
overcome its excarnating of objectivity from the body.
Non-biochemically, Ricoeur is criticizing Cartesian dualism for
ignoring the embodiment of the objective. He is insisting that
objectification must be done within the context of the lived world. We
analyze the lived world or reduce it to quantities within the general
framework of awe or wonder. Ricoeur's approach suggests that even
logical positivism and linguistic analysis needs to look at the
problem of excarnation. These movements are in the same category as
Cartesian dualism when they consider analysis or reduction as without
wonder, or devoid of the lived world.

The difference between logical positivism and analytic philosophy on
the one hand, and Cartesian dualism on the other, rests with their
views of reality. Dualism sees mind and body, or objectivity and
subjectivity, as both real and valid. The problem is how to relate
them. Positivism and analytic thinking argue that the lived world,
subjectivity, wonder, awe, and so on do not exist as irreducible
reality. They are totally reducible to the simples of fact.

Ricoeurian thinking contrasts with Cartesian dualism and with
positivism and analytic philosophy by saying all three movements
should see themselves as having wrongly excarnated object from the
lived world. An ethics approach to wonder, however, goes deeper than
Ricoeur. The ethicist would insist that we cannot justify wonder for
the sake of wonder. We need to look at how we approach wonder or awe.
Saying that the lived world and wonder are important is not
sufficient. Arguing against positivist and analytic reductionism of
wonder to facts is only partly correct. How we define the biochemical
context of wonder is critical.

In ethics, we may wonder by being conscious and not taking drugs to
alter the brain. People look around them, or they inquire, or
meditate, and feel it crucial to feel a sense of wonder that beings
"are." We wonder by ourselves, without bio-physiological intervention.
Indeed, we do not need to take an aspirin or other legal medication to
feel as sense of relaxation, calm, or rest. Beyond this, ethics says
we ought not feel it important or in any way justified to take any
illegal drugs that might induce a "high." The biochemical high or awe
is indeed a biochemical reduction or analytic approach to wonder. This
approach would assume that the state of wonder is primarily, perhaps
exclusively, a chemical reaction within the brain, and has little to
do with normal, non-biochemical experiences of the lived world. In
other words, the biochemical approach to wonder suggests that we
wonder not through existing, but primarily through changing the
chemistry of the brain.

Ethics might call the biochemical approach to wonder as biochemical,
pharmaceutical, or otherwise physiological positivism or analysis.
Ironically and unfortunately, this becomes serious to the point where
no real inquiry, not even traditional logical positivism and analytic
thinking is possible. An ethicist might ask us to look at a piece of
analytic literature or philosophy. We see symbols, diagrams, and
virtually mathematical methods for attempting to determine resolutions
to questions and problems. The analytic thinker, the positivist, would
argue that they are coming near to solving issues, and that these
solutions or clarifications reveal a reality devoid of wonder.

The ethics approach notes that these analytic and positivist thinkers
are consciously engaging in intellectually work. They converse with
each other, perhaps argumentatively with existentialists and
phenomenologists, but always are participating in some kind of control
over what they are doing. Their brains are functioning without
medication or alteration. Now, the ethicists will point out, consider
the biochemically activated phenomenologist or existentialist. In
other words, we no longer just speaking of the positivist and analytic
thinker inquiring without drugs. We are no longer speaking of
positivists and analytic thinkers trying to totally reduce wonder to
facts in terms of normal, not medicated activity. What the ethicist
criticizes is the phenomenologist or existentialist who is defending
wonder through druges. This person is criticizing positivism and
analysis for trying to totally non-biochemically reduce wonder or awe
to atomism. Yet, the phenomenologist and existentialist is defending
irreducibility by feeling wonder, perhaps even attempting writing if
that is possible, by consuming biochemicals which will induce the
sense of oneness or awe (Eliade, p. 31).

In effect, the phenomenologist or existentialist has become a de facto
positivist or analytic thinker. The phenomenologist or existentialist
becomes a biochemical phenomenologist or existentialist, totally
reducing the chemistry of the brain, body, and lived world to atoms
and chemical reactions. If it is possible, the ethicist calls this
positivistic or analytic phenomenology or existentialism. On the other
hand, for clarification, the ethicist might use another term:
biochemical phenomenology or existentialism.

b. War

What of the analytic thinker or positivist using computers for their
approaches? Ethics would point to the efforts by analytic thinkers
during World War II to crack Hitler's Enigma Machine code. The machine
worked strictly through symbols. Codes are symbols. During WWII the
codes were relatively complex, but speed was crucial in breaking them.
Today, and in the future, with cryptology becoming increasingly
sophisticated, codes become more complex, and the speed required to
break them more crucial.

Positivists and analysts would insist that their philosophy requires
respect, and faster computers. Ethicists would argue that we need a
better world where criminals and dictators are minimized, and their
powers decapitated. Having the computer capabilities of speedier
problem-solving does not "solve" the problem in its widest sense. The
problem in its widest sense is that people, usually the leaders, go
bad and make evil things happen in the world. When governments ignore
the rise of evil, they usually invite international catastrophes such
as the Second World War. As the war occurs, and as the innocent
attempt to now fight and defeat the enemy, many on the side of the
innocent take pride in their technical efforts.

Technical abilities helped our side win against Hitler in his efforts
to communicate through codes. None of this would have had to occur if
we had kept him from rising to power in the first place. His rise to
power, and the unethical ways we ignored his ascension were key to the
disaster of the Second World War. We ignored his actions against Jews
and non-Jews. This ignorance was unethical. We sat back and did
nothing.

Toward the end, we began panicking and wondered how to solve problems
to end the war. One major answer was to break his coding abilities.
Fortunately, we broke his code, and this helped us win the war.

Today, intelligence agencies are increasingly positivistic in their
coding/decoding efforts. Computers are the foundations of
coding/decoding. Speed is paramount. We spend money, lots of it, in
developing ways of surreptitiously monitoring telecommunications to
determine what potential terrorists are saying. Technology is
advancing rapidly in our endeavors to translate foreign and English
conversations to determine whether speakers are planning attacks.

Forgotten in all this rush to technologize existence, society ignores
the ethical grounds of analysis and computers (Stine, 141). We forget
that analysis is embodied in wonder, and that thinking and wonder
involve the ethical orientation. Are we ignoring the poor, the
economically and socially deprived, the underprivileged? We no doubt
are ignoring the impoverished. Then, in the event that the
impoverished seek ways of retaliating, we suddenly seeks technical
ways of speedier discovery of the terrorists' plots.

Even when terrorists are wealthy, we seek to look the other way
instead of considering their moral deviancy and their ongoing hatred
of humanity, especially of the West. We let this hatred grow, assuming
that we do not initially deny it. As their hatred grows, it can
mushroom into attacks against the West or even people in other
cultures. Only then, in post 9/11 fashion, do we react and seek the
speediest computers to analyze terrorist activities and conversations.

Ethics is derived from ethos or people. Any human activity must be
seen within the social context. Thinking and wonder are among the
fundamental human activities. Relegating cognition to the sum total of
data becomes anti-human; similarly, relegating wonder to the realm of
intravenous or other methods of drug intake is no longer a human
activity. The ethos orientation of cognition means that thought,
contrary to what Descartes said, is embodied and of social
perspective. Cognition is never disembodied. To disembody cognition is
to commit two wrongs.

One wrong is to seek cognition as devoid of awe. This makes thought
sterile and dehumanizing. The second wrong is to see disembodied
cognition as part of a technology where speed is the only way to
resolve problems and answer questions.

Awe or wonder is the pre-cognitive requisite of the cognitive. Yet,
ethics notes that we cannot stop there. Wonder cannot be an end in
itself. If wonder is derived from a natural, non-drug induced sequence
whereby we simply wonder that things "are," then we are practicing
true awe. Once we take drugs or otherwise stimulate the brain to
induce wonder, than the wonder is unethical. It is mechanical rather
than emerging from ethos.

c. Hospitals

Take the example of a hospital's intensive care unit. Patients are put
on a respirator to help them breathe. They may also be put on
intravenous feeding so that the body can be "fed" nutrients
mechanically instead of taking in food through the mouth. In time,
however, society believes that such patients may be retained on such
mechanical devices only if their physical conditions warrant such
technologization. The purpose of life is for the patient to be helped
toward normalcy. In this case, the patient must be helped to leave the
hospital and eat and breathe, and so on, on their own.

The objective of life, of the hospital, is never to merely have the
patients remain in intensive care, or even in the hospital. People
need to be active in daily life, eating, breathing, and so on on their
own. To eat and breathe on their own means dining and respiring as
part of society, with one's own bodily abilities. Food is irreducible
to nutrients. Breathing is irreducible to oxygen intake. Food and
respiration emerge from the ethos, from the ethical. As biological as
eating and breathing, they are not merely physical processes.

For example, the nervous person, the seriously emotionally troubled
individual, will have difficulty eating and breathing. Human activity
such as eating and breathing are as much part of the ethos or ethical,
as they are physical, neurochemical, and so on. Indeed, eating
disorders such as those resulting in being overweight, imply reducing
food to merely physical entities being "put into the mouth." Eating
does not mean simply stuffing the mouth, eating quickly, or any other
physical process. Dining is a cultural, ethical process.

Similarly, we do not just respire by hyperventilating. We breathe by
inhaling and exhaling normally, often unconsciously. Perons inhaling
too fast may be suffering from an emotional problem, or perhaps
physical difficulty. Persons inhaling and exhaling too fast are
behaving unethically, anti-ethos or different from normal human
activity.

We can say the same about wonder and analysis. Wonder is something we
sense under normal human conditions without mechanical assistance.
Drugs ought not play part of wonder.

Analysis is an activity in which we participate without the aid of
computers, and hopefully within the context of wonder. To think
analytically is to take apart. But to spend our time only taking apart
means that we are simply assuming that words, pictures, behavior, and
so on are only to be taken apart and never appreciated as products of
the ethos or community. Taking apart ought mean that something was
initially a whole. That wholeness cannot be violated. If we emphasize
the taking apart aspect of existence, and reject or ignore the
synthetic and the wonderful, we have relegated existence to a form of
hospitalization, to a form of the intensive care unit.

Existence is not meant to be only analyzed, and it is not meant to be
only wondered. Ethos means that analysis and wonder go hand in hand.
Analysis and wonder are not mutually exclusive. We never merely
analyze without some wonder, and never wonder by merely mechanical
means. Both analysis and wonder reflect an ethical, social, cultural
dimension.

Feminism can be helpful here. Feminists argue that nothing written is
ever totally objective, and devoid of the cultural. Look at books.
Their authors are not just "authorities," but traditionally have been
white males. Their subject matter, too, have typically ignored
injustices toward women. Sexism means that we have looked at women
simply as reducible to anatomy, and never as human beings. Ethics
means that women are human beings, irreducible to physical
characteristics.

Racial theory can also help. Racism has meant that authorities writing
books have been white males. But the ethical thrust of the women's'
movement and racial justice has attempted to bring about a better,
ethos oriented vision. We now have books and articles written by
women, and by nonwhite males. Authors are not just authors. They are a
racial-gender-human continuum. No author is the sum total of racial,
religious, biological, and other parts. Every author is first of all a
human being.

Wonder and analysis, then, are irreducible to mechanical
identification. Persons need to be able to wonder with only their mind
and body, in awe of the universe or of any particular event. They need
only to analyze within the context of this natural wonder, and with
computers only on a limited scale.

Ethics does not demand the exclusion of computers from society. The
ethos orientation requires only that computing, speed, technology, and
other quantification occur within the context of a healthy
environment. The idea of proactivity or prevention is important here.

Proactivity means we need to prevent rather than react to bad events.
Before illness strikes, we need to monitor physical and other
conditions resulting in disease. Ethics means we ought not ignore
health dangers, and then react medically, physically, surgically, to
"solve" unhealthy situations. Drugs, whether over the counter or
prescription, do not need to take the place of a healthy lifestyle and
diet. People might need to depend on drugs as they age and their body
deteriorates. Even then, they must take drugs only by doctor's orders,
and never simply because the drugs are there.

The preventative, proactive approach to health includes habits of
proper diet, exercise, monitoring stress, wearing clothes appropriate
to the season, air conditioning during the summer and heat during the
winter. These measures and lifestyles help insure that people will not
get ill to the extent that they can have some reasonable control over
life. Illness can and will come under many circumstances. Viruses,
bacteria, many forms of sickness will emerge regardless of what we do
to prevent illness.

When illness does come, we need to take a look at the best ways of
curing what we have, and returning to a relative healthy state.
Physicians may often examine patients and tell them than rest, proper
diet, the drinking of fluids, and so on, will probably help bring the
patients back to health. Not all diseases require medication.
Additionally not all diseases require surgery. Even broken bones may
not require cutting the patient. In time, many bones will heal
correctly if their break is not in a physical position to cause
deformity when healed.

Medicine, then, often seeks to prevent illness through a healthy
lifestyle. When medical treatment is needed, pills are often
preferable to surgery. Similar approaches are sought by ethicists for
awe and analysis.

Wonder and analytic thinking are never mutually exclusive. Existence
does not consist of wonder devoid of analysis, or analysis and
rational-sensory approaches lacking awe. Most importantly,
phenomenological ethics means that wonder and analysis are not to be
merely the ends in themselves. We cannot say that because we are
analyzing within the context of wonder, we are therefore being
ethical, appropriately intellectual and properly in awe.

The states of awe and analysis are human states. They are irreducible
to mechanical, physical, neurophysiological methods. Before we
consider being in awe as a context for being analytical, we need to
realize the need for being ethical, social, humane. Ethics is more
than doing right and avoiding wrong in daily activity, business
ventures, and the professions. Ethical behavior is basic to cognitive
efforts to understand reality. The drug culture of the 1960s assumed
that achieving a "high" was very important, but could not be reached
until persons smoked pot or did hard drugs to alter the mind.

Similarly, people who believe in the rational approach to existence
frequently misinterpret rationalism, logic, calculation, and speed.
They too often assume that the logical or rational sequences are only
sequences depending on speed. Their view is that speed is fundamental,
and therefore the faster a sequence the better. From that view, the
quicker we gather and understand greater numbers of variables or parts
of the problem, the better our solution.

An unethical view of problem solving involves quick technical
solutions to a given problem. A problem can be small or large. Instead
of asking ourselves whether the problem is real or not, we frequently
tell ourselves that speedy solutions are the answer. For example, take
urban crime. We see robbers, burglars, car thieves. We hear of
homicides and arsonists. Our typical approach is to assume that crime
is crime, and its solution is a nonsocial, purely professional
response from the police. The more police the better. The faster our
calls are answered, and the quicker the police arrive at the scene,
the better we feel that the problem of criminality is being solved.

This unethical view says that more crime we have, the more and faster
police response we need. That view also suggests that the faster we
get fingerprints and identify the wrongdoer, the more our society is
progressing. Our emphasis is on speed, imprisonment or worse,
technology, and other mechanical forms of reaction.

The ethical approach is fundamentally different. We would give
opportunities to young people in order to attract them to productive
lives outside crime. Families need strengthening, discipline must be
practiced and taught, neighborhoods aware of wrongdoing, parental
responsibility required. Our social institutions must be upheld.
Churches, social groups, schools, governmental organizations,
hospitals, and all businesses will need to work together. The police
are there, but cannot be the only people combating crime. Technology
ought be there, but only within the context of the social structures.

Society ought not ignore the social conditions and then go after the
criminals arising as a result of deteriorating cultural situations.
Culture is the not only contributor to crime. Some people simply may
be born trouble makers. A weak social structure lets them do as they
please until it is too late. Simply waiting for people to become
criminals, then going after them, arresting, taking them to trail, and
locking them up are the mechanical ways of recidivism.

The ethical approach attempt to return the criminal to society through
rehabilitation when initial parenting or habilitation has failed. We
cannot just let young people grow up doing as they please, and then
throw the book at them when they go wrong. Society seems to like the
mechanical approach to most things. In medicine and health, we
increase emergency rooms. In law enforcement, we want more and faster
police. Education becomes a mechanical method of learning from
computers. Transportation develops into a way of speedier, aircraft,
and automobiles even if we need to build bigger airports, and destroy
ecology with more highways. Information becomes merely a commodity
where we transmit data and receive it with greater efficiency. In more
and areas, technology and rapidity of getting something or someone
from here to there becomes paramount. Ethically, medicine must involve
better health habits, law enforcement better homes, love, and
discipline, learning a matter of student teacher interaction, travel a
matter of bicycles and trains, and information an issue of
understanding and social empathy.

d. Ethics of Integration

Wonder and analysis are good when they are integrated. We cannot have
just wonder, or only analysis. Yet, integrated or not, wonder must
come from within and never as a result of drugs and electrical
stimulation of the brain. Analysis must be within the social context
and never merely a computerized battle toward solutions.
Phenomenological ethics shows awe to be the view that things are
fundamentally one, and culturally uplifting. Basic to all is our
wonder that reality is a beautiful, awesome, non-problematic
existence.

Existence is more than just a problem to be solved, a difficulty to be
overcome. Existing ought mean appreciating life, people, God, culture,
and all plants and animals. We cannot just look at the world as an
ongoing defect to be repaired. Life may have evil in it, but is not
essentially evil. It is a wondrous reality. This view is available to
us not just through drugs, but our very natural feeling of awe. Again,
good parenting and better social structure can contribute to or take
away from this feeling.

Albert Einstein displayed ethics when he told his fellow scholars at
Princeton to stop by an say hello from time to time. Most scholars
were shocked. They felt that Princeton was a place for intellectual
discourse instead of chit chat and normal conversation. They felt even
more strongly that Einstein's work was so critical that they did not
wish to interfere in his studies with what they consider small talk or
any conversation irrelevant to scientific work.

We think of Einstein as a scientist. He was clearly displaying what
phenomenology calls intersubjectivity and wonder as the basis of any
scientific work. Einstein believed that normal human beings, even
those in intensive scholarly research, needed and should engage in the
wonder of interpersonal, face to face community that this the social
foundations of any verbal communications. Community is the basis of
communications. We cannot communicate or convey information from
person to person unless we first establish of acknowledge what
phenomenology calls the "given" community or lived world.

e. People

In phenomenological ethics, we are first, last, and always in the
community of people, in intersubjectivity, wonder, awe, or the
non-cognitive. We are one with vegetation, with nature, with spiritual
powers or religious dimensions. The term "people like us" is not to be
taken as meaning individuals of our race, creed, color, or gender. It
is to be interpreted as meaning that all human beings in the world are
like each other. People are the same, regardless of race, creed, and
so on.

Wonder means that all things are essentially related with each other.
We do not first sense races, creeds, religions, and genders, and then
arrive, step by step, to our humanity. The first thing we sense is
that all individuals are alike. Races, religions, and so on are
differentiations that we tend to make in distinguishing each other.
Wonder makes it clear that whatever else we have as differences, human
beings are, at bottom, the same.

Only within the context of fundamental awe of the unity of all things,
do we then take apart or analyze people from each other, animals,
nature, and so on. Analysis, done within awe, is benign. Analysis done
outside the framework of wonder becomes mere taking apart of the
essentially unified. In this sense, analysis becomes mere destruction.

Wonder and analysis in the ethical perspective comprise our
intersubjective, sensory, rational unity. This occurs only when awe
and analytic thinking occur within the context of the ethic or ethos:
culture. Human beings are meant to awe that they are in the unified
world of people, animals, vegetation and nature. Nothing is or ought
be totally objectified. We are meant also to differentiate or analyze
carefully in order to understand and intellectually cope with the
existing world. Within awe, we objectify in order to develop an
intellectual stance about why things are as they are.

Intersubjectivity and objectivity go hand in hand. Intersubjectivity
or wonder devoid of objectivity becomes dangerously anti-technology.
Objectivity alone becomes anti-human. Ethics tells us that this
integration is complete when we appreciate intersubjectivity through
normal human activity and not through drugs. We need also appreciate
objectivity through normal intellectual activity and never through
seeing speed, technology, or quantification as an end in itself.

The awe of our being together as a basis for any technique in
analyzing that intersubjectivity can be seen MIT's OpenCourseWare.
Classroom learning with face to face interaction is fundamental to any
distance learning. Wonder occurs not through mechanical activity but
the social interaction found in the classroom; analysis is then found
not through sophisticated telecourses, but computers existing and
operating in the service and context of face-to-face interaction.

Alfred North Whitehead (p. 232) says that philosophy begins in wonder,
and that wonder continues after philosophers have analyzed reality.
Judith Boss says ethics begins in wonder. Philosophy can say that
wonder and analysis begin with ethics, and that ethics continues as
the context or orientation for analysis and wonder, and all activity.

2. Tying Phenomenological Ethics to the World

a. Overview

A key model that represents the way to tie phenomenological ethics to
the world is by examining ethics, philosophy, and engineering.
Scholars in the field of ethics would say that their field provides
basic ideas unifying engineering and philosophy. Those thinkers who
are ethicists would indicate that engineering and philosophy share a
common ground in ethics. Engineering and philosophy are specific
manifestation of ethics. The ethicist's position sees engineering and
philosophy as fields where human beings and values orient technology,
objectivity, reason, and logic.

Ethicists (Kazanjian, 1998, Chapter 2) would view ethics as unifying
engineering and philosophy. Scholars in ethics would view their field
as underlying the humanistic thinking in philosophy, and the
scientific views of engineering. Those who study ethics would see
ethical ideas as necessary in courses in virtually all disciplines and
professions. These scholars see ethics as an interdisciplinary
foundation to the arts and sciences. For ethicists, business ethics,
legal ethics, medical and biomedical ethics, engineering ethics, are
all integral parts of business, law, medicine, and the other
disciplines. Those who are ethics scholars would say business ought
engage in ethical instead of unethical practices. These ethicists
would also see lawyers, physicians, biomedical researchers, engineers,
and others as competent when their curriculum teaches them values and
morals as well as technical expertise. Ethicists would say that values
and morals orient technique. The ethical perspective sees the
mechanics of a given field as ethically oriented. Ethics scholars
would view any disciplinarian as a professional concerned with human
beings instead of merely a cognitive or technical, non-ethical expert.
Scholars from the field of ethics see their work as
interdisciplinarity, among their tasks being the disclosure of the
ethical basis of engineering and philosophy. As such, ethicists see
their discipline as basic to liberal arts and sciences, and
interdisciplinarity at any level.

b. uman Factors Engineering

Human factors engineering, also known as ergonomics or ergonomic
engineering, is that kind of engineering which designs physical
environments including machines and processes to match human limits
and abilities, and train people to use those environments (Chapanis,
p.534; Kantowicz and Sorkin, p. 20). These engineers work with
mathematics, physics, chemistry, and often computers. Beyond these
scientific and technical fields, ergonomics engineers deal with human
beings. These engineers are concerned not only with how to design an
environment, but how to design it to be safe for the user.

The ergonomics position sees safety as meaning that engineers ought
design the environments to be user friendly and ought avoid both user
unfriendly and user too friendly designs (Adams, p. 256). A design
that is user unfriendly ignores the user. To be user unfriendly means
is a design whereby the machine or process is dangerous or offensive
for the user. The other design is user too friendly, whereby the
machine or process is so safe as to be rendered unfunctional.
Designing something as user friendly means that users are able to work
with an environment which takes into account the users' limits and
abilities. Such limits and abilities mean people have arms, legs,
eyes, ears, and torsos with certain anatomic and sensory measurements.
Arms bend in certain ways and are of certain lengths. The same with
legs. Ears hear best at certain sound levels. We see best at certain
distances.

Ergonomics is saying that human beings see, hear, and move within
certain physical parameters. People do not merely perceive, sense,
move, and so on. Any machine or process ought be designed such that it
allows the user to use it comfortably, without undue stress or
tension. Designing user friendly machines or processes is right.
Designing an environment that forces people to merely sense or move is
wrong. At the other extreme, designing an environment so safe that
users need not make any effort to learn or use it is also wrong. The
system could become nonfunctional.

The typical human factors engineering text looks like a combination
engineering, psychology, and biology book. Ergonomics engineers say
that any physical environment is as much social and psychological as
it is mathematical, physical, or chemical. No user friendly design is
totally reducible to the sum of nuts and bolts. Human factors argues
that objects and people comprise an interface: both are interrelated
to each other. Machines/processes and human beings ought not be seen
as mutually exclusive, but inherently human-oriented. Al Gini (p. 3)
argues that work is vital to our identity, but it must be a humanizing
career and never just meaningless, dehumanizing sum of tasks.

Human factors also rejects overemphasizing the user. If
machines/processes are to take into account the user's abilities and
limits, they are not to simply make things so safe and user-friendly
that the machine/procedure becomes unfunctional or unable to perform
its technical task.

c. Phenomenology: Brentano

Phenomenology is the philosophical movement somewhere between
existentialism and logical positivism. Existentialists would see human
beings or any aspect of reality almost totally irreducible to numbers
or rational explanation, while the logical positivist position would
view people and any reality as totally reducible to number and reason.
The existential position views our social and cultural embodiment or
existence is almost completely irreducible to number and reason,
whereas logical positivism and linguistic analysis see our existence
as basically, perhaps totally, rational and numeric. Brentano is
considered the founder of phenomenology. He (Stewart and Mickunas, p.
8) initiated the idea of intentionality. Intentionality means that
consciousness or embodiment inherently relates to objects.
Consciousness is consciousness of objects. Brentano attempted to
overcome the logical positivist notion that objects and sensation are
real, and consciousness is totally reducible to objectivity.

Brentano would see the thinking mind and the body mutually
interrelated . He believed Cartesian dualism is wrong in stating that
thinking and the body are two different entities. In speaking about
the mind-body unity, Brentano set the stage for Husserl to develop
phenomenology. Brentano spoke of the mind-body continuum and rejected
total objectivity. Thinking is continuous or interrelated with the
body. But Husserl more fully developed the continuum and rejecting two
extremes: thinking alone or objectivism, and mere embodiment or
subjectivism.

d. Phenomenology: Edmund Husserl

Edmund Husserl moved beyond Brentano (Stewart and Mickunas, p. 8).
Husserl sees a development of the mind-body continuum. Objectivity or
mind is never value-free or disembodied, according to Husserl. All
objectivity is value-laden or occurs as worldly, social, cultural.
This view contrasts with the logical positivist notion that
objectivity is the sole reality, and value-free.

Husserl's position would say objectivity ought be seen as reflecting
or matching subjectivity or values. From the perspective of
phenomenology, we must consider all phenomena as real that appear to
consciousness or our thoughts. Where logical positivists and
linguistic analysts, and all emotional terms such as God as poetry and
not cognitively meaningful, phenomenologists believe all objectivity
reflects subjectivity, culture, values, and ethics.

The phenomenological position sees the mind-body issue in the manner
that people ought look at physical environments as continuous with
subjectivity, and emotions and noncognitive ideas as the social milieu
generating the meaning of physical environments. Phenomenologically,
objects, cognition, and cultural artifacts are real: products of human
or subjective intentions. Mathematics, physics, chemistry, computers,
and all the arts and sciences must be seen as part of life. But these
cognitive realities emerge from a social, subjective realm and are not
to be divorced from human experience. Cognition is never reducible to
numbers, symbols, sense perception, and other non-emotive reality.
Words reflect human experiences as a whole.

The position of phenomenology is that objectivity to be value-laden
and ought avoid two extremes. One extreme is value-free cognition.
This is cognition whereby cognition or any object is seen as free of
any emotive or cultural values or spirituality. The other extreme
means extreme existentialism that rejects any reducibility. Here,
science, technology and any cognitive effort is considered almost
anti-human. Phenomenology sees cognition and physical environments as
things that take into account our values and any other noncognitive
being. People have cognitive and analytical abilities and ought use
them in certain ways. Knowing is not a simple matter of sense
perception and analysis. The blanket denial of the reality of
noncognitive ideas such as God and values suggests too simplistic a
means of getting at reality.

Husserl also rejects subjectivism or solipsism. In saying that
everything appearing to consciousness is real, critics argues that he
was dangerous near, if not in fact, advocating solipsism. However,
Husserl reject both logical positivism's cold objectivism, which says
people are objects and values unreal, and extreme existentialism and
subjectivism's solipsism, which maintains that the self is the only
reality.

Phenomenology: Alfred Schutz (p. 140) comes from the perspective of
applied phenomenology. Specifically, his viewpoint is sociology. He
considers sociology as the study of "lived history," or human
institutions within which we find chronological or day to day history.
He points out that human beings see, hear, and move within value
parameters. Social structures comprise "lived history," and are the
context within which "chronological history" makes sense. Schutz ideas
are similar to those of Kenneth Boulding. Boulding, while not
technically a phenomenologist, notes that perception and action occur
within our images of wholes, and never as the sensing of raw data or
merely mechanical anatomic movement. People do not merely perceive,
sense, move, and so on.

In phenomenology, consciousness intends or is consciousness of
objects, thus revealing a subject-object continuum. Objectivity,
perception and movement, in turn, are colored by our values and lived
world. Objectivity is continuous with subjectivity. Subjectivity is
never the reality of just one person, but intersubjective or social.
Thus, phenomenology rejects the existential notion of extreme
individuality or the virtually solipsistic ego.

Reality, in phenomenology, is the subject-object continuum or duality.
Phenomenologists say we ought avoid Cartesian dualism of the mutually
exclusive mind and body. Consciousness is always of the object, and
the object is always embodied. Ricoeur (p. 217) argues that
phenomenology overcomes Cartesian dualism by reintroducing the
excarnate mind into the carnate or body. His efforts enable
phenomenology to resolve dualism, as well as the objectivism of
positivism, and subjectivism of existentialism.

The mind-body continuum means that subjectivity and objectivity are
both real, but comprise a systematic reality instead of parts being
real in themselves. Human beings exist in a world of physical reality.
We sense this as we consider the lived world of culture giving meaning
to material objects and generating ideas. Subjectivity does not exist
alone; it requires a object. Likewise, objectivity is not merely "out
there;" it is always perceived within cultural, lived orientations.

The phenomenological view is that subjectivity is never devoid of
objectivity, while the solipsistic position entails subjectivity as
devoid of objectivity. We need the world, for people are part of
physical reality. Interpreting objectivity as devoid of subjectivity
is similarly wrong. It becomes a dehumanized objectivity disregarding
human beings and consciousness. Along these lines and seemingly less
serious a problem, dualism is just as wrong, according to
phenomenology. Objects and subjects are irreducible to mutual
distinct, inherently unrelated entities. We do not just take discreet
objectivity and subjectivity and externally juxtapose them. We would
be unable to bridge the subject-object gap if it were intrinsically
discontinuous or unbridged.

e. Phenomenology and Ergonomics: Parallels

Human factors engineering and phenomenology appear to be mutually
distinct fields. One is engineering and quantitative, the other a
philosophical movement rejecting total quantification. As such,
engineering and phenomenology would seem to be irreconcilable
disciplines: engineering being strictly hard culture, phenomenology
fundamentally soft culture. But our brief statements above show
something else.

A glance at human factors engineering and phenomenology reveals
parallels. Human factors believes that all physical environment
interface with people. Objects ought be designed as continuous with
human operators. The entire system is a machine-person interface or
continuum, instead of the machine being something totally objective
and non-personal. Phenomenology says that mind or objectification is
continuous with the social dimension. Phenomenologists speak of the
mind-body continuum. Human factors could speak of the machine-user
continuum, phenomenology of the mind-body interface. Human factors
would be saying machines are continuous with the user, phenomenology
would be indicating that the mind interrelates with the body. In
ergonomics, seeing designs or actual machines means seeing the
operator or subjectivity. In phenomenology, seeing words on paper must
mean seeing human values and other intangibles. For human factors
engineers, machines/processes ought be acknowledged as intrinsically
continuous or interfacing with people's physical, social, and
psychological limits. In phenomenology, the written word ought be
recognized as inherently continuous with values and other cultural
themes underlying the empirical.

Human factors says machines/processes ought be user-friendly, and
ought not be user-unfriendly. Phenomenology maintains that objectivity
ought be seen as value-laden, and never value-free. By user friendly,
human factors means buttons, numbers, levers, lights, and other
physical apparatus the operations and reasons of which the user can
learn relatively easily, and the use of which will not harm the
person. The human being need not be the proverbial rocket scientist to
understand these operations; training would not require the typical
user to earn a Ph.D., or even take one course from MIT. The user also
need not be made of steel or physically qualify for Navy SEAL commando
work to use the environment. The user friendly environment is designed
for the typical person's intellectual and physical abilities. By
value-laden, phenomenology means any word ultimately reflects human
values. No word is or can be value-free, as the philosophical
movements logical positivism and .linguistic analysis tend to
maintain. Positivists and analytic thinkers argue that words such as
God, love, and religion do not belong in intellectual discourse
because they reflect values and emotion. Words such as chair, table,
atom and other words are value-free and non-emotive. However, chair
reflects the English language, can imply the electric chair, can mean
a department head at a college or university, and appears to be
nonsexist relative to the apparently sexist term chairman.
Phenomenologists would maintain that no word is value-free, that every
term is a sociology of that term. Every word emerges from and reflects
the social and cultural framework that produces it.

A user unfriendly environment is totally objective, ignoring human
limits and abilities and forcing people to mere push, pull, and
perceive. Al Gini (p. 120) notes that work offering no hope and
becoming unethical is wrong, and means roughly what ergonomics means
by user unfriendly work. Value-free language would mean a totally
objective set of words over which there is no debate. However, every
math, computer, physics and other science book or piece of literature
reflects a human author and the author's perspective, slant, or view.
Feminism and civil rights thinkers have shown that such books (any
book) are value-laden whether we like it or not. Each is written by a
white male, black male, Latino woman, or person of a particular
religious, ethnic, or sexual orientation. An author lacking ethnic,
gender, and similar human qualities is impossible.

Human factors could say machines ought be user-laden, while
phenomenologists might indicate that objectivity ought be seen as
subject-friendly. The human factors term "user" is synonymous with
phenomenology's term "subject." User and subject mean the human being
and the cultural context from which the human being emerges.

Both ergonomics and phenomenology look at human-made environments as
reflecting culture and not as just cognitive, scientific, or merely
objective fields of study and work. Moreover, both ergonomics and
phenomenology consider the human as part of the object. Thus,
ergonomics notes that we ought avoid simply catering to the person's
every desire and want, and phenomenology rejects solipsism's view that
the individual is the sole reality.

f. Phenomenology and Ergonomics: Enter Ethics

The previous section notes the technical parallels between ergonomics
and phenomenology. Readers will see the term "ought" throughout the
paragraphs.

Phenomenology and human factors have fundamental parallels, as
indicated in the previous section. These are intellectual or technical
similarities. They indicate that both see a unity of objects and
people.

In doing so, they are ethical in the general sense. Both machines and
rational thought emerge from the social context. Ergonomics argues
that machines reflect the social and cultural milieu, and are not
totally reducible to nuts and bolts. Phenomenologists (Stewart and
Mikunas, p. 10) note that God, love, anger, desire, and other
intangibles are real because they appear to consciousness. Secular
phenomenologists consider nonreligious themes as real. Religious
phenomenologists believe that theological and spiritual notions such
as God are real.

Both human factors experts and phenomenologists deny that sensation is
our only way of knowing and experiencing. Ergonomics engineers would
say it is wrong or unethical to design a machine or process that has
operators simply "look," "hear," or otherwise sense a control panel or
other part of a machine. Phenomenologists argue that we would be
outside the ethos or culture if we considers human behavior or reality
as strictly sensory phenomena.

Engineers abide by and study professional ethics, and the Occupational
Safety and Health Administration monitors dangerous in the workplace
according to federal law. Phenomenology, however, does not become part
of a professional ethics issue except in the case of the ethics of
teaching. It may seem that in phenomenology, the subject-object
discontinuity or dichotomy is only an academic rather than a
technically ethical matter as in engineering. To say that objects are
disconnected from and do not reflect subjectivity is not an ethical
matter.

Phenomenology is concerned with ethics in the broad sense of ethos or
culture. Totally reducing knowledge or reality to the empirical means
excarnating or taking sensation out of the social realm comprising
ethos. In applied phenomenology, reducing people to computerized
forms, numbers, and related paper work may be seen an unethical or
socially undesirable.

In acknowledging the social and psychological as well as physical side
of people, both human factors engineering and phenomenology are rooted
in the sociology of human-made products. A sociology of work suggests
that people do not just "do." They do and know within social, ethos,
and thereby ethical constraints.

Both human factors engineering and phenomenology share the view that
the person or subject is not alone. In ergonomics, machines ought take
the user into account, but this does not mean that the design reflect
everything about the user. Physical environments should not be so
designed as to satisfy every want, desire, and whim of the operator.
Operators need to be trained, and put forth effort to realize that the
environment requires change on the users' part. Additionally,
operators are continuous with their surroundings. They are not
Luddites, working or existing alone, without the use of physical
environments. Phenomenology says that subjectivity is not the same as
subjectivism. In subjectivism, the self is considered to be alone,
devoid of objectivity.

Phenomenology seems not to fall into the same ethics category of
including punishments for unethical behavior as does human factors
engineering. However, the culture that supports a totally dehumanized
attitude toward people, such as allowing computerization to go wild
and reduce everyone to numbers in every instance, is manifesting an
anti phenomenological view. The positivism attitude is that we merely
know and are excarnated from feelings and emotions. No ethical ruling
can be made against positivism as an intellectual movement Yet
positivism reflects the culture view that we can and ought ignore
feeling and other intangibles.

The lived world is phenomenology's notion that people live, work, and
play in a social context where not everything is totally reducible to
numbers or is effable. Paul Ricouer tells us that Cartesian dualism is
the effort to see the world and the mind as two different substances.
The Cartesian world-view means that cognition is excarnate,
discontinuous with the body. Positivism argues that the cognitive is
all there exists. Ricoeur would want us to reintroduce the cognitive
into the lived world, and to see cognition as incarnate or embodied.

Broadly speaking, the embodied viewpoint is the ethos-oriented
viewpoint whereby cognitive activity emerges from the parameters of
culture. People ought not just think. Basically, they never just
think. Thus, no individual ought take the stand that we are simply
thinking substances, whether this substance is somehow related to the
body in dualistic terms, or stands by itself in positivistic notions.
On the other hand, the cognitive is part of life. We ought not
consider the reductive or cognitive as unwarranted, as in much
existentialism. We certainly ought not take the view that the
cognitive does not have a reality, that the self is alone, that each
of us is isolated.

The ethical view posits a holistic perspective. Objectification ought
be seen as interfacing or being continuous with the subject or
intersubjectivity. Neither objectification devoid of subjectivity, nor
subjectivity without objectivity, is the ought.

Human factors speaks of groups of users, not just a user, as reference
for designing machines. Phenomenology speaks of intersubjectivity, not
just of one subject, a reference for seeing the cognitive. Both
ergonomics and phenomenology look at individuals as social, and their
limits and abilities are pertaining to groups rather than to one or
two people.

Phenomenological thinkers take the position that could be interpreted
as the philosophical version of ergonomics. In ergonomics, we do not
hear of linguistic analysis, logical positivism , or existentialism.
Yet, Ergonomics reveals or deals with language in the broadest sense.
When ergonomics speaks of people seeing, hearing, touching, pulling,
they are using language. In saying that a person is something that
simply sees, hears, etc., we are being positivistic and reducing the
individual to an object. If we agree that users are human beings who
see, hear, and otherwise sense and move within emotive, cultural, and
physical contexts, we are then thinking or using language from a
phenomenological viewpoint.

Traditional linguistic analysis tends to imply that philosophers in
that vein are only thinkers and not fundamentally akin the
engineering. An interdisciplinary attitude with a broad vision of
language sees things differently. Language analysts in philosophy work
with symbolic logic and not technical mathematics. Human factors
engineers work with mathematics, but are suggesting that people are
indeed at least partly physical, sensory, and material. Ergonomics may
be called human factors, but it can also be called subjectivity
factors: we need to take the subjective and cultural into account for
engineering processes.

As a corollary, the phenomenological position would be that human
factors considers users as not mere objects, but that any
characteristic of the person that appears to consciousness is a valid
reality. Thus, engineers who are only nuts and bolts people
traditionally say we are only skin, neurons, senses, and bones. This
is very positivistic language. Phenomenologically, users are also
values, emotions, spirituality, and ethos as a whole. Human factors
and phenomenology are looking at operators as fundamentally human
beings with dignity and essentially irreducible qualities.

Logical positivists might argue that their members helped win World
War II by cracking Hitler's Enigma Machine code. This is true. On the
more fundamental side, Hitler would not have risen to the powerful
level that we allowed to him to do so had we been phenomenological and
cultural. As he was rising and accumulating power, a cultural view
would have told us to stop him in his tracks. Had we done so, war
would have been unnecessary, the Normandy invasion would not have had
to occur, and Hitlers codes would not have had time to develop to be
used against us.

Ethics tells us that human factors and phenomenology speak the same
language, though ergonomics is the trained engineer designing
machines, and phenomenologists are philosophers trained in inquiry and
argument instead of the design of physical environments. Physical
environments are but a form of language. Ergonomics and phenomenology
speak the same language in terms of acknowledging that objectivity is
subject- or value-oriented. Al Gini speaks of work in terms of
business ethics: work must be ethical and never unethical.

They speak the same language in saying that human beings are essential
social instead of standing alone. The physical, written, and motor
environments are never totally reducible to objects "out there." But
as reflections of human beings, these environments mirror "our" and
not "my" world. Any human value represents the share world-view of
numerous individuals comprising a group. Language ought never be
either completely symbolic as in the totally logical methods of
linguistic analysis, nor ought it be simply one person's language
which no other person can understand.

Two people, one a human factors engineer, the other a phenomenologist,
can look at a machine or consider a procedure. These two individuals
can communicate with each other if they understand their shared
viewpoint. Both are coming from the ethical perspective. The engineer
is saying that the numbers, words, and motions, which is to say, the
language, of a system, ought reflect human beings in light of culture.
A phenomenologist is saying that the writings in a human factors text
ought reflect the social, psychological and related value-oriented
words and meanings we see in culture.

Both the ergonomics and phenomenological philosopher would agree that
the human values comprise a share enterprised that reflects the
objective world continuous with the cultural milieu. No person is an
island, no person is reducible to flesh and bones. Somewhere between
extreme individualism and mere objectivism, the subject-object
continuum or machine-person interface comprises a reality including
the validity of external and internal worlds.

Ethics means objects are the externalizing of human ideas and the
validity of the outside world. As ethos, we are neither extra-ethos
nor merely ethos. The extra-ethos or extra-ethical suggests that
people are sensations and motions; the merely ethos or ethical can
mean we are only a commune, only a community doing little or nothing.
Pushed to the extreme, the commune leads to the individual member as
possibly believing that he or she stands alone.

In both human factors and phenomenology, language as our fundamental
nature is seen as an object-subjective reality. Positivism sees
language as symbols and sensory activity; traditional engineering
involving merely nuts and bolts sees machines, and therefore language,
as the sum total of physical parts. Human factors and phenomenology,
rooted in ethos, consider language as a holistic reality whereby being
serves to objectify itself through beings.

g. Ethics as Homological

We typically think of ethics as a course of study, as in professional
or philosophical ethics. In that way, ethics is no more fundamental
than any other discipline. The above pages show that ethics is
isomorphic or homological. Isomorphic is derived from iso meaning the
same, and morphic meaning shape. Ethics is the same shape or principle
that underlies ergonomics and phenomenology. Homological is derived
from homo means same, and logic meaning word or structure. Ethics is
the same structure from which ergonomics and phenomenology are
derived. Learning ethics is basic to human factors engineering and
phenomenology. As we consider ethics, we find it necessary to
objectify within the parameters of culture, values, and perhaps
spirituality. From the engineering perspective, ethics becomes a
method of developing physical structures for human use. From the
philosophical view, ethics can be interpreted as the intellectual
inquiry into knowledge and reality.

As an isomorphic or homological root to human factors and
phenomenology, ethics becomes the foundations for a liberal arts.
Whatever we know and do, we are inherently facing the opportunity to
know and do what is humane, and what is not. This opportunity means
intellectual and engineering approaches are basically ethical. They
emerge from culture or ethos. To deny values would be to reject our
cultural foundations; to seek only values would be unrealistic.

Interdisciplinary research has gone in two directions. One is
interdisciplinarity in the sense of team teaching and putting together
courses and topics in some sort of seamless or minimally seamed
fabric. Ethics plays an equity role here. It is one of the disciplines
or ideas relevant to knowledge. The other direction (Kazanjian, 2002,
p. 30) is more fundamental. This is the isomorphic direction.
Isomorphic or homological ethics means that we must study ethics as a
cultural, ethos framework within which we find the roots for all other
professions.

Ethics as the homological root of numerous disciplines can thereby
show us how to understand human factors engineering and phenomenology.
Take ethics away from ergonomics and we essentially eliminate human
factors engineering. The very term "human factor" implies that ethos
is basic to engineering. Take ethics away from phenomenology and we
basically have logical positivism. The subjective orientations of
objectivity refer to the ethos from which emerges the objective.

Contemporary interest in professional ethics implies that ethical and
non-ethical thinking and doing is something new. Indeed, our admission
is new. The existence of the ethical perspective is as old as
humanity. Mircea Eliade (p. 31) has taken pains to elucidate the
validity of ethics in primitive cultures. In every society we have dos
and don'ts. Without that view, any person in any culture will simply
do or know, and the result could hurt that person or others.

Eliade's point concerns comparative religion. Ancient societies did
everything by repeating the anatomic gestures as performed in
Primordial Time by the gods. Primordial Time is the time before the
gods created the world and our idea of calendar time. No member of any
society simply "did" something. Today, we imply that we merely do or
know. Even Eliade suggests that contemporary society is totally
secularized. Yet, Clifton Bryant's research in the sociology of work
(p. 1) catalogues the social and thus ethical directions of knowledge
and technique.

Ethics, then, is not just another topic (Kazanjian, p. 3). It is the
ongoing insight that ethos or culture provides us with the framework
for survival and etiquette. Human factors and phenomenology are two
specific manifestation of that insight.

3. References and Further Reading

A. THEORY
Clifton D. Bryant ed. The Social Dimensions of Work Englewood Cliffs,
NJ.: Prentice-Hall; 1972
Martin Buber I and Thou New York: Charles Scribner's Sons; 1970.
Jeremy Campbell The Improbable Machine New York: Simon and Schuster; 1989,
Mircea Eliade Patterns in Comparative Religion Cleveland: The World
Publishing Company; 1958.
Michael M. Kazanjian Learning Values Lifelong The Netherlands: Rodopi; 2002.
Paul Ricoeur Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary
Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press; 1968.
David Stewart and Algis Mackunas Exploring Phenomenology Athens, OH:
Ohio University Press; 1990.
G. Harry Stine The Hopeful Future New York: Macmillan;1983.
Alfred North Whitehead Modes of Thought New York: The Macmillan Company; 1958.

B. TYING PHENOMENOLOGICAL ETHICS TO THE WORLD
Jack A. Adams Human Factors Engineering. New York: Macmillan; 1989.
Mircea Eliade Patterns in Comparative Religion. Cleveland, OH: World
Publishing; 1963.
Clifton D. Bryant ed. The Sociology of Work. Englewood Cliffs, New
Jersey: Prentice Hall; 1972.
Alphonse Chapanis, "Human Engineering," in Operations Research and
Systems Engineering ed. Charles D. Flagle, William H. Huggins, and
Robert R. Roy, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press; 1960.
Al Gini My Job, My Self. New York: Routledge; 2001.
Edmund Husserl Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to
PhenomenologicalPhilosophy The Netherlands: Kluwer; 1967..
Barry H. Kantowicz and Robert D. Sorkin. Human Factors. New York: John
Wiley; 1983.
Michael M. Kazanjian Phenomenology and Education The Netherlands:
Rodopi: 1998. Especially chapters one and two comparing ethics, human
factors, and phenomenology.
Michael M. Kazanjian Learning Values Lifelong The Netherlands: Rodopi; 2002.
Algis Mikunas and David Stewart Exploring Phenomenology. Athens, OH:
Ohio University Press; 1990.
Paul Ricoeur Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary.
Evanston: Northwestern University Press; 1966.
Alfred Schutz The Phenomenology of the Social World. Evanston:
Northwestern University Press;1967.