# Australia II: A Case Study in Engineering Ethics

## TL;DR

This paper explores the ethical issues surrounding the design of the revolutionary wing keel of the yacht Australia II and how credit was attributed.

## Contribution

The paper provides van Oossanen’s account of the wing keel design and applies ethical codes to resolve a credit attribution dilemma.

## Key findings

- The wing keel was designed by Peter van Oossanen and Dr. Joop Slooff, not Ben Lexcen as officially credited.
- The NSPE and KIVI ethical codes offer conflicting guidance on the case.
- A method of applied ethics using moral paradigm cases is proposed to resolve the ethical impasse.

## Abstract

Australia II became the first foreign yacht to win the America's Cup in 1983. The boat had a revolutionary wing keel and a better underwater hull form. In official documents, Ben Lexcen is credited with the design. He is also listed as the sole inventor of the wing keel in a patent application submitted on February 5, 1982. However, as reported in New York Times, Sydney Morning Herald, and Professional Boatbuilder, the wing keel was in fact designed by engineer Peter van Oossanen at the Netherlands Ship Model Basin in Wageningen, assisted by Dr. Joop Slooff at the National Aerospace Laboratory in Amsterdam. Based on telexes, letters, drawings, and other documents preserved in his personal archive, this paper presents van Oossanen’s account of how the revolutionary wing keel was designed. This is followed by an ethical analysis by Martin Peterson, in which he applies the American NSPE and Dutch KIVI codes of ethics to the information provided by van Oossanen. The NSPE and KIVI codes give conflicting advice about the case, and it is not obvious which document is most relevant. This impasse is resolved by applying a method of applied ethics in which similarity-based reasoning is extended to cases that are not fully similar. The key idea, presented in Peterson’s book The Ethics of Technology (Peterson, The ethics of technology: A geometric analysis of five moral principles, Oxford University Press, 2017), is to use moral paradigm cases as reference points for constructing a “moral map”.