Engineering due diligence uses the principles behind the judgments of the courts and applies them pre-event to ensure
sound organisational decision-making. The primary purpose of engineering due diligence is to facilitate safe and efficient operations.
It also provides confidence to all relevant parties. It perhaps represents a form of reverse engineering of ‘the decisions of the courts’.
In the event of an incident, the due diligence process should satisfy the courts. As a legal concept and it represents an aspect of moral philosophy,
that is, how the world ought to be and how humanity should behave.
This is along the lines that one should treat others as you would like to be treated by them (the reciprocity principle).
Essentially the parliamentary process is a method of implementing moral philosophical thought via the medium of legislation and regulation.
Of course the difficulty is that predicting the way of the world and managing it in advance is stupendously difficult. For example,
simply trying to make the workplace ‘safe’ is a huge undertaking, when all the types of workplaces and environmental circumstances are taken into account.
It’s simply not credible that the parliaments and regulators can predict the future so well that they ‘get it right’, all of the time.
This is where due diligence engineering comes in. By watching the outcomes of the courts, both in their interpretation of legislation and regulation, and the common
law assessment of ‘fairness’, engineers can align the observed laws of nature with the expressed laws of man. This is especially important in an advanced
industrial society where the outcomes of human technological activity can have such huge upsides and calamitous downsides.
