Stress is an engineering concept that is applied metaphorically in the life sciences and social sciences. The ethical implications of stress in the social sciences lie in its perceived significance for work and health in technologically advanced societies. Stress provides an exemplary case for the interactions of science, technology, and ethics.

Origins

Although the word stress existed long before it became a technical term—it originally meant hardships and afflictions, as in "the stress of weather"—the earliest modern meanings of the term belong to engineering. In the nineteenth century considerations of stress in a modern sense took shape in several fields: strength of materials, thermodynamics, and medicine. William Rankine (1820–1872), who did pioneering work in civil engineering and thermodynamics, defined stress as the forces a material exerts in response to external forces applied to it. Those engineering developments applied not only in theory but also in practice as...