Engineers and other technical professionals are increasingly challenged by the impacts of globalization. Further, engineering educators, technical managers, and human resources staff have demonstrated great interest in selecting and training engineers who are capable of working competently, professionally, and ethically in global context. However, working across countries and cultures brings considerable challenges to global engineers, including as related to understanding and navigating local and regional differences in what counts as professional ethics and integrity. In this study, we focus on written (...) responses to 27 assessment scenarios that involve micro- and/or macro-ethical considerations in six national/cultural contexts. More specifically, we analyze responses to open-ended versions of the scenarios. Our participants consisted of both experts and novices. Comparing and contrasting how experts and novices responded to these ethical problems sheds light on differences in their ethical strategies and approaches. This analysis also allows us to discern what specific cultural knowledge and sensitivity were employed by experts in solving cross-cultural ethical problems, but were largely lacking among novices. Finally, we analyze and discuss challenges faced by experts and novices in responding to cross-cultural ethical situations. (shrink)

Over the past two decades, ethical challenges related to robotics technologies have gained increasing interest among different research and non-academic communities, in particular through the field of roboethics. While the reasons to address roboethics are clear, why not to engage with ethics needs to be better understood. This paper focuses on a limited or lacking engagement with ethics that takes place within some parts of the robotics community and its implications for the conceptualisation of the human being. The underlying assumption (...) is that the term ‘ethical’ essentially means ‘human’. Thus, this paper discusses a working hypothesis according to which by avoiding to engage with roboethics, roboticists contribute to the tacit dehumanisation process emerging in and outside of robotics. An alternative approach includes ‘lived ethics’ which involves not only incorporating formal ethical approaches into the roboticists’ work but also ‘being’ ethical and actually engaging with ethical reflection and practice. (shrink)

Contemporary engineering education recognises the need for engineering ethics content in undergraduate programmes to extend beyond concepts that form the basis of professional codes to consider relationality and context of engineering practice. Yet there is debate on how this might be done, and we argue that the design and pedagogy for engineering ethics has to consider what and to whom ethics is taught in a particular context. Our interest is in the possibilities and challenges of pursuing the dual imperatives of (...) socialization and critique. Socialization involves creating opportunities for all, in a diverse cohort of students, to access and engage with the dominant professional engineering ethics knowledge, while critique involves engaging with a range of ways of knowing, valuing, being and using language as relevant in contemporary engineering practice. We identify conceptual tools from engineering ethics and ethical pedagogy in education scholarship for our context. We illustrate how we use these tools systematically to strengthen our reflective practice in a first-year university engineering ethics module to a deeper form of reflexivity. Specifically, we explore the ways in which we attend to the dual imperatives and also highlight opportunities that we miss. We identify as key opportunities design choices such as how we formulated questions and prompts, and how we attended to content, context and language in selecting classroom texts. Other key opportunities were pedagogical choices of when and how to use student contributions in discussion, and what was made explicit in the classroom and assessment. We share our plans to take our learnings forward in our practice and consider the generative possibilities of these learnings and the concepts in other contexts. (shrink)

This paper aims to review the empirical and theoretical research on engineering ethics education, by focusing on the challenges reported in the literature. The analysis is conducted at four levels of the engineering education system. First, the individual level is dedicated to findings about teaching practices reported by instructors. Second, the institutional level brings together findings about the implementation and presence of ethics within engineering programmes. Third, the level of policy situates findings about engineering ethics education in the context of (...) accreditation. Finally, there is the level of the culture of engineering education. The multi-level analysis allows us to address some of the limitations of higher education research which tends to focus on individual actors such as instructors or remains focused on the levels of policy and practice without examining the deeper levels of paradigm and purpose guiding them. Our approach links some of the challenges of engineering ethics education with wider debates about its guiding paradigms. The main contribution of the paper is to situate the analysis of the theoretical and empirical findings reported in the literature on engineering ethics education in the context of broader discussions about the purpose of engineering education and the aims of reform programmes. We conclude by putting forward a series of recommendations for a socio-technical oriented reform of engineering education for ethics. (shrink)

Moral responsibility is one of the core concepts in engineering ethics and consequently in most engineering ethics education. Yet, despite a growing awareness that engineers should be trained to become more sensitive to cultural differences, most engineering ethics education is still based on Western approaches. In this article, we discuss the notion of responsibility in Confucianism and explore what a Confucian perspective could add to the existing engineering ethics literature. To do so, we analyse the Citicorp case, a widely discussed (...) case in the existing engineering ethics literature, from a Confucian perspective. Our comparison suggests the following. When compared to virtue ethics based on Aristotle, Confucianism focuses primarily on ethical virtues; there is no explicit reference to intellectual virtues. An important difference between Confucianism and most western approaches is that Confucianism does not define clear boundaries of where a person’s responsibility end. It also suggests that the gap between Western and at least one Eastern approach, namely Confucianism, can be bridged. Although there are differences, the Confucian view and a virtue-based Western view on moral responsibility have much in common, which allows for a promising base for culturally inclusive ethics education for engineers. (shrink)

This inclusive cross-cultural study rethinks the nexus between engineering education and context. In so doing the book offers a reflection on contextual boundaries with an overall boundary crossing ambition and juxtaposes important cases of critical participation within engineering education with sophisticated scholarly reflection on both opportunities and discontents. -/- Whether and in what way engineering education is or ought to be contextualized or de-contextualized is an object of heated debate among engineering educators. The uniqueness of this study is that this (...) debate is given comprehensive coverage – presenting both instrumentally inclined as well as radical positions on transforming engineering education. -/- In contextualizing engineering education, this book offers diverse commentary from a range of disciplinary, meta- and interdisciplinary perspectives on how cultural, professional, institutional and educational systems contexts shape histories, structural dynamics, ideologies and challenges as well as new pathways in engineering education. Topics addressed include examining engineering education in countries ranging from India to America, to racial and gender equity in engineering education and incorporating social awareness into the area. -/- Using context as “bridge” this book confronts engineering education head on. Contending engineering ideologies and corresponding views on context are juxtaposed with contending discourses of reform. The uniqueness of the book is that it brings together scholars from the humanities, the social sciences and engineering from Europe – both East and West – with the United States, China, Brazil, India and Australia. (shrink)

Promoting the ethical formation of engineering students through the cultivation of their discipline-specific knowledge, sensitivity, imagination, and reasoning skills has become a goal for many engineering education programs throughout the United States. However, there is neither a consensus throughout the engineering education community regarding which strategies are most effective towards which ends, nor which ends are most important. This study provides an overview of engineering ethics interventions within the U.S. through the systematic analysis of articles that featured ethical interventions in (...) engineering, published in select peer-reviewed journals, and published between 2000 and 2015. As a core criterion, each journal article reviewed must have provided an overview of the course as well as how the authors evaluated course-learning goals. In sum, 26 articles were analyzed with a coding scheme that included 56 binary items. The results indicate that the most common methods for integrating ethics into engineering involved exposing students to codes/standards, utilizing case studies, and discussion activities. Nearly half of the articles had students engage with ethical heuristics or philosophical ethics. Following the presentation of the results, this study describes in detail four articles to highlight less common but intriguing pedagogical methods and evaluation techniques. The findings indicate that there is limited empirical work on ethics education within engineering across the United States. Furthermore, due to the large variation in goals, approaches, and evaluation methods described across interventions, this study does not detail “best” practices for integrating ethics into engineering. The science and engineering education community should continue exploring the relative merits of different approaches to ethics education in engineering. (shrink)

Risk management is certainly one of the most important professional responsibilities of an engineer. As such, this activity needs to be combined with complex ethical reflections, and this requirement should therefore be explicitly integrated in engineering education. In this article, we analyse how this nexus between ethics and risk management is expressed in the engineering education research literature. It was done by reviewing 135 articles published between 1980 and March 1, 2016. These articles have been selected from 21 major journals (...) that specialize in engineering education, engineering ethics and ethics education. Our review suggests that risk management is mostly used as an anecdote or an example when addressing ethics issues in engineering education. Further, it is perceived as an ethical duty or requirement, achieved through rational and technical methods. However, a small number of publications do offer some critical analyses of ethics education in engineering and their implications for ethical risk and safety management. Therefore, we argue in this article that the link between risk management and ethics should be further developed in engineering education in order to promote the progressive change toward more socially and environmentally responsible engineering practices. Several research trends and issues are also identified and discussed in order to support the engineering education community in this project. (shrink)

Though this paper is mostly about a sense of “profession” common in much of the West, it explains how the term might apply in any country (especially how the profession of engineering differs from the function, discipline, and occupation of engineering). To do that, I have to explain the connection between “profession” (in my preferred sense) and another hard-to-translate term, “code of ethics” (in the sense it has in the expression “code of engineering ethics”). To understand engineering (or any other (...) occupation) as a profession is to adopt a certain conception of it, one neither old nor (yet) universal. With that conception in hand, it should be possible for social science to answer the question posed in the title. (shrink)

This article describes the education portion of an ongoing grant-sponsored education and research project designed to help graduate students in all engineering disciplines learn about the basic ethical principles, rules, and obligations associated with engineering practice in the United States. While the curriculum developed for this project is used for both domestic and international students, the educational materials were designed to be sensitive to the specific needs of international graduate students. In recent years, engineering programs in the United States have (...) sought to develop a larger role for professional ethics education in the curriculum. Accreditation requirements, as well as pressures from the private sector, have helped facilitate this shift in focus. Almost half of all engineering graduate students in the U.S. are international students. Further, research indicates that the majority of these students will remain in the U.S. to work post-graduation. It is therefore in the interest of the profession that these students, coming from diverse backgrounds, receive some formal exposure to the professional and ethical expectations and norms of the engineering profession in the United States to help ensure that they have the knowledge and skills—non-technical as well as technical—required in today’s engineering profession. In becoming acculturated to professional norms in a host country, international students face challenges that domestic students do not encounter; such as cultural competency, language proficiency, and acculturation stress. Mitigating these challenges must be a consideration in the development of any effective education materials. The present article discusses the project rationale and describes the development of on-line instructional materials aimed at helping international engineering graduate students acclimate to professional engineering ethics standards in the United States. Finally, a brief data summary of students’ perceptions of the usefulness of the content and instructional interface is provided to demonstrate the initial effectiveness of the materials and to present a case for project sustainability. (shrink)

The changing milieu of research—increasingly global, interdisciplinary and collaborative—prompts greater emphasis on cultural context and upon partnership with international scholars and diverse community groups. Ethics training, however, tends to ignore the cross-cultural challenges of making ethical choices. This paper confronts those challenges by presenting a new curricular model developed by an international team. It examines ethics across a very broad range of situations, using case studies and employing the perspectives of social science, humanities and the sciences. The course has been (...) developed and taught in a highly collaborative way, involving researchers and students at Zhejiang University, the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay and Brown University. The article presents the curricular modules of the course, learning outcomes, an assessment framework developed for the project, and a discussion of evaluation findings. (shrink)