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Beyond Ethical Frameworks: Using Moral Experimentation in the Engineering Ethics Classroom

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Abstract

Although undergraduate engineering ethics courses often include the development of moral sensitivity as a learning objective and the use of active learning techniques, teaching centers on the transmission of cognitive knowledge. This article describes a complementary assignment asking students to perform an ethics “experiment” on themselves that has a potential to enhance affective learning and moral imagination. The article argues that the focus on cognitive learning may not promote, and may even impair, our efforts to foster moral sensitivity. In contrast, the active learning assignments and exercises, like the ethics “experiment” discussed, offer great potential to expand the scope of instruction in engineering ethics to include ethical behavior as well as knowledge. Engineering ethics education needs to extend beyond the narrow range of human action associated with the technical work of the engineer and explore ways to draw on broader lifeworld experiences to enrich professional practice and identity.

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Notes

  1. The study reported in this paper is not itself experimental, and I do not use the term, “experiment,” to refer to it. However, the subject assignment does require students to experiment with an untried ethical practice, and in this regard, as will be described in further detail below, many choose a design with control and experimental components. The use of the term to describe their work is intended to emphasize the active testing, probing, and investigation that the assignment requires.

  2. A full discussion of these textbooks can be found in the section below, “Limitations of Cognitivist Approaches to Teaching Engineering Ethics.”

  3. I am indebted to my colleague, Randalyn Browing, for the original conception of this assignment, which she developed for a writing course. I have adapted her assignment to address the learning outcomes of a course in ethics. The use of experiments in the context of students’ lives as a strategy that is starting to appear more and more in college courses that seek to have students question existing norms (Kaza 2005).

  4. A good deal of interesting scholarship has challenged the distinction between world and text. We now understand that we can read the cultural artifacts of our world and that texts themselves create worlds. I do not intend to challenge this productive understanding here. Instead, I only want to highlight that so far as their professional work goes, texts are central to legal cognition and technique in ways that they are not for engineers.

  5. While rule-driven ethical frameworks are often characterized as modern and virtue ethics as a feature of ancient culture, in fact, the pendulum has swung between the two. Victorians were preoccupied with rules, but the next generation tended to reject utilitarian values in favor of a reflective individualism that obeyed the Golden Rule (Naser 2012).

  6. Stanley Fish’s (2010) New York Times article on plagiarism provides an even more explicit example of this kind of thinking. In it, he claims that rules about plagiarism do not implicate moral or ethical values. Instead, they are like the rules of golf. If one doesn’t conform to the rules, no one will play with you.

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  1. College of Engineering and Writing Program, University of California, Santa Barbara, South Hall, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, USA

    Olivia Walling

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  1. Olivia Walling
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Walling, O. Beyond Ethical Frameworks: Using Moral Experimentation in the Engineering Ethics Classroom. Sci Eng Ethics 21, 1637–1656 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-014-9614-0

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