Open Access
Subscription Access
Open Access
Subscription Access
Engineering Ethics:Decision Making Using Fundamental Canons
Subscribe/Renew Journal
An engineering professional's work demands that the technological solutions designed to solve practical problems of society are addressing the safety, health and welfare of the public. An engineer thus works in an environment where equally competing considerations for different stakeholders need to be accounted for before providing uncompromised solutions. In such a professionally obligatory setting, ethical dilemmas come into foreplay which will decide the course of action which the problem solver will seek to take. However, the ethical problems are ill-structured and lack a set of prescriptive and enumerable solutions. Thus, the professionals need to be trained in exploring the solution space of problems related to engineering ethics during their formative four years. An aim to achieve this will require engineering educators to include of the principles of Engineering Ethics is the curriculum.
The objective of this paper is to explore the existing solution space for the curriculum design, content and assessment of ethics instruction. It also presents the approach followed in designing a module on Engineering Ethics in an introductory freshman course in our university. We have designed an assessment in which the students are required to provide a resolution to the ethical dilemma by basing their decision on fundamental canons of National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE). From the results we conclude that students are able to identify and resolve ethical dilemmas which lie in the domain of public welfare, health and safety more than the others.
Keywords
- Colby, A., & Sullivan, W. M. (2008). Ethics teaching in undergraduate engineering education. Journal of Engineering Education, 97(3), 327.
- Davis, M., & Feinerman, A. (2012). Assessing graduate student progress in engineering ethics. Science and engineering ethics, 18(2), 351-367.
- Dyrud, M. A. (2010). Problem Solving in Engineering and Ethics: Points of Intersection.
- Flanagan, M., Howe, D. C., & Nissenbaum, H. (2005, April). Values at play: Design tradeoffs in socially-oriented game design. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 751-760). ACM.
- Fleddermann, C.B. 2008. Engineering ethics, 3rd Ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.
- Friedman, B. (1996). Value-sensitive design. interactions, 3(6), 16-23.
- Gorman, M., Hertz, M., Garrick, L., & Magpili, L. (2000). Integrating ethics & engineering: A graduate option in systems engineering, ethics, and technology studies. Journal of Engineering Education, 89(4), 461.
- Harris, C. E., Davis, M., Pritchard, M. S., & Rabins, M. J. (1996). Engineering ethics: what? why? how? and when?. JOURNAL OF ENGINEERING EDUCATIONWASHINGTON-, 85, 93-96.
- Haws, D. R. (2001). Ethics instruction in engineering education: A (mini) meta-analysis. Journal of Engineering Education, 90(2), 223.
- Herkert, J. R. (2004, June). Continuing and emerging issues in engineering ethics education and research: integrating microethics and macroethics. InPower Engineering Society General Meeting, 2004. IEEE (pp. 647-Vol). IEEE.
- Hess, J. L., Beever, J., Iliadis, A., Kisselburgh, L. G., Zoltowski, C. B., Krane, M. J., & Brightman, A. O. (2014, October). An ethics transfer case assessment tool for measuring ethical reasoning abilities of engineering students using reflexive principlism approach. In 2014 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE) Proceedings (pp. 1-5). IEEE.
- Hoffmann, M., & Borenstein, J. (2014). Understanding illstructured engineering ethics problems through a collaborative learning and argument visualization approach. Science and engineering ethics, 20(1), 261-276.
- Jonassen, D. H., & Cho, Y. H. (2011). Fostering argumentation while solving engineering ethics problems. Journal of Engineering Education, 100(4), 680.
- Jonassen, D. H., Shen, D., Marra, R. M., Cho, Y. H., Lo, J. L., & Lohani, V. K. (2009). Engaging and supporting problem solving in engineering ethics .Journal of Engineering Education, 98(3), 235-254.
- Martin, M. W., Schinzinger , M. R., (1998), Introduction to Engineering Ethics, 2nd Edition , McGraw-Hill, Newyork.
- MUSIB, M. K. Teaching Ethics by Adopting a Role-play, Scenario-based Learning Approach for an Authentic Learning Experience.
- Nissenbaum, H. (2001). How computer systems embody values. Computer, 34(3), 120.119. doi:10.1109/ Santi, Paul M. "Ethics exercises for civil, environmental and geological engineers." JOURNAL OF ENGINEERING EDUCATION-WASHINGTON-89.2 (2000): 151-160.
- Self, D. J., & Ellison, E. M. (1998). Teaching engineering ethics: Assessment of its influence on moral reasoning skills. JOURNAL OF ENGINEERING EDUCATIONWASHINGTON-, 87, 29-34.
- Shuman, L. J., Besterfield-Sacre, M., & McGourty, J. (2005). The ABET "professional skills"h.Can they be taught? Can they be assessed?. Journal of engineering education, 94(1), 41-55.
- Shuman, L. J., M. Besterfield-Sacre, and B. M. Olds. 2005. Ethics assessment rubrics. In Vol. 2 of Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics, eds. C. Mitcham, L. Arnhart, D. Johnson and R. Spiers, 693.695. NY: MacMillan Reference Books.
- Van Wynsberghe, A., & Robbins, S. (2014). Ethicist as Designer: a pragmatic approach to ethics in the lab. Science and engineering ethics,20(4), 947-961.
- Velankar A, Joshi G & Baligar P (2016) Promoting Ethical Skills in First Year Engineering Students through Socially Relevant Experiments, In 2016, 6th Regional conference on Engineering Education (RCEE).
Abstract Views: 222
PDF Views: 0