Ethical Risk Management Education in Engineering: A Systematic Review

Abstract

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.

Empowering Engineering Students in Ethical Risk Management

“…We therefore propose an innovative method based on active-learning to help in this matter. We believe that this study offers a significant contribution to a critical question, as the nexus between risk management and ethics is clearly underdeveloped in engineering education [18].…”

Board 86 : Risk Management and Ethics in Capstone Design

“…The College of Engineering at RIT has laid out an ethics curriculum for its students, which includes senior year objectives of being able to (1) explain ethical behavior in a team environment, (2) summarize how to build and maintain a professional reputation, and (3) recognize the complex relationships that exist between engineering decisions and their broader impact. While items (1) and (2) are addressed several times in the undergraduate curriculum prior to the senior year, item (3) is not. It was the focus of the capstone instructor's participation in an Ethics Across the Curriculum (EAC) initiative launched by the Chair in Applied Ethics in the Department of Philosophy.…”

“…This provides the added benefit of integrating ethics into existing course material rather than treating it as a standalone topic. This practice addresses a known challenge with ethics education [1], [2], and has been recommended in the literature as far back as 1996 [3].…”

“…These risks are the ones that could prevent the team from completing their project, but they have little bearing on the use of their product or process after it is handed off to the customer and are therefore not necessarily indicative of ethical considerations. As outlined in [1], this type of instruction is typical of technically-focused risk management exercises, which are common in the engineering education community in, for example, Electrical [4] and Construction Engineering [5], and Engineering Management [6].…”

“…The questions the authors seek to answer are: (1) Were students able, after seeing examples, to consider risks related to harms that their designs may cause? (2) Did the balance of risks related to technical and resource challenges, compared with risks related to harms that could be caused, vary depending on the type of project examined?…”