In Situ Ethics: The Ethical Sensibility That Engineers Bring To Their Work

Abstract

Engineering educators often acknowledge that engineering ethics should be integral to undergraduate skills curriculums. In fact, the body of work regarding teaching engineering ethics to undergraduates is substantial and programs, courses, case studies, special assignments, partnerships with industry and other venues have been forged and implemented quite successfully in undergraduate education. A quick look in the IEEE archives, for example, shows over 75 recent papers and conference panels that address teaching undergraduate engineering ethics in the past three years alone. However, the body of work about how professional engineers are trained about ethics on the job, how they enact ethical decision making, or how/if they think about ethics in daily work environments is not nearly as rich. And while various professional codes of ethics are easily found in the engineering, business, and technical fields, part of our study's purpose was to tease out the values and ethical positioning that engineers apply moment to moment during their work. Engineering, like all professional work, reflects an intricate interplay of social forces, economic forces, legal constraints, technological demands, and organizational cultures 1. Any discussion about ethics on the job is complex, unwieldy, and may resist even the best attempts at categorization or standardization.

Alumni Reflect on Their Education About Ethical and Societal Issues

“…Nathans-Kelly et al [26] conducted a survey of engineering alumni working in the engineering profession from a single institution (n=162), interviews with 91 engineers / former engineers, and case studies within six engineering organizations. Two important themes were profit/time versus perfection ("reconciling the creation of a product in a safe and thorough manner while working under budget/profit demands within an organization") and ethics unseen (arguing that engineers did not perceive that daily decision making often had ethical implications).…”

“…The most common response was that ethical/moral dilemmas were encountered infrequently and were not of significant personal concern (34% of jobs); the second most common response was that they had never been confronted with an ethical or moral dilemma regarding how their work impacted people, society, and/or the environment. It seems unlikely that there were no ethical dimensions to their work, but rather individuals were unaware of these issues, similar to the ethics unseen theme in [26]. This points to the importance of the first step in the ethical decision making process of recognizing an ethical dilemma [14].…”