2006 ASEE Southeast Section Conference A Back to the Basics Approach to Teaching Engineering Ethics

Abstract – One of the essential characteristics of a profession is a set of rules generally defining the conduct of its practitioners in carrying out their special duties. This is true of the practice of law and medicine as well as engineering. Nowadays, most engineering curricula include the teaching of some form of ethics either as a separate course or often as part of the capstone experience. Driven by the spate of financial as well as engineering ethical failures of recent years, there is a pervasive sense among the public that ethics, if not ethical standards, are not what they once were. Given this climate and the notion that education, rightly so, conforms to the perceived needs of society, it is likely that ethics would have found its way into engineering curricula with or without the prompting of ABET [1]. Since it is universally agreed that the teaching of ethics is such a good thing, then regrettably, some have concluded it is so important it should be taught, not by engineers, but by professional ethicists who may be distrustful of technology and the engineers who create it. In this milieu, a lecture on engineering ethics can yield the subliminal and somewhat adversarial message of “what you (the engineers) ought to do to protect us (the non-engineers of society) from you and your technology”. More useful would be to introduce the students to a well defined and articulated set of rules of engineering ethics such as the Canons of Professional Engineering. More often, these are bypassed for the more intellectually stimulating but highly ambiguous case studies, most of which are better suited to a debating society than an introduction to engineering ethics. This paper will discuss the pitfalls of this disturbing trend in engineering education and why we need to stay focused on the basics