From “Not My Business ” to Positive Responsibility

Abstract – How does a course on engineering ethics affect an undergraduate student’s feelings of responsibility and decisions about moral problems? Can an ethics course promote moral courage? In this study, we interviewed six students who had taken a course on engineering ethics and six who had not. We asked what they would do as participants in two short cases that posed moral problems. For each case, we successively increased the level of seriousness and asked how each change altered the students ’ decisions. For both cases, even when they were not directly involved, students who had taken the ethics course were more likely to feel responsible and take corrective action. Students who were less successful in the ethics course gave answers similar to students who had not taken the course. This latter group of students seemed to have weaker feelings of responsibility: they would say that a problem was “not my business.” Index Terms – assessment, engineering ethics, professional responsibilit