Ethics Education in Engineering: Practices on and off the Campus

This paper will focus on two major methods for educating engineers in ethics. It is important to realize that two sets of standards exist within the field of engineering, both from the professional standards set within industries and from the personal moral standards held by engineers themselves. This article first examines the education of ethics within the workplace as some engineers have no previous training in ethics. Second, it discusses how ethics is introduced to engineers through university undergraduate and graduate courses. It will also evaluate whether ethics courses are more effective than the real-world application found through the professional setting. It concludes that it is best to incorporate a part of all of these methods of ethical training, but the least useful is that of teaching ethics to students in undergraduate programs with the hope of measuring these results by tests and assessments. Rather, it is more important to build students’ personal values, virtues, and then their ethical training will naturally occur, and result in engineers being more motivated to adhere to these ethical practices. As for research methods, information was gathered through database searches for articles relating to ethics within the engineering workplace. These articles were studied to determine the multiple ways of creating ethical standards for engineers. This process was completed by consideration for the historical development of these standards for promoting more ethical engineering