IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2015 - 56
Teaching
Engineering Ethics
A Phenomenological Approach
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Valorie Troesch
Five variants of the trolley problem.
T
wo concerns dominate engineering
ethics pedagogy. The first is that 21st
century technologies present daunting ethical questions that require
strong engagement with engineering
ethics. The second is that engineering students don't emotionally engage with the study of ethics - in short, they don't care
much about it. Instead, today's engineering students are
confident that technology itself will operate to resolve
most ethical questions.
In a 2012 article, Pine argues that emerging technologies pose unique ethical issues for engineers and that a
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2015.2425615
Date of publication: 19 June 2015
56
1932-4529/15©2015IEEE
"new" ethics instruction for the 21st century is essential
for engineering students [1]. Newberry finds that, although
engineering students can learn and apply the rules of professional ethics and are capable of considering ethics from
multiple perspectives, they deem the ethics component
of their coursework to be "the least interesting, the least
useful, and the most trivial" [2]. Although students can
intellectually engage in ethical study, they do not achieve
emotional engagement, which Newberry defines as "developing a student's desire, on an affective level, to recognize,
to care about, and to resolve ethical issues" [2]. Pine and
Newberry agree that effective ethics instruction is critical.
I agree with them, but I suggest an approach that does
not expect students to "learn and apply ethics." I propose
a phenomenology-informed pedagogy that asks students
to explore and reflect on the lived experience of being an
IEEE TEchnology and SocIETy MagazInE
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