IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2015 - 60

In-Class Activities
I do not assume any theoretical ethics knowledge of my
students, so I think they need to have some grounding
in ethical theory. My phenomenological methods are
intended to supplement and not supplant ethical theory.
I provide an overview of the three dominant ethical
theories (deontology, consequentialism, virtue) and how

Engineering students deem the ethics
component of their coursework to be
"the least interesting, the least useful,
and the most trivial."
they relate to engineering ethics. Then, I pose two ethics
problems to the students. The problems posed are well
known to ethicists but not necessarily to engineering
students: the case of the inquiring murderer (a problem
of deontology) and the trolley problem (a problem of
consequentialism: there is a runaway trolley and you can
operate the switch that will avoid the trolley killing five
people on the track, but by switching tracks, the trolley
will kill one person on the other track).
Following this, I ask students to think about how
ethical decisions are actually made. If codes and rules
and utilitarian calculations of consequences have limited practical usefulness in ethical decision-making,
then how do engineers make ethical decisions? Most
students recognize that they rely on their "values" to
make decisions. What they do not think about, however,
is how their values influence nearly every decision they
make, usually with ethical consequences.
A set of three activities helps them think about values.
First, I ask the students to recall what they ate (or didn't
eat) for breakfast and then to think about why they made
those choices. What students discover is that even the
simple choices they make about breakfast are based on
their personal values and often carry ethical implications.
The second activity asks student to work in small
teams to consider the Canons of the NSPE Code of
Ethics and to identify the values that are behind these
rules. If they cannot rely on the NSPE Code of Ethics to
definitively answer professional ethical questions, then
why does it exist? Where did these rules come from?
The third activity is also a team activity. Each student
is asked to reflect on the values that made him or her
choose engineering as a profession and the particular field
of engineering. These three activities are inclusive ways to
have students begin to talk about values, to realize how

influential values are in all decision-making, and to understand how ethical consequences follow from values.
Finally, I ask the students to consider a real-world
case such as the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.
Students now understand the issues in the case from
a values perspective rather than from a rules or consequentialist perspective, resulting in new questions,
alternative possibilities, and perhaps otherwise unconsidered ethical options and obligations.
The terms "values" and "virtue ethics" are often used
interchangeably. Virtue ethics arises from the Aristotelian notion of the virtuous person and the virtues such a
person would possess. Aristotle is unwavering in his conviction that the virtuous person acts virtuously because
that is who the person is. The virtuous person, as recognized by Aristotle, is exceedingly rare. Current writers
who advocate for a virtues- based approach to engineering ethics usually begin with Aristotle and then offer prescriptive, though rarely identical, lists of the virtues that
a virtuous engineer would possess [13]-[15].
A values-based approach to engineering ethics emphasizes human values, things that are important to and that
motivate people [30], [34]. In this respect, values-based
ethics resembles virtue ethics. But values cross all theoretical boundaries in ethics. As the in-class activities on
values demonstrate, both deontological and consequentialist ethics are premised on complex sets of values,
although the theories themselves seek to give universal
guidance on right behavior without the need to explicitly
acknowledge or identify the values underlying them. As
part of a phenomenological inquiry into what it is to be
an ethical engineer, students discover and reflect on the
values they think are important, rather than have these
values delivered to them as pre- packaged content.

Engineer Interview
Reading
Downey, Lucena and Mitcham, Engineering Ethics and
Identity: Emerging Initiatives in Comparative Perspective [35]. The authors interview engineers from France,
Japan, and Germany and compare their cultural views
on what it is to be an ethical engineer. My students represent a diversity of cultures. The ability to work in a global
workplace is now a requisite skill, and this reading offers
a glimpse into how engineers in different cultures vary
in their understanding of what it is to be an ethical engineer. The article opens a discussion of the cultural differences represented by the students themselves.

Interview and Writing
Interviewing is the principle method of phenomenological research [36]. Talking with a person to discover the
essence of the experience being investigated is the best

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june 2015

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