Abstract
This paper addresses several concerns in teaching engineering ethics. First, there is the problem of finding space within already crowded engineering curricula for meaningful discussions of ethical dimensions in engineering. Some engineering programs may offer entire courses on engineering ethics; however, most do not at present and may not in the foreseeable future. A promising possibility is to weave ethics into already existing courses using case studies, but most current case studies are not well integrated with engineering technical analysis. There is a danger that case studies will be viewed by both instructors and students as departures from “business as usual”—interesting perhaps, but not essentially connected with “real” engineering. We offer a case study, inspired by the National Society of Professional Engineer’s popular video Gilbane Gold, that can be used to make the connection. It requires students to engage in technical analysis, but in a context that makes apparent the ethical responsibility of engineers. Further, the case we present marks a significant departure from more typical cases that primarily focus on wrongdoing and its prevention. We concentrate more positively on what responsible engineering requires. There is a need for more such cases, regardless of whether they are to be used in standard engineering courses or in separate courses in engineering ethics.
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Gilbane Gold (1989), National Society for Professional Engineers, 1420 King Street, Alexandria, VA 22314, USA (24 minute video).
Janis, I. (1982) Groupthink, 2nd ed., Houghton Mifflin, Boston MA, USA.
Jewell, Wm. (1994) Resource-Recovery Wastewater Treatment, American Socientist 82(4): 366–375.
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This article is the product of the NSF/Bovay Endowment “Workshop to Develop Numerical Problems Associated With Ethics Cases for use in Required Undergraduate Engineering Courses” (NSF Grant DUE-9455141) held at Texas A&M University in August 1995. For further information about this project, contact Michael J. Rabins, Director of the Ethics and Professionalism Program in the Look College of Engineering at Texas A&M University. Additional case studies from this workshop are available on the Internet site http://ethics.tamu.edu. The writing of this article was supported in part by “Engineering Ethics: Good Works” (NSF/EVS Grant SBR-930257).
Michael Pritchard teaches ethics and is co-author of Engineering Ethics: Concepts and Cases (1995) with C.E. Harris and Michael Rabins (Wadsworth, Belmont CA).
Mark Holtzapple teaches chemical engineering and is author of Foundations of Engineering (McGraw-Hill) which includes an ethics chapter suitable for freshman engineering students.
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Pritchard, M., Holtzapple, M. Responsible engineering: Gilbane Gold revisited. SCI ENG ETHICS 3, 217–230 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-997-0011-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-997-0011-9