Undergraduate Education in Practical Ethics: A general plan plus sample assignments for engineering students using materials from the Online Ethics Center
Author(s):
Caroline Whitbeck
- Ethics Education in Freshmen
Orientation
- 100-Level Courses, Especially
First-Semester Freshman Classes
-
Topics for First-and Second-Year
Students
- Active Learning about professional
responsibility for freshmen and sophomores
- Model active learning assignment on
professional responsibility for engineering
- Other Topics Suitable for First and Second
Year Students
- Topics in Courses for Juniors and
Seniors
- Preparing Students for Their Co-ops and
Coaching Them As Ethical Problems Arise
- Ethics Projects for Seniors
This essay recommends what is called a "hands on,"
"practice-oriented," "experiential," or "active" learning
approach to ethics education. The active learning exercises
should be chosen so that over the course of their
undergraduate career students engage in developing a full
range of ethical skills. These include not only making
judgments about whether some action is ethical, or which of a
set of multiple choices is the best (or least bad), but
skills such as the ability to:
- Find statements of ethical standards by reputable
bodies and evaluate the legitimacy of those standards
- Conduct an ongoing assessment of a problem in a way
that does not cause unnecessary harm (e.g., destroy a
person's reputation)
- Recognize explanations other than the one that appears
most likely
- Fashion responses that will be robust in the sense that
they will be wise, even if the situation turns out to be
other than the one that seemed most plausible
- Recognize when the moral territory is unfamiliar and
locate good advice about how to proceed and the likely
effects of doing so
For more detailed information on active learning
methods that teach a full range of skills for moral
problem solving, see "Moral Agents and Moral
Problems ". (That this essay was selected for reprinting
by the National Student Pugwash, shows student enthusiasm for
these methods.)
Active learning materials are featured in
the Online Ethics Center (OEC).
Active learning methods were featured in pedagogical
presentations in the March 1999 International Conference on
Ethics in Engineering and Computer Science held at Case. The
conference papers
describing these methods are available in the OEC.
Other valuable methods are already used in those
disciplines in the humanities and social science that
regularly include ethics in their subject matter. Ethics has
sometimes been well incorporated into capstone courses in
engineering design. The present proposal is not meant to
displace either such existing disciplinary courses that treat
ethics in depth, or ethics education that already
incorporated into engineering courses.
A. Freshman Orientation:
As of Fall 2000 the first day of Freshman Orientation at
Case featured skits depicting predicaments of college life
with President Auston in attendance. These challenge students
to think through their actions in a range of situations, from
responding to a student who has passed out after drinking, to
deciding what kinds of help they may use in doing their
assignments. The conversation about the moral
responsibilities in an academic community and academic
honesty as a value central to the practices of acquiring,
augmenting, and transmitting knowledge began here, as it
should, at the beginning of orientation. The uniformity of
the expectation on students and faculty alike to fully
acknowledging all sources and aids used in one's work began
at this point.
B. 100-Level Courses, Especially
First-Semester Freshman Classes
Orientation to the university as a center of learning and
research, and introduction to the practices that define a
research university and the centrality of academic integrity
to those practices should continue in 100-level courses. In
these courses, upper-class students as well as first-year
students are introduced to disciplines. They need to learn
not only the methods of creation and discovery used in those
disciplines, but also the standards for evaluating and
crediting contributions made in the given discipline, and the
reasons behind the differing standards of behavior required
for maintaining academic integrity in different
disciplines.
By beginning with an emphasis on crediting sources,
faculty can create an atmosphere in which students can safely
bring to light the sources they do in fact use. The
appropriateness of that use can then be examined. When
students see that the careful reporting of data and full
citation of sources are expectations of mature as well as
apprentice scholars and investigators, they understand what a
research community is, and what their full participation
requires. This sets academic honesty in a very different
light than when students see it as obedience to a set of
arbitrary rules set down by faculty to make easier the
faculty's evaluation task. (In contrast, rules such as those
against studying exams from previous years foster the
negative impression that rules about academic honesty have no
moral justification.) Understanding that academic integrity
is continuous with research integrity works to prevent what
Case's recent Academic Integrity Survey shows are the most
common serious departures from academic honesty, namely,
fabricating or falsifying data on lab reports, failing to
properly credit sources and copying others' lab reports.
Students need to understand the criteria for fair use of
sources in each new discipline they enter, because what is
common knowledge or original work is field-dependent. For
example, copying another's word choice and phrasing has a
significance in writing poetry that it does not have in
writing research reports, and copying another's data has
significance in reporting research that it does not have in
writing science fiction.
C. Topics for First- and Second-Year
Students
Practical problems of being and becoming university
students often absorb first- and second-year students,
especially those in engineering and computer science. Only
the precocious among them think often about life after
graduation. Therefore, most first and second year students
are most easily engaged in moral reflection and
problem-solving that is closely related to matters close to
their college experience.
Those enrolled in professional programs, such as nursing,
engineering, and accounting, can be encouraged to consider
what it is to choose a profession, and the particular
responsibilities, temptations and moral pitfalls that attend
the one they have chosen. They are faced with present
decisions, such as what major to choose and whether to join
the Case student chapter of their professional society with
which to connect an elementary consideration of professional
ethics.
Those in pre-professional programs or those who have plans
to go into other professions, such as teaching, have a
similar immediate interest in the choice they are making in a
pre-professional program or major and its implications for
their lives. The OEC contains a cross-section of codes of ethics in science-based
professions.
Even those students who pursue a liberal education with no
thought of career preparation, face questions of forming
realistic expectations and deciding when and whom to trust as
they become independent adults. They are often most
interested, for example, in what they can expect in dealings
with health care practitioners or teachers. Such discussions
should deal with the responsibilities of students or patients
(e.g., the patient's responsibility to provide the
practitioner with complete and accurate information) as well
as their rights.
C.1 Active Learning about Professional
Responsibility by First and Second Year Students
Rather than simply studying a code, a more engaging active
learning approach begins with discussion of brief open-ended
(what-shall-we-do?) problem situations that might arise in
the profession in question. During the class session, have
the students discuss how they might address the problem. For
follow-up homework, assign the students to see what the
provisions of the relevant professional society's code of
ethics would have to say about the situation or the responses
they have proposed. It is often a good idea to assign
students to work in groups on this question, or to respond to
one another's responses.
Those teaching students in engineering and the applied
sciences cases may want to make use of a collection
of open-ended discussion cases (cases that ask what
should be done). These open-ended cases are based on other
closed-ended cases (cases that ask only how given actions
should be judged). . These open-ended cases are based on
other closed-ended cases (cases that ask only how given
actions should be judged). Those closed-ended judgment cases
were constructed by the National Society of Professional
Engineers (NSPE). The NSPE Board of Ethical Review (BER)
applied the then current version of the NSPE Code of Ethics
to the case to judge the ethical acceptability of the actions
of the engineer(s) in the case. Each discussion case on the
OEC Web site has a link to the corresponding NSPE BER case
and the BER's judgment on it. Beginning with cases that
students must grapple with and teaching principles in
relation to those cases is an essential feature of active or
experiential learning. Students find this approach more
interesting than trying to read the code or even a code and a
judgment that applies it without first trying to cope with
the kinds of situations that the code seeks to address. It
helps them understand:
- Why codes of ethics mention only certain ethically
significant actions, and not all the moral rules that would
apply to their member's actions (The codes focus on matters
related to the responsibilities and temptations specific to
a their profession.)
- That the ethical considerations they themselves bring
forward are not always the same as those that the
professional societies consider, but may nonetheless be
valid.
- That professional societies are concerned not only with
responsibility for the public good, but with promoting
cooperation and goodwill among members of their
profession.
These discoveries help students not only understand codes,
but to evaluate whether and when the provisions within a code
of ethics have ethical justification.
C.2. Model Active learning assignment on
professional responsibility for engineering and science
students (for whom the need is greatest):
In class: Present students with one of
the research or safety cases best suited to your class topic
research ethics
or safety cases.
(If the class is a large one, use small groups, in which case
schedule time for each group to briefly report to the whole
class). Also, discuss:
For homework assign students to:
- Read the current code of
ethics of the National Society of Professional
Engineers. Compare it to one of the other codes in the
Codes Section of the Online
Ethics Center closest to your own discipline.
- Write a brief discussion (100-200 words) of the NSPE's
Board of Ethical Review (BER) in the case that is linked at
the bottom of the safety case considered in class. State
where you agree, where you disagree with their judgment,
and why. Send it by email to the instructor by 9 am before
the next class along with discussions of the two NSPE BER
cases that correspond to the discussion cases above.
For further reading:
D. Other Topics Suitable for First and
Second Year Students
- The moral standards that apply to university life
- The responsibilities of citizens
- What is the good life or "the good" for people?
- How can one respect others with different values
without falling into ethical subjectivism
- Voting, driving, responsible drinking
- Ethical question about personal life and values and
conduct with friends and family, including both the
personal and policy dimensions of birth and death
- Laboratory safety, highway safety, consumer safety, and
human interdependence
- Ethics in the news items: There are, unfortunately,
always news stories officials brought up on ethics charges
or cited for conflict of interest. See Glossary entry for
"Conflict of Interest"
Sample discussion problem: Is it a conflict of
interest for faculty members to hire students in their
courses for clerical jobs? For baby sitting or yard work in
their homes? For research assistance?
If any of these do create conflicts of interest, would
it be acceptable for students who were already employed in
any job that was problematic above subsequently to enroll
in the employing faculty member's course? Why or why
not?
E. Topics in Courses for Juniors and
Seniors
For juniors and seniors, life after graduation takes on
more reality, especially when they have internships, summer
jobs, and volunteer experiences with potential future
employers and other first hand experiences of that life. The
ability to evaluate the moral climate of the organizations
they will enter after graduation becomes more important to
them, especially as they realize how different from their
undergraduate life the work world and graduate school may be.
Online resources for this activity include:
Ethical Guidelines for Employers and Employees on ethical
behavior in:
- Recruitment
- Employment
- Professional
Development
- Termination and
Transfer
- Guidelines for Raising
Ethical Concerns
- Issues in the Responsible
Conduct of Research
Active learning assignments on professional
responsibility for science and engineering students
Science and engineering faculty members can find and freely
adopt course-tested assignments from
the course assignment list
for PHIL304/404, Science and Engineering
Ethics. (I request that if you are a member of the
Case faculty and you use some of these materials, you inform
me of which assignments you will be using by sending me email
at cwhitbeck@onlineethics.org with the course name and
estimated enrollment for your class. If a significant number
of students are likely to take both courses, I can then
replace the assignment you use with another one in my
course.) The topics and assignments in
Science and Engineering
Ethics increase in difficulty and sophistication
over the span of the semester. Therefore, faculty members are
advised not to give freshmen and sophomores those assignments
that come at the end of the course.
F. Preparing Students for Their Co-ops
and Coaching them as Ethical Problems Arise
A committee composed of interested and experienced faculty
and former co-op students could work Deborah Fatica to
provide for on-the-job ethics coaching (on the model of the Ethics Help-Line of the
Online Ethics Center ).
Other resources for (and some currently used by) the Co-op
Program include:
- An ethics game
widely used in major corporations that reveals many
expectations of well functioning corporations (but with
varying amounts of explanation and justification of those
policies).
- Thoughtful advice on
ethical conduct from the Ethics Office of a major
corporation.
- Web pages and essays on
conflict of interest and conflicting interests and
commitments in work and research contexts.
G. Ethics Projects for Seniors
Ethics projects would make a useful capstone experience in
ethics for those students not already assigned to do one. In
such projects students develop brief descriptions of an
ethically significant open-ended problem situation of
interest to them. Students may work individually or in small
teams. Each student takes his, her, or the team's problem to
people who have knowledge and experience about how to respond
in the student's chosen context (usually an employment or
graduate or professional school context). Doing the project
often builds the student's confidence about his or her
ability to act on ethical convictions in the work or study
situation that he or she plans to enter after graduation.
You may access detailed instructions for conducting such a
project in a current 300/400 level course. A sampling of
student reports from MIT
and Case undergraduates and graduate students is also
available in the Online Ethics Center.
Related resources:
- Using Materials from the
Online Ethics Center for Engineering & Science in the
Engineering Curriculum , a response to a request from
Case's ABET Readiness Committee for a "handbook for
dummies" on Engineering Ethics
- Course-tested
online assignments from Science and Engineering
Ethics The assignments at the beginning of the
course may be used with students at any level, but those in
the second half of the course should be used only with
juniors, seniors, and graduate students.
Caroline Whitbeck