Online Ethics Center: Teaching Engineering Responsibility for Environmental Consequences

The creation and implementation of new technology, products, and buildings involves many professionals. But the engineer has a particularly special role to play in that the design of products and technology has direct ethical implications. When a company decides to create a new product, it is the engineers who, in designing that product, make decisions that affect the world's resources. Design questions as simple as `What materials should go into this product?' have incredible implications for the environment. Engineering students should be taught to consider the environmental implications of the design choices they make. They need to be given the tools to assess those implications (that is, to make value judgments about them). And finally, they need to consider how to mediate possible conflicts of environmental concerns with economic concerns and obligations to clients and employers. This section offers pedagogical advice for incorporating these ethical considerations into the design course.

What to Stress

Suggested Pre-Assignments

Expanding Design Course Material to Include Consideration of Environmental Consequences

Web Resources and Bibliography

What to Stress

When teaching engineering students about the environmental impacts of technology, it is important to stress both ethics and the law. Students should be aware of law; especially the National Environmental Policy Act, 1969 which was passed, in part, to get engineers to incorporate the environmental affect of their projects into their design procedure. Students should also be aware of ethics; especially questions surrounding our obligations to the environment, animals and future generations. What is the source of these obligations? How do we mediate conflicts between these obligations and obligations to clients and bosses or economic concerns? How can we incorporate environmental concerns into the design process given uncertainty of the long-term effects of technology on the environment? Given that many professionals are involved in the creation of new products, how much responsibility should fall on engineers to care for the environment?

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Suggested Pre-Assignments:

1. Asking students to examine an EIS (Environmental Impact Statement) relevant to their area is a good place to start. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA- sec. 102) mandates that every government project have an EIS. As the Pantex Corporation Website explains: "Environment" considered in an EIS includes land, water, air, structures, living organisms, environmental values at the site, and the social, cultural, and economic aspects. An "impact" is a change in consequence that results from an activity. Impacts can be positive or negative or both. An EIS describes impacts, as well as ways to "mitigate" impacts. To "mitigate" means to lessen or remove negative impacts. Therefore, an EIS is a document that describes the impacts on the environment as a result of a proposed action. It also describes impacts of alternatives as well as plans to mitigate the impacts. Below are links to websites that students can use to access EIS's relevant to their field. You might have students find EIS's for projects close to home and in process. Writers of these statements can be contacted and brought to class as guest lecturers. After students look at an EIS, lead a brief discussion about what they found. In particular, stress the ethics of design.
2. Have students look at engineering codes of ethics for statements about environmental concerns. In addition, some engineering societies issue policy statements concerning the environment. See, for example ASCE's policy statements on a variety of environmental issues. Ask students to think about how the society justifies the requirement to consider the environmental impact of their designs. (Most appeal to the effect on humans, not on animals or the ecosystem. Use this fact to lead into discussion about criteria to establish the moral standing of beings; an important background discussion for this topic. You might also share Policy Statement 120 of ASCE. This statement refers explicitly to obligations to consider the environmental impact of designs, but it also mentions the possible conflict with economic concerns. Such statements can be used as a springboard for discussion about whether too much environmental regulation can inhibit the economy. Some argue that with too much regulation, short-term professional profitability would suffer and the economy might be inhibited in the name of environmental protection.

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Expanding Design Course Material to Include Consideration of Environmental Consequences

The goal here is to get engineering students to expand the questions they ask themselves when making engineering design decisions. By introducing the relevant background information and using realistic scenarios in the process of doing so, you should already be in a good position to show students that engineering decisions often have environmental impacts. Given this, such decisions need to be made in a context larger than a purely scientific one. The best way to incorporate these ideas into the classroom so that students can get practice thinking within the larger context is to expand problems they are already working on in the classroom. Michael Davis, in his article Teaching Ethics Across the Engineering Curriculum, explains how professors can take typical problems found in engineering textbooks and revise them in a way that gets students to think about design problems in the larger context. Examples:

1. Davis gives an interesting example. Take a numerical problem that asks students to compare two types of refrigerants in terms of pressure, etc.. You might expand such a technical problem by asking students to suppose they are recommending to a manufacturer which refrigerant is better to use. Ask students to consider what factors they would use to make their decision; pointing out that impact on the environment is a relevant factor to consider. Davis points out, expanding text-book cases like this shows students that "the abstract problem is always implicitly a practical problem; all engineering problems are." What you are doing here for students is making the practicality explicit.
2. Designing Engineers: Integration of Engineering "Professional Responsibility" in the Capstone Design Experience by Steven P. Nichols, P.E., Ph.D., J.D. In this essay, Nichols shows that senior design projects provide an opportunity to show students that "professional issues (such as ethical, legal, environmental, etc.) are as integral to solving engineering design problems as analytical tools." He offers an example of an ethical problem that arose for a student design team. This example "indicates the kind of questions of professional responsibility inherent in design problems."
3. Design and Numerical Problems with Ethical Content These problems were originally developed as part of an NSF funded project to create numerical problems that raise ethical issues for use in engineering and other course assignments. Such problems might fit into the technical course you are teaching.

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Web Resources and Bibliography

Teaching Ethics Across the Engineering Curriculum

In this article, Michael Davis shows how simple cases found in engineering textbooks can be altered so as to incorporate ethical issues. See in particular section IV: Some Examples.

Designing Engineers: Integration of Engineering "Professional Responsibility" in the Capstone Design Experience

By Steven P. Nichols, P.E., Ph.D., J.D. In this essay, Nichols explains how engineering professors can easily incorporate ethical considerations into the senior design experience.

Design and Numerical Problems with Ethical Content

These problems were originally developed as part of an NSF funded project to create numerical problems that raise ethical issues for use in engineering and other course assignments. This project included a workshop held at Texas A&M University in August 1995, under the direction of Charles E. Harris and Michael Rabins. The problems presented here have been slightly edited for clarity. Problems that raise environmental issues include: HVAC Design Problem, Heat Pump Ethics Problem, and Mt. Dioxin.

Rachel Carson

The case of Rachel Carson as an example of a moral leader in environmental concerns makes a good teaching tool. Rachel Carson was instrumental in alerting the public about the hazards of pesticides. Her book, Silent Spring, caused a major shift in public consciousness about the environment.

Design and the Environment

This topics section contains links to cases that help students see the effect of their designs on the environment. It also has a valuable bibliography.

In the Topics Section, Educational and Workplace: Environmental Issues

This topics section includes issues in global, nuclear, and chemical impacts. It offers information and cases covering technological disasters (the Challenger Disaster), endangered ecosystems (Rachel Carson), and toxic waste (Love Canal). A great bibliography can also be found here.

Clean Air Standards and a Government Engineer

This case, based on a real NSBE case, depicts an engineer refuses to draw up a permit for a building she believes violates environmental standards. Several days later, she learns that her department issued a permit anyway. There are also links to the original case and BER judgment.

Suspected Hazardous Waste

This case, based on a real NSBE case, depicts a supervisor instructing a student engineer to withhold information from a client about the suspected nature of waste on the client's property to protect what the supervisor takes to be the client's interest. There are links to the original case and BER judgment.

Environmental Impact Statements by State

You can click on any state and get brief descriptions of environmental impact statements currently under consideration. Included are contact numbers for students to get more information.

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) website on Compliance

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requires federal agencies to integrate environmental values into their decision making processes by considering the environmental impacts of their proposed actions and reasonable alternatives to those actions. To meet this requirement, federal agencies prepare a detailed statement known as an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). The EPA helps oversee this process.

Council on Environmental Quality

The Council on Environmental Quality coordinates federal environmental efforts and works closely with agencies and other White House offices in the development of environmental policies and initiatives. This office sets the standards for Environmental Impact Statements.

Pantex Facility Environmental Impact Statement

The Pantex Facility is America's only nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly facility. It is operated for the United States Department of Energy by a management and operating contractor BWXT Pantex. This website contains useful information on EIS's in general as well as a real example of an EIS from this company.

Vesilind, P. Aarne and Gunn, Alastair S. Engineering, Ethics, and the Environment. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

This book contains valuable discussion of the politics often present behind the creation of environmental policies within professional societies. It points out that environmental concerns must often be mediated by other concerns, such as professional profitability and impact on economic growth.