Teaching engineering ethics and sustainability

Most professional engineering code’s of ethics require that engineers shall understand and promote the principles of sustainability and/or sustainable development and have due regard for their environmental, social and economic obligations. However the ethical obligations towards sustainability are incorporated into the teaching of engineering ethics in very few programmes. Typically engineering ethics is taught via relatively straightforward case studies whereby students are asked to identify with a particular individual agent acting alone and determine the correct or optimum course of action. Context, complexity and an interdisciplinary approach tend to lose out to objective reality in such scenarios. This paper describes the teaching of engineering ethics as part of an introductory first year undergraduate module. Students were presented with the real life wicked problem of matching future municipal water supply and demand in Dublin. They were asked to consider the published findings of an engineering consultancy group and then propose and present their own recommendations. This approach was employed to introduce a number of sustainability concepts in the context of professional ethical responsibility while developing their critiquing skills. The paper reflects on the outcomes of this exercise, including the students’ own assessments. Teaching engineering ethics – current practice The typical means of teaching engineering ethics in professional programmes reflects the values and perceptions of both engineers and engineering educators, that is, that engineering is somehow a ‘value free’ profession [1] which seeks to establish ‘objective’ criteria in making decisions and solving problems, including ethical ones. Ethics is therefore taught through the individualistic object world of the engineering profession [2] where the broader context is ignored [3], and the teaching of ethics reflects this though case studies which focus on microethical issues where students are encouraged to role play and reconcile ethical dilemmas involving individual actors. Such case studies encourage students “to express ethical opinions, ..to identify ethical issues and formulate and effectively justify decisions” [4]. Other characteristics of this approach include a framework based on professional codes of ethics and an assumption that win–win solutions always exist and can be implemented by individual engineers [3]. The interplay between the individual and the organization is sometimes examined in this context, but rarely is the broader super-organisational world of public policy, society, governance or the greater good invoked. For it seems this is not the role of the engineer! As the UK Teaching of Engineering Ethics Group [5] suggested: “A typical perception that engineers ‘do engineering’ whilst others have the prime concern with the implications is erroneous and based on an overly-narrow view of the role of the professional engineer often held by engineers as well as by others” Others concur with this view. Herkert [4] has pointed to “the traditional preoccupation of engineering ethics with specific moral dilemmas confronting individuals” in American engineering ethics education. Zandvoort [6] reports that engineering ethics textbooks are inadequate in preparing students for what he calls the “necessary knowledge for social responsibility”. Perhaps in this context it is