Making Ethics Explicit: Relocating Ethics to the Core of Engineering Education

Our project is motivated by the expanding and at times controversial literature that emphasizes the centrality of emotion to moral choice. In this paper we present the preliminary results of our project funded by the National Science Foundation Ethics Education in Science and Engineering program. Our project aims to develop effective pedagogical practices that incorporate the emotions into engineering ethics curricula. We synthesize findings from the philosophy of emotion, science and engineering ethics, engineering studies, and education research to argue that emotions offer an entry point to ethics that engages students' preconceptions. Pedagogical research across the curricula shows the necessity of addressing the preconceptions that students hold. We argue that ethics instruction should begin by engaging students' preconceptions and existing ethical frameworks, which may be expressed emotively. Rather than portraying emotion as a threat to rationality, we outline pedagogical strategies that encourage students to explore the relationship between emotions and feelings, logic and reason, and values and ethics. The pedagogical strategies presented here are being piloted in an advanced (upper-division) undergraduate seminar course, "Ethics, Engineering, and Society." This seminar, which was first taught during the 2011/12 Academic Year at the University of California, Berkeley, also informed the development of our funded project. This paper describes early student responses to the new curriculum. Our results suggest that engaging students' emotions encourages and enables them to reflect on their preconceptions about engineering and about engineering ethics. While many students initially perceive ethics as tangential to their larger education, engaging their emotions about this assumption allows for the possibility to reframe ethics as a core part of their curriculum.