This Ethics Education in Science and Engineering award supports a study of ethical decision making in research teams of engineering students, with the aim of improving ethics education for engineering students and ultimately ethical practice among professional engineers. The study focuses on the group dynamics of ethical decision making in project teams and research labs to determine whether the presence of an "ethics expert" acts as an effective resource to improve ethical decision making. Answering this question requires a multidisciplinary approach involving theoretical work in both practical ethics and situated learning as well as qualitative observational research that includes experimental studies of ethical decision making in group projects. The project includes developing a normative philosophical framework for situational, collaborative ethical reflection and problem solving, and applying that framework to ethics training for engineering. Graduate and undergraduate students in engineering are observed in ethical decision making in situ and participate in activities where they consult with "ethics experts" -- students in a special ethics course about ethical and social issues in technology -- about concerns arising in their research projects. Experimental studies compare the behavior and results produced by teams that do and do not interact with the "ethics experts."
The intellectual merits of this research include contributions to the fields of philosophical ethics, moral psychology, pedagogical theory, and science and engineering education. Specifically, this project generates new ideas in ethics about the possibility and role of experts and expertise and the way that responsibility and ethical decision making can be constructed in group situations. This study also investigates a new range of phenomena for moral psychology, which has primarily focused on ethical decision making by individuals rather than on the dynamics of group reflection, decision making, and the social distribution of moral responsibility. The proposal expands the situated learning approach to cases of ethical training and the options for ethics pedagogy, which will generate results that will be the basis of new materials for ethics training in science and engineering education. Results will be widely disseminated via journal publications and open forums on the web. This research will have broader impacts on the current practices of engineering ethics education that emphasize abstract principles, individual responsibility, and case studies of extreme situations. Engineers trained according to this program are expected to more readily use the resources available to them in their professional environments, such as an ethics office or ombudsperson, and to function effectively in team decision making about ethical issues. The researchers plan follow up this project by developing curricular resources to expand this type of training to other programs and institutions.
