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1. Empowering Graduate Students to Address Ethics in Research Environments

   https://doi.org/10.1017/S096318011900046X  

   HILDT, ELISABETH; LAAS, KELLY; MILLER, CHRISTINE; TAYLOR, STEPHANIE; BREY, ERIC M. (July 2019, Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics)

   Abstract: In this article, we present an educational intervention that embeds ethics education within research laboratories. This structure is designed to assist students in addressing ethical challenges in a more informed way, and to improve the overall ethical culture of research environments. The project seeks (a) to identify factors that students and researchers consider relevant to ethical conduct in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) and (b) to promote the cultivation of an ethical culture in experimental laboratories by integrating research stakeholders in a bottom-up approach to developing context-specific, ethics-based guidelines. An important assumption behind this approach is that direct involvement in the process of developing laboratory specific ethical guidelines will positively influence researchers’ understanding of ethical research and practice issues, their handling of these issues, and the promotion of an ethical culture in the respective laboratory. The active involvement may increase the sense of ownership and integration of further discussion on these important topics. Based on the project experiences, the project team seeks to develop a module involving the bottom-up building of codes-of-ethics-based guidelines that can be used by a broad range of institutions and that will be distributed widely. 

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2. Operationalizing Ethical Becoming as a Theoretical Framework for Teaching Engineering Design Ethics

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-019-00160-w  

   Fore, Grant A.; Hess, Justin L. (January 2020, Science and Engineering Ethics)

   Ethical becoming represents a novel framework for teaching engineering ethics. This framework insists on the complementarity of pragmatism, care, and virtue. The dispositional nature of the self is a central concern, as are relational considerations. However, unlike previous conceptual work, this paper introduces additional lenses for exploring ethical relationality by focusing on indebtedness, harmony, potency, and reflective thought. This paper first reviews relevant contributions in the engineering ethics literature. Then, the relational process ontology of Alfred North Whitehead is described and identified as the foundation of the ethical becoming concept. Following this, ethical becoming is imagined as comprising five components: relationality and indebtedness, harmony and potency (i.e., beauty), care, freedom and reflective thought, and ethical inquiry. Each component will be unpacked and knit together to argue that (1) becoming in all its forms is relational and, therefore, whatever becomes is indebted to all to which it relates; (2) one’s ethical engagement must be directed toward the creation of harmony and potency; (3) care practices are necessary to ensure that multiplicity is valued and safeguarded in the meeting of needs; (4) the capacity for reflective thought is necessary to fashion one’s self and others in the direction of harmony, potency, and care; and (5) ethical thought and action must operate through a cycle of ethical inquiry. This paper will close with a brief exploration of how ethical becoming could be utilized in engineering education contexts. 

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3. Informing a Robot Ethics Architecture through Folk and Expert Morality

   Surendran, V.; Melo Cruz, A.; Wagner, A.; Borenstein, J.; Arkin, R.; Chen, S. (July 2022, 7th International Conference on Robot Ethics and Standards)

   Ethical decision-making is difficult, certainly for robots let alone humans. If a robot's ethical decision-making process is going to be designed based on some approximation of how humans operate, then the assumption is that a good model of how humans make an ethical choice is readily available. Yet no single ethical framework seems sufficient to capture the diversity of human ethical decision making. Our work seeks to develop the computational underpinnings that will allow a robot to use multiple ethical frameworks that guide it towards doing the right thing. As a step towards this goal, we have collected data investigating how regular adults and ethics experts approach ethical decisions related to the use in a healthcare and game playing scenario. The decisions made by the former group is intended to represent an approximation of a folk morality approach to these dilemmas. On the other hand, experts were asked to judge what decision would result if a person was using one of several different types of ethical frameworks. The resulting data may reveal which features of the pill sorting and game playing scenarios contribute to similarities and differences between expert and non-expert responses. This type of approach to programming a robot may one day be able to rely on specific features of an interaction to determine which ethical framework to use in the robot's decision making. 

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4. Toward Ethical Robotic Behavior in Human-Robot Interaction Scenarios

   Chen, S.; Surendran, R.; Wagner, A.; Borenstein, J.; Arkin, R.C. (March 2022, The Road to a successful HRI: AI, Trust and ethicS - TRAITS Workshop @HRI 2022)

   This paper describes current progress on developing an ethical architecture for robots that are designed to follow human ethical decision-making processes. We surveyed both regular adults (folks) and ethics experts (experts) on what they consider to be ethical behavior in two specific scenarios: pill-sorting with an older adult and game playing with a child. A key goal of the surveys is to better understand human ethical decision-making. In the first survey, folk responses were based on the subject’s ethical choices (“folk morality”); in the second survey, expert responses were based on the expert’s application of different formal ethical frameworks to each scenario. We observed that most of the formal ethical frameworks we included in the survey (Utilitarianism, Kantian Ethics, Ethics of Care and Virtue Ethics) and “folk morality” were conservative toward deception in the high-risk task with an older adult when both the adult and the child had significant performance deficiencies. 

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5. Exploring the relations between ethical reasoning and moral intuitions among Chinese engineering students in a course on global engineering ethics

   https://doi.org/10.1080/03043797.2024.2406446  

   Clancy, Rockwell F; Zhu, Qin (November 2024, European Journal of Engineering Education)

   Research in engineering ethics has assessed the ethical reasoning of students mostly in the US. However, it is not clear that ethical judgements are primarily the result of reasoning or that conclusions based on US samples would be true of global populations. China now graduates and employs more STEM majors than any other country, but the moral cognition and ethics education of Chinese engineers remain understudied. To address this gap, a study examined the relations between ethical reasoning, intuitions and education among engineering students in China. It found that (1) ethical reasoning is positively related to an emphasis on care and fairness and (2) global ethics education results in significantly higher levels of ethical reasoning, as well as a greater concern with fairness and loyalty. The relation between ethical reasoning and intuitions in China is like that of students in the US, but ethics education affects students in China differently. 

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