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1. Complexity, Right Action, and the Engineering Curriculum

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--34317  

   Cheville, R. A.; Heywood, J. (June 2020, American Society for Engineering Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exhibition)

   oday’s engineering students face a very different world than their predecessors. As engineering has adapted to a more global and interconnected economy, the issues that face today’s engineers have become more complex. In a highly networked world notions of the impact of an engineer’s actions on others, the basis for moral and ethical behavior, also become more complex. The definition of complex here captures higher-order and emergent behaviors, situations that can change rapidly, limitations to predictability, and behavior arising from interactions rather than innate to components. While ethics has remained central to engineering education and in general has retained its deontological basis, the ideas the serve as the basis for engineering ethics have changed over time and can be expected to change in the future. The fact that the future ethical challenges that engineering students will face will be distributed and complex while most engineering curricula focus on simplified systems and decisions indicates emerging challenges for effectively addressing engineering ethics within the curriculum. Frameworks that distinguish simple and complicated from complex systems—in which outcomes are more uncertain—emphasize that action becomes more important than knowledge. In other words, it is more important to do what is right, even if one’s actions are imperfect, than know what is right to do. This paper explores the intersection of engineering curricula and engineering ethics from the perspective of “right action”, that is being able in act in ways that lead to ethical outcomes. It is argued that by focusing predominately on knowledge and situating learning in academic settings engineering curricula miss opportunities for developing capabilities for action. Through this lens the opportunities to address engineering ethics in the curriculum are seen to lie predominately outside traditional coursework. 

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2. Encountering Engineering Ethics in the Workplace: Stories from the Trenches

   Kim, D.; Howland, S. J.; Jesiek, B. K. (July 2021, Proceedings of the 2021 American Society of Engineering Education Virtual Annual Conference)

   null (Ed.)

   While formal coursework remains one of the most common strategies for developing ethics knowledge and competence among engineering students, ethical situations also surface in many other settings. In our own research on engineering student perceptions of ethics and social responsibility, we found that many engineering interns and co-ops reported encountering ethical issues or dilemmas in the workplace. To further illuminate such encounters, this paper aims to: 1) identify and describe real-world ethical issues encountered by engineering students in workplace settings, and 2) investigate what students learned from these experiences. We address these objectives by reporting select results from an ongoing qualitative analysis of 33 interviews with undergraduate students in their fourth year of college. We more specifically present a series of illustrative cases drawn from four of the interviews, selected because the participants described specific work situations in considerable detail and the cases represent a wide variety of ethical concerns. The purpose for sharing these cases is threefold. First, we note some specific lessons that our subjects learned (or failed to learn) through the selected cases. Second, we argue that the workplace is a particularly rich setting for learning about professional ethics. Third, we make recommendations for better scaffolding and supporting student learning in workplace settings. We expect this paper will be of particular interest to engineering ethics scholars studying where and how students learn about ethics, instructors looking for ways to enhance and extend ethics learning, and students preparing for internship, co-op, and/or full-time job roles. 

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3. Kantian one day, Consequentialist the next: Moral emotions as mediators between ethical frameworks for robots

   Wagner, A.; Borenstein, J.; Arkin, R. (June 2019, 2019 Conference of the International Association for Computing and Philosophy (IACAP 2019))

   The field of machine ethics in the process of designing and developing the computational underpinnings necessary for a robot to make ethical decisions in real-world environments. Yet a key issue faced by machine ethics researchers is the apparent lack of consensus as to the existence and nature of a correct moral theory. Our research seeks to grapple with, and perhaps sidestep, this age-old and ongoing philosophical problem by creating a robot architecture that does not strictly rely on one particular ethical theory. Rather, it would be informed by the insights gleaned from multiple ethical frameworks, perhaps including Kantianism, Utilitarianism, and Ross’s duty-based ethical theory, and by moral emotions. Arguably, moral emotions are an integral part of a human’s ethical decision-making process and thus need to be accounted for if robots are to make decisions that roughly approximate how humans navigate through ethically complex circumstances. The aim of this presentation is to discuss the philosophical aspects of our approach. 

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4. Kantian one day, Consequentialist the next: Moral emotions as mediators between ethical frameworks for robots

   Wagner, A.; Borenstein, J.; and Arkin, R. (June 2019, 2019 Conference of the International Association for Computing and Philosophy (IACAP 2019))

   The field of machine ethics in the process of designing and developing the computational underpinnings necessary for a robot to make ethical decisions in real-world environments. Yet a key issue faced by machine ethics researchers is the apparent lack of consensus as to the existence and nature of a correct moral theory. Our research seeks to grapple with, and perhaps sidestep, this age-old and ongoing philosophical problem by creating a robot architecture that does not strictly rely on one particular ethical theory. Rather, it would be informed by the insights gleaned from multiple ethical frameworks, perhaps including Kantianism, Utilitarianism, and Ross’s duty based ethical theory, and by moral emotions. Arguably, moral emotions are an integral part of a human’s ethical decision-making process and thus need to be accounted for if robots are to make decisions that roughly approximate how humans navigate through ethically complex circumstances. The aim of this presentation is to discuss the philosophical aspects of our approach. 

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5. Robots as Moral Advisors: The Effects of Deontological, Virtue, and Confucian Role Ethics on Encouraging Honest Behavior

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3434074.3446908  

   Kim, Boyoung; Wen, Ruchen; Zhu, Qin; Williams, Tom; Phillips, Elizabeth (March 2021, ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction)

   null (Ed.)

   We examined how robots can successfully serve as moral advisors for humans. We evaluated the effectiveness of moral advice grounded in deontological, virtue, and Confucian role ethics frameworks in encouraging humans to make honest decisions. Participants were introduced to a tempting situation where extra monetary gain could be earned by choosing to cheat (i.e., violating the norm of honesty). Prior to their decision, a robot encouraged honest choices by offering a piece of moral advice grounded in one of the three ethics frameworks. While the robot’s advice was overall not effective at discouraging dishonest choices, there was preliminary evidence indicating the relative effectiveness of moral advice drawn from deontology. We also explored how different cultural orientations (i.e., vertical and horizontal collectivism and individualism) influence honest decisions across differentially-framed moral advice. We found that individuals with a strong cultural orientation of establishing their own power and status through competition (i.e., high vertical individualism) were more likely to make dishonest choices, especially when moral advice was drawn from virtue ethics. Our findings suggest the importance of considering different ethical frameworks and cultural differences to design robots that can guide humans to comply with the norm of honesty. 

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