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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. 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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3. The Power of Playful Learning - Ethical Decision-Making in a Narrative-Driven, Fictional, Choose-Your-Own Adventure [Work In Progress]

   Wagner, T. ; Bassett ; L. ; Pascal, J. ; Burkey, D. D. ; Streiner, S. ( June 2023 , ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   We contend a better way to teach ethics to freshman engineering students would be to address engineering ethics not solely in the abstract of philosophy or moral development, but as situated in the everyday decisions of engineers. Since everyday decisions are not typically a part of university courses, our approach in large lecture classes is to simulate engineering decision-making situations using the role-playing mechanic and narrative structure of a fictional choose-your-own-adventure. Drawing on the contemporary learning theory of situated learning [1], [2], such playful learning may enable instructors to create assignments that induce students to break free of the typical student mindset of finding the “right” answer. Mars: An Ethical Expedition! is an interactive, 12 week, narrative game about the colonization of Mars by various engineering specialists. Students take on the role of a head engineer and are presented with situations that require high-stakes decision-making. Various game mechanics induce students to act as they would on-the-fly, within a real engineering project context, using personal reasoning and richly context-dependent justifications, rather than simply right/wrong answers. Each segment of the game is presented in audio and text that ends with a binary decision that determines what will happen next in the story. Historically, this game had been led by an instructor and played weekly, as a whole-class assignment, completed at the beginning of class. The class votes and the majority option is presented next. In addition to the central decision, there are also follow-up questions at the end of each week that provoke deeper analysis of the situation and reflection on the ethical principles involved. This prototype was initially developed within a learning management system, then supported by the TwineTM game engine, and studied in use in our 2021 NSF EETHICS grant. In 2022-23 the game was redesigned and extended using the GodotTM game engine. In addition to streamlining the gameplay loop and reducing the set-up and data management required by instructors, this redesign supported instructors with an option to allow the game to be student-paced and played by individual students or to keep the instructor-led 12 week whole-class playstyle. Our proposed driving research question is "In what ways does individual student play differ from whole class instructor-led play with regard to learning that ethical behavior is situated?" In the next phase of our ongoing investigation, we plan to further evaluate the use of playful assessment to estimate its validity and reliability in comparison to current best practices of engineering ethics assessment. 

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4. Embedded Ethical Experiences: Designing Playable Case Studies for Ethics Education

   Hansen, Derek L. ; Neupane, Aatish ; Gedris, Kira ( January 2021 , Co-Designing Resources for Ethics Education in HCI, ACM-CHI Workshop)

   null (Ed.)

   Providing learners with authentic ethical situations in a formal educational environment can be challenging. While we encounter ethical situations daily (e.g., how we treat those around us; temptation to illegally use copyrighted content), some types of ethical situations are high-risk, rare, and/or embedded into contexts that learners don’t typically inhabit. For example, learners studying user experience design may someday be pressured by a boss to implement “dark UX” patterns to increase sign-ups by deceiving users. Learners can benefit from the ability to practice recognizing unethical behavior, making decisions in ethically complex contexts, and learning from their responses. A new genre of highly realistic educational simulations, called Playable Case Studies, can provide a context in which players can experience ethical conundrums in a safe environment, helping learn from mistakes and successes. In order to make the experience authentic and not obviously about ethics, it makes sense to embed ethical experiences into simulations focused on other topics in which ethical issues arise. An example of this approach is described, wherein an ethical situation is embedded within a cybersecurity Playable Case Study called Cybermatics. Many questions remain about how to design and evaluate such experiences in ways that lead to effective learning. 

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5. Responsibility and Accountability: Faculty Leaders, Ethics Frameworks, and Disciplinary Enculturation

   Pinkert, L. ; Beever, J. ; Kuebler, S. ; Taylor, L.E. ; Vazquez, E. ; Milanes, V. ( June 2023 , 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   What responsibility do faculty leaders have to understand the ethics frameworks of their faculty colleagues? To what extent do leaders have capacity to enact that responsibility, given constraints on curricular space, expertise, basic communication skills, and the political climate? The landscape of disciplinary ethics frameworks, or the value content and structured experiences that shape professional development and disciplinary enculturation, reaches wide across the curriculum and deep into the discipline [1][2][3]. This landscape might include frameworks ranging from accrediting bodies and institutional compliance structures to state and national laws and departmental cultures. Coupled to the diversity of specializations within a single discipline, this landscape is richly complex. Yet, faculty leaders play important roles in shaping departmental and programmatic cultures, which are at least partially informed by the disciplinary value landscape. The objective of this paper is to build on previous work [4] to explore this problem of faculty leader responsibility by contrasting faculty leaders’ perspectives on disciplinary values with the values evidenced by their professional organizations. To evidence this contrast, we compare data from interviews with faculty leaders in departments of biology and computer science at a large metropolitan high research intensive HSI-serving university against data scraped from the websites of professional organizations those leaders reference as ethics frameworks. We analyze both sets of data using content analytics methods to examine qualitative and quantitative differences between them. This comparison is part of a larger institutional study looking at this problem across a wide diversity of disciplines [5]. We find an anticipated disparity between identification of the disciplinary frameworks and their content, opening space for discussion about the impact of national ethics frameworks at the local disciplinary level. But we also find an unanticipated diversity of types of ethics frameworks identified by faculty leaders, demonstrating the complexity of just how value frameworks inform disciplinary enculturation through leadership and training. Based on our findings, we articulate the relationship between responsibility and accountability [6] in the process of values-driven disciplinary enculturation. This work is relevant to ethics in that if ethics frameworks and the values they encode play a role in disciplinary enculturation, and there is a disconnect between faculty leaders perceptions of ethics frameworks and their disciplines explicit communications of their values, then the processes and practices of disciplinary enculturation could be more tightly connected to disciplinary values – resulting in more richly ethical professionals. *note: a version of this abstract is also submitted concurrently as a presentation to the Association of Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE), which does not publish abstracts or proceedings papers. [1] Tuana, Nancy. 2013. “Embedding Philosophers in the Practices of Science: Bringing Humanities to the Sciences.” Synthese 190(11): 1955-1973. [2] West, C. and Chur-Hansen, A. (2004). Ethical Enculturation: The Informal and Hidden Ethics Curricula at an Australian Medical School. Focus on Health Professional Education: a Multi-Disciplinary Journal 6(1): 85-99. [3] Nieusma, D. and Cieminski, M. (2018). Ethics Education as Enculturation: Student Learning of Personal, Social, and Professional Responsibility. 2018 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition. Paper 23665. [4] Pinkert, L.A., Taylor, L., Beever, J., Kuebler, S.M., Klonoff, E. (2022). Disciplinary Leaders Perceptions of Ethics: An Interview-Based Study of Ethics Frameworks. 2022 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition. https://peer.asee.org/41614. [5] National Science Foundation, “Award Abstract # 2024296 Institutional Transformation: Intersections of Moral Foundations and Ethics Frameworks in STEM Enculturation.” https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2024296, 2020. 

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