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Engineered systems are designed to serve societal needs, from bridges providing mobility to communication systems enabling the transfer of information. It is essential that engineers recognize the social impact of their work to ensure they provide equitable benefits across communities when implementing such systems. In times of crisis, such as after natural disasters, these ethical considerations and awareness of community needs are especially important. Ethical development must begin when engineers are still students so that they can be trained to consider ethical issues before they begin working. Ethical development can be observed using James Rest’s Four-Component Model of Morality: moral sensitivity, moral judgement, moral motivation, and moral behavior. Previous work has focused largely on the second stage, moral judgement, which describes the ability to determine which action is morally right when confronted with an ethical issue. Here, however, we focus on the first stage, moral sensitivity, emphasizing one’s ability to recognize a moral issue. Studies show that while moral sensitivity does not always lead to moral behavior; moral sensitivity can help explain variances in moral behavior. Researchers argue that pinpointing students’ gaps in moral sensitivity can help educators identify gaps in engineering ethics curriculum. Towards this goal, we interviewed undergraduate engineering students to evaluate their moral sensitivity, using a current event, the 2021 Hurricane Ida in Southern Louisiana, as background. This natural disaster provided a useful context to evaluate moral sensitivity due to the complex effects of such a crisis on engineered, natural, and social systems. The story is framed using Lind’s Indicators of Ethical Sensitivity, providing the story characteristics, stakeholders, and consequences. We asked interviewees to provide the final indicator—ethical issues. Using a qualitative content analysis, we found that interviewees connected several ethical issues with the primary consequence of socioeconomic inequities. Identified ethical issues included topics of climate change, infrastructure, disaster planning, and corporate/government accountability. Implications of this study include recommendations for future moral sensitivity research and applications to improve classroom learning.
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This content will become publicly available on July 29, 2026
Insurance and the “Irrationalization” of Disaster Policy: A Political Crisis Theory for an Age of Climate Risk
In the last several years, disaster insurance programs around the world have experienced disruptions that many observers interpret to be a primary symptom of “climate crisis” (Bittle 2024). Governments have responded to these disruptions through disjointed and at times contradictory measures: they treat disasters, alternately, as “Acts of God” that should be a collective responsibility, or as the result of decisions that can be attributed to individual agency. This article argues that such shifts between mutualism and individualization in disaster insurance are symptoms of an “irrationalization” of disaster policy. The concept of irrationalization, derived from the Marxist state theory of Claus Offe (1973), describes the process of goal identification and policy formulation of contemporary states as they navigate simultaneously valid but ultimately contradictory principles of political morality and governmental rationality. Through case studies of two disaster insurance programs in the US—the National Flood Insurance Program and property insurance in California, which covers wildfires—the article shows that irrationalization processes are becoming more marked as disasters grow ever larger and costlier, fueled by climate change and other anthropogenic causes. It also suggests that the concept of irrationalization offers insight into the emerging forms of “climate crisis” that are unfolding in disaster policy and other domains. The concept of climate crisis is frequently invoked to designate the ruptural change that will follow from global warming, and to both summon and justify radical action to address problems that are attributed to a particular causal or moral agent. But in the context of the irrationalization of disaster policy, technical and moral attributions are uncertain and disputed. Disasters generate political conflict and crisis‐driven reorganization rather than decisive courses of action.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2230636
- PAR ID:
- 10638501
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The British Journal of Sociology
- ISSN:
- 0007-1315
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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