Abstract
An important goal of teaching ethics to engineering students is to enhance their ability to make well-reasoned ethical decisions in their engineering practice: a goal in line with the stated ethical codes of professional engineering organizations. While engineering educators have explored a wide range of methodologies for teaching ethics, a satisfying model for developing ethical reasoning skills has not been adopted broadly. In this paper we argue that a principlist-based approach to ethical reasoning is uniquely suited to engineering ethics education. Reflexive Principlism is an approach to ethical decision-making that focuses on internalizing a reflective and iterative process of specification, balancing, and justification of four core ethical principles in the context of specific cases. In engineering, that approach provides structure to ethical reasoning while allowing the flexibility for adaptation to varying contexts through specification. Reflexive Principlism integrates well with the prevalent and familiar methodologies of reasoning within the engineering disciplines as well as with the goals of engineering ethics education.
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Notes
Interestingly, Albert Jonsen, a leading critic of principlism and proponent of the “new” casuistry was one of the members of the Commission that authored the Report. Like Jonsen, we recognize that cases play a central role. But, following Beauchamp and Childress, we think cases without frames are too unwieldy, forcing participants to rely on intuitions and previous experience, which is problematic for young and developing professionals without sufficient experience. Our interest in marking Jonsen’s role on the Commission is to point out the ongoing discussion about the relevant relationship between principlism and casuistry.
See, for example, analyses of potential problems by Beauchamp and Childress (2013: 422–423) and Haslett (1987: 307–310).
Our anticipation of this result is guided by our experience as engineering ethics educators who have seen first-hand how much time it takes for someone to specialize not only in engineering but also in ethics sufficiently to teach ethics effectively. We are now poised to test the argued position that Reflexive Principlism is, for engineering educators, less work than theory-based approaches and more robust than case-based approaches.
“In essence, ABET is advocating a kind of preventative ethics. Preventative ethics contains two dimensions: (1) engineers must be able to think ahead to anticipate possible consequences of their actions as professionals, especially consequences that may have an important ethical dimension; (2) engineers must be able to think effectively about those consequences and decide what is ethically right.” (Harris et al. 2000: 18).
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Acknowledgments
The research for this paper was completed as part of an NSF award: Award #1237868 SIRA Modules for Effectively Engaging Engineers in Ethical Reasoning About Emerging Technologies.
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Beever, J., Brightman, A.O. Reflexive Principlism as an Effective Approach for Developing Ethical Reasoning in Engineering. Sci Eng Ethics 22, 275–291 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-015-9633-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-015-9633-5