Abstract
This paper describes a teaching methodology whereby students can gain practical experience of ethical decision-making in the engineering design process. We first argue for the necessity to teach a ‘practical’ understanding of ethical issues in engineering education along with the usual theoretical or hypothetical approaches. We then show how this practical understanding can be achieved by using a collaborative design game, describing how, for example, the concept of responsibility can be explored from this practical basis. We conclude that the use of games in design education can provide an excellent basis for discussing practical and ethical reasoning during the process of design.
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Notes
An argument for why the process of design might be intrinsically ethical derives from Dewey’s concepts of imagination and deliberation. The imagination, Dewey argues, is essential to the process of deliberation in that it allows the consequences of alternative situations to be considered: Casebeer [3] notes: “the capacity to imagine is crucial for moral reasoning on Dewey’s account.” In Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct [4] he explains that: ‘Deliberation is an experiment in finding out what the various lines of possible action are really like. It is an experiment in making various combinations of selected elements of habits and impulses, to see what our resultant action would be like if it were entered upon. But the trial is in imagination, not in overt fact. The experiment is carried on by tentative rehearsals in thought which do not affect physical facts outside the body. Thought runs ahead and foresees outcomes, and thereby avoids having to wait the instruction of acutal failure and disaster. An act overly tried out is irrevocable, its consequences cannot be blotted out. An act tried out in imagination is not final or fatal. It is retrievable.” (pp. 132–133)
This has obvious parallels with the process of design, a process that very deliberately weighs up the value of alternative solutions, and is largely dependent on the designer’s ability to imagine. More recently Johnson [5] has extended the argument that imagination is core to ethical decision-making with evidence from cognitive science. He concludes that activities that help to develop imagination—and one might infer designing as one of these activities—are valuable in this respect.
Winner [9] has questioned the success of this way of teaching ethics, arguing that it both ignores the way in which ethics can be found in normal day to day experience, and that it tacitly accepts existing structures of power which, from an ethical point of view, would be better examined. Whereas the teaching of ethics could be used as a means of questioning much existing engineering practice, Winner seems to suggest, it is in fact rather hypothetical, even anodyne.
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Lloyd, P., van de Poel, I. Designing Games to Teach Ethics. Sci Eng Ethics 14, 433–447 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-008-9077-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-008-9077-2