FEATURE
HOW TO BECOME AN ETHICAL ENGINEER
With an increased reliance on technology, engineers are facing more ethical dilemmas than ever. It begs an important question: are they prepared to successfully navigate them?
Written by Kayt Sukel
Photo: Getty Images
WHEN JAMES DEWBERRY ARRIVED AT AUBURN UNIVERSITY for his freshman year, he found that he was rooming with two aspiring engineers: one mechanical, one aerospace. Discussing their respective course loads one evening, he learned that the ME was taking an ethics course, as directed by his degree plan. The aerospace major, however, was not required to do so. Given the fact that aerospace engineers work on a wide variety of aircraft, spacecraft, satellites, and missile systems, Dewberry couldn’t understand why not.
Dewberry, a journalism major, was curious enough about what he saw as a discrepancy that he reached out to the head of the aerospace department to ask about the matter. The department chair responded that engineering ethics were covered in the major’s coursework and capstone project—and ethics were taught in all Auburn’s engineering classes—so students did not need yet another class. Unsatisfied, Dewberry penned an op-ed for Auburn’s student newspaper, The Auburn Plainsman, stating the institution had a “duty” to teach ethics to all its engineers, including those in the aerospace program.
“For engineering accreditation, the school needs to teach ethics. And if all the engineers are taught ethics in all their classes, as I was told, why do some majors need to take a separate course? It doesn’t make sense,” Dewberry said. “With the news talking about bombs in Gaza and plane crashes, it feels like this should be a bigger conversation because ethics are a big part of these things.”
He’s not wrong. Between Elizabeth Holmes defrauding investors at Theranos, Boeing’s quality control issues, and the unfulfilled promise of autonomous vehicles, it would seem engineers are under more pressure than ever to sign off on questionable work. With technology playing a larger role in their design work, engineers are increasingly confronted with challenging ethical choices. The question is whether they are ready to handle them.
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A Virginia Tech research lab, where researchers explore ethical and policy issues related to artificial intelligence and robotics. Photo: Qin Zhu/Virginia Tech
A Snapshot of Engineering Ethics Education Today
Engineering programs are accredited by a non-profit, non-governmental agency known as the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). In 2000, said Joseph Herkert, a professor emeritus at North Carolina State University who has taught engineering ethics for more than 35 years, the organization revamped its accreditation requirements, elevating ethics education in its list of required criteria.
“With that, many universities started impressing on their faculty that they needed to be addressing ethics—some did more successfully than others,” he said. “The American Society for Engineering Education started a division in engineering ethics and there were more resources available to different programs. But, while that did help make some progress, it’s still a work in progress. Many academic institutions don’t put a lot of teeth in their ethics instruction.”
Qin Zhu, whose work at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) focuses on ethics, including ethics and policy surrounding computing technologies and robotics, said different universities take different approaches to checking ABET’s ethics requirement. Some refer their students to affiliated humanities departments to select a course in philosophy, history, or cultural studies. Others offer standalone classes specifically focusing on engineering ethics, with an emphasis on case studies. And still others, like Auburn, work to layer ethics into existing major courses.
“Accreditation doesn’t really require a particular way of teaching ethics,” said Zhu, who is moving to the University of Alabama later this year to serve as an associate professor, Dean’s Distinguished Research Fellow, and founding director of the Human-Centered Intelligent Systems Initiative. “Many universities are trying to embed modules in technical courses, but many of the ethical engineering problems that students are expected to solve in those are purely technical. And there’s more to ethics than that.”
In the book, A Designer’s Code of Ethics, Mike Monteiro, a designer, quipped that all design decisions are ultimately ethical decisions. A choice of material may make a product unaffordable to most of the world. Certain processes may result in pollution, waste, and environmental harm. And, of course, as seen with Boeing, design flaws can result in deadly public safety issues. How to capture all the potential nuances in a single course is, understandably, a challenge.
“The American Society for Engineering Education started a division in engineering ethics and there were more resources available to different programs. But, while that did help make some progress, it’s still a work in progress. Many academic institutions don’t put a lot of teeth in their ethics instruction.”
—Joseph Herkert, professor emeritus at North Carolina State University
Photo: Getty Images
One mid-career mechanical engineer, who asked to speak anonymously, said that ethics education, especially at the undergraduate level, is lacking—especially when it comes to putting ethics theory into practice. A philosophy class or a requirement for your capstone project to source ethical materials for some widget doesn’t instruct you how to speak up when the company you work for is stumbling into murky ethical waters.
“Plato doesn’t tell you how to escalate an issue or who is the right person to escalate it to without causing a problem that might affect your standing with your team,” he said.
Jeffery Smith, Frank Shrontz Chair of Professional Ethics at Seattle University, said being able to stand up and point out an ethical issue takes “a certain kind of courage and moxie.”
Smith continued: “It sounds simple and easy to say something. But, more often than not, when deadlines are in place, certain metrics are used to determine success at the exclusion of others. When there is time or financial pressure, it can be easy for people to get caught up in the work without being more thoughtful about the surrounding values or purpose of why they are doing it.”
That’s why Herkert believes that more universities should focus on practical training when it comes to addressing ethical issues. For example, some analysts, in the Boeing case, have highlighted the “problem of many hands” when the organization opted to reposition the engines on the Boeing 737 to compete with Airbus’ A320neo, suggesting that engineers may not have understood the implications of design decisions because they worked in silos—“too many people” or “too many decisions” were made for any one engineer to realize crashes could occur. Herkert disagrees and said teaching the case study in a way that focuses more on the actual decisions engineers have to make could be helpful for the engineer who finds themselves in their own thorny ethical situation.
“I joke that case studies are the gift that keeps on giving. From the Pinto to Boeing, there is no lack of engineering catastrophes to look at where you can see where engineers could have made a different decision,” he said.
In addition, engineers can benefit when educators place a greater emphasis on that much-needed “courage and moxie” in classes. Herkert noted that one study showed that, in an evaluation of 26 ethics interventions in engineering programs, only 27 percent had a learning goal of “ethical courage, confidence, or commitment.”
There’s "no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to this, but we need to do more to ensure the practical is more emphasized,” he said. “While we’re doing much better in engineering ethics education than we were 20 years ago, there’s still more we can do to prepare these students for the real world.”
The Structural Element
ASME’s code of ethics demands that “engineers uphold and advance the integrity, honor, and dignity of the engineering profession by using their knowledge and skill for the enhancement of human welfare; being honest and impartial, and serving with fidelity their clients (including their employers) and the public; and striving to increase the competence and prestige of the engineering profession.” That canon is strikingly similar to other professional engineering societies, and requires not only technical skills, but an ability to work within an organization.
“This is one of the major challenges of engineering ethics education in the U.S. The approach is derived from this much longer history of teaching ethics to professionals like lawyers, nurses, and police officers,” Zhu said. “And it is based on the idea that professionals are rational individuals with autonomy capable of making decisions independent of anyone else in the organization which, to me, is an illusion. In reality, that kind of moral responsibility is distributed across the entire organization.”
Smith said that most of the problems seen in ethics case studies, engineering or otherwise, are scenarios that involve otherwise good people who are placed in bad environments. One of the best ways to ensure that engineers, or any other employee, for that matter, can successfully navigate a thorny ethics scenario is to create conditions where people feel safe to do so without threat to their reputations or jobs.
“Social psychologists and organizational theorists have identified the traits of organizations that are most likely to press people to make poor ethical decisions,” he said. “Those are organizations that are extremely hierarchical, that have certain kinds of performance metrics without thinking about how those outcomes might impact ethical concerns, and isolation where people in different units and divisions aren’t talking to one another.”
Adam Hauke, global director, product strategy and innovation at Gentherm Medical, a biomedical company based in Cincinnati, Ohio, said it’s important to have an ethical culture where people feel like they can speak up and address potential issues.
“There’s no real coursework out there that prepares you to deal with an ethical dilemma,” he said. “But I would say that ethics is built into our design process from the very beginning. We always look to start with a real clinical problem and then look for the technology to solve it. At the end of the day, the idea that ethics and the business opportunity are mutually exclusive is not true. They are extremely closely linked, especially in the biomedical space. So, you need to support ethics across your design process from the very beginning.”
Smith added that ethical leadership is also critical. You want an organizational structure that does not downplay potential ethical issues—and recognizes and rewards people who have the courage to shine a light on them.
“You want meetings conducted in a way that allows people a convenient opportunity to stand up and say something,” he said. “Alan Mulally, former CEO at Ford, said when he first got to Ford, the culture was that people did not bring bad news forward. He actually praised and clapped for a group of people who raised a red flag. It started a cultural shift that allowed the people there to feel like they could talk about problems without concern.”
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“Taking the time to cultivate moral sensitivity, creativity, a look beyond just technical or legal issues, and the ability to learn while you work in an organization can help you develop an ethical framework that will help you deal with a potential problem.”
—Qin Zhu, associate professor in the Department of Engineering Education at Virginia Tech
Photo: Getty Images
Becoming an Ethical Engineer
As Dewberry, the young journalism major at Auburn University pointed out, the different approaches in engineering ethics, even at a single institution, merit some conversation—and one wonders if the very structural elements that permitted poor design decisions to ultimately become engineering tragedies aren’t also at work in administrators who are foregoing practical ethics education in favor of strictly technical curricula.
Even without more practical programs, however, Zhu said today’s engineers can learn to become ethical engineers; no philosophy course required. He said it begins with a change of mindset. He recommends that engineers consider ethics beyond a particular decision-making moment and make it more of a habit or virtue that is part of your engineering identity.
“These are different skills, just like communication or soft skills. But taking the time to cultivate moral sensitivity, creativity, a look beyond just technical or legal issues, and the ability to learn while you work in an organization can help you develop an ethical framework that will help you deal with a potential problem,” he said. That same framework can also support more of the “courage and moxie” required for speaking up.
Then there’s the matter of finding an organization that does have the right organizational structure to support good ethics. While many engineering companies will say ethics are part of their core values—you can see it on their website—it’s important to make sure they are walking the walk. Zhu said companies that are serious about ethics could offer mentoring for employees to show just how they integrate it into their internal processes.
“If companies could do some kind of on-the-job training, like providing reflective tools to help engineers integrate ethics into their design decisions, they could become a learning organization that keeps building ethical expertise,” he explained.
Even without such training, engineers can still look for organizations that share their ethical values. Today, many job candidates will take time during the interview process to ask potential employers about things like flexible schedules or performance metrics. You can also ask pointed questions about how the organization handles potential ethics situations to make sure it’s a good fit, Smith added.
“Figuring out a question or two that signals not only your commitment to ethical values, but whether or not it’s an organizational environment where you feel like you can be yourself and speak up when you need to, is good advice, particularly for young people,” he said. “If you’re talking to hiring managers, ask how work is divided up. How are meetings conducted? Is there a situation where the division or unit dealt with an ethical problem? How did it deal with it in relation to the code of the company? Those are all questions that I think can be helpful—and help you find the right place.”
Kayt Sukel is a technology writer and author in Kansas City.
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