The Civilized Enginee

In his book, The Civilized Engineer, Samuel Florman proposes that, for engineers, ethical practice involves more than morality or “goodness”. He states: “The greatest threats to moral engineering are carelessness, sloppiness, laziness, and lack of concentration.”4 For engineers, competence is an important part of ethical practice and this is something that would most likely not be effectively addressed from the viewpoint of other academic disciplines.

Richard Devon5 presents another aspect of engineering ethics as he explores group (as compared to individual) decision-making. He comments: “It really is not very important how ethical engineers are, if they do not understand the implications of their designs.” In his paper he proposes a shift of focus away from individual ethics toward ethics as a guide to the process of decision-making in engineering design (often a group effort). This directly addresses criteria f and h of the ABET 2000 accreditation criteria.

Because engineering practice impacts society as a whole in a significant way, engineering ethics must be broadened to include competence on an individual as well as on a group (or process) level. This is best addressed from within the engineering discipline. Students who encounter ethics from within the discipline of engineering first and then take ethics from a different academic discipline, such as philosophy for example, will be able to compare and contrast different approaches and develop critical thinking skills. This point is more fully explored by Pfatteicher.2 (pp.140-141)

Influences to the P.S.E. Approach There are two major influences that have shaped our approach to making ethics instruction fundamental in our curriculum. The military academies – especially the United States Military Academy at West Point and the United States Naval Academy have greatly influenced our thinking. The second major influence is our experience with the development of curriculum materials to teach environmentally responsible design. Each of these influences will be described briefly in this section. Military Academies: The author taught at the United States Naval Academy from 1982-1989 and has, in more recent years, developed a dialogue with faculty at West

S. T. Fleischmann

372 Science and Engineering Ethics, Volume 10, Issue 2, 2004

Point. For many years the Military Academies have demonstrated success in developing professionalism at the same time as an academic discipline is taught. It is also interesting to note that while leadership in the armed services is the major focus of our military academies, they are predominantly engineering schools. This makes their experience especially valuable to engineering schools in the civilian world. While there are great differences between civilian schools and military academies, Col. L. Donnithorne, in his book, The West Point Way of Leadership, notes that differences in military and civilian leadership “are differences in degree, not in kind.”6 Col. Donnithorne (now a civilian college president) details the West Point approach and discusses how this approach can be used in civilian schools to produce leaders of character.

The military academies teach professionalism most effectively by modeling it at all times both inside and outside the classroom, by requiring students to practice professionalism at all times, and by making a commitment to critique that practice at all times. A military influence is felt in all classes, perhaps most visibly by the requirement to wear uniforms and to live within a formal command structure, but it is also felt through the choice of examples presented in class and the instructors’ willingness to share life experience with the material being taught. While civilian schools cannot require uniforms or enforce a command structure, they can make a commitment to model what they teach at all possible times, to require students to practice engineering under many circumstances, and to be willing to critique student practice both formally and informally. In a real sense, an excellent engineering instructor is always looking for “a teachable moment” and seizes it when it occurs in or outside of class. There is much to learn from the military academy approach and the specific areas that have been adopted by the Padnos School of Engineering (PSE) will be more fully discussed throughout this paper. Environmentally Responsible Design Curriculum: In the early 1990’s the faculty of the Padnos School of Engineering (PSE) was under contract to produce a curriculum to teach environmentally responsible design. We struggled with the most effective method to fulfill this contract. One option was to develop a course or possibly a series of courses – maybe even a concentration area in environmental engineering. The problem with this approach was that a single course or even a series of courses were unlikely to change the thought patterns and intellectual habits of all of our students. Such an approach would also most likely involve elective courses that would be taken by just a few students. We wanted to change the culture of the engineering school and to have an impact on the preparation of all students. This is precisely what we also wanted to do with ethics. Adding required courses to the curriculum was certainly not an option. In addition to an already over-crowded curriculum, we were overwhelmed by the amount of new information that we would be required to master and teach.

We decided to develop curriculum materials that could be used in courses that are normally required for all engineering students at all levels. We also decided that we would use environmental problems as a context for teaching the material that we already taught and that rather than teaching students about environmentally responsible

Embedding Ethics into an Engineering Curriculum