Expectations and Experiences of Ethical Issues in Engineering: A Survey of Stanford Engineering Students and Practicing Engineers
Author(s):
Robert E. McGinn
Presented at the OEC International Conference on Ethics in Engineering and Computer Science, March 1999
(Do not cite, quote from, or reproduce any part of this
paper or its appendices, including the survey questionnaire,
without the written permission of the author.)
I. Introduction
In alternate years I teach E 131, a course in the Stanford
School of Engineering entitled "Ethical Issues in
Engineering." Students who come to the first class meeting
are asked to complete on the spot a questionnaire about
various aspects of ethical issues in engineering. In
addition, those admitted into the course—29 of the 70
first-day attendees in 1997—must recruit at least 6
fellow Stanford engineering students not in the class and at
least 3 practicing engineers outside academia and have each
of them fill out the appropriate part of the same
questionnaire. Each class member retrieves and hands in at
least 9 completed questionnaires at the end of the second
week of class. The following week, two hours of class time
are devoted to discussion of responses to selected survey
questions, including short presentations on the two questions
each student was asked to design and add to the questionnaire
and respondents' most interesting answers to them.
My goal in designing and carrying out this survey was to
furnish contextual information which could, if taken on
board, enhance engineering ethics teaching and learning.
Specifically, I hoped to get a sense of both the expectations
that engineering students brought to the class
regarding matters engineering ethical and, based on the
experiences of practicing engineers regarding ethical issues
in their professional careers, what current engineering
students are likely to encounter along ethics-in-engineering
lines in their future work lives. These dimensions of context
are relevant because, presumably, how one teaches an
engineering ethics course should not be independent of but
rather reflect both the mentalit´s engineering
students bring to the course about its subject matter and the
experiences and related opinions practicing engineers have
accumulated regarding ethical issues in their work lives. I
hope the findings reported below prove useful to engineering
ethics teachers, especially those concerned about possible
disconnects between (a) the actual ethics-related
expectations, experiences, and opinions of current
engineering students and practicing engineers and (b)
implicit assumptions about these phenomena made by
engineering ethics course instructors.
The two-part survey one for students, the other for
practicing engineers—contains some questions calling
for short, aggregatable responses and others designed to
elicit more extended, non-aggregatable responses. The data
and discussion that follow pertain mostly to the short-answer
questions in both parts. Comprehensive discussion of
responses to the survey's long-answer questions is beyond the
scope of this essay and limited here to only two items.
II. The Survey
A. Respondents
The survey on which this paper is based was administered
on April 2, 1997. Respondents fell into three groups:
- Group Si: 70 Stanford students; 65 majoring in
engineering; who came to E 131 the first day of class and
filled out the student-part of the questionnaire in the
classroom that day. Of these 70, 29; all engineering majors
-- were admitted into the course.
- Group Sii: 178 Stanford students—176 majoring in
engineering; who filled out the student-part of the
questionnaire outside of class during the first two weeks
of the quarter at the request of the 29 class members
- Group P: 100 practicing engineers (contacted by the 29
class members) who filled out the practicing-engineer part
of questionnaire and returned it during the first two weeks
of the quarter.
B. Informal Character of the Survey
The survey was not scientifically designed, pre-tested, or
administered. I am not a professional survey designer and the
survey was not reviewed by one beforehand. Nor was it
administered to a strictly random sample of Stanford
engineering students or practicing engineers. Further, the
results obtained have not been subjected to sophisticated
statistical analysis. Lack of these desirable features
notwithstanding, the author believes that the results
obtained shed light on the topic and hopes that they prompt
rigorous survey inquiry into anthropological engineering
ethics, an important domain of inquiry still virtually
terra incognita. One methodological point worth
noting at the outset is that the results obtained from
student Groups Si and Sii were deliberately kept separate.
This permitted determination of whether the results obtained
from the self-selected engineering students who came to the
first day of class differed markedly from those who did not
but subsequently filled out the survey at the request of
class members. As it turned out, the response patterns of the
two engineering student groups are strikingly similar.
III. Basic Respondent Data and Aggregated
Responses to Short-Answer Survey Questions
A. Engineering Students
Preliminarily, the two groups of engineering student
respondents resembled each other to a quite high degree, as
regards both their gender profiles and the percentages of
them who indicated intentions to become practicing
engineers.
S4: Sex
|
|
Male |
Female |
No Answer |
| Group Si |
43 (61.4%) |
26 (37.1%) |
1 (1.4%) |
| Group Sii |
118 (66.3%) |
60 (33.7%) |
0 |
S5: Do you intend to become a practicing
engineer?
|
|
Yes |
No |
| Group Si |
60 (85.7%) |
10 (14.3%) |
| Group Sii |
142 (79.8%) |
36 (20.2%) |
After providing data about respondents' majors, year of
study, nationality, gender, and career intentions, the
students were asked whether they expect to be faced with any
ethical issues or conflicts during their engineering careers.
The affirmative response levels for both groups were
strikingly high:
S6: Do you expect to be faced with any ethical
issue or conflict in your engineering career?
|
|
Yes |
No |
NOp |
No Answer |
| Group Si |
56 (93.3%) |
2 (3.3%) |
2 (3.3%) |
10 |
| Group Sii |
118 (83.1%) |
20 (14.1%) |
4 (2.8%) |
36 |
Although the extremely high level of 93% came as a
surprise, the fact that a substantial percentage of the
students in Group Si answered in the affirmative might have
been expected. For these respondents constitute a
self-selected group, each member of which presumably chose
voluntarily to come to the first meeting of the class because
of, inter alia, belief that its subject matter, as
indicated by the course title, might be pertinent to their
future careers. Yet, the fact that approximately 83% of the
142 students in Group Sii who intend to become practicing
engineers but did not come to class answered in the
affirmative strongly suggests that the great bulk of
undergraduate engineering students at Stanford who intend to
become practicing engineers do in fact expect to be faced
with "ethical issues or conflicts" during their professional
engineering careers. Discussion of why that percentage
is so high follows below.
The student groups were next asked whether any
engineering-related ethical issue had ever been discussed in
any of their "technical engineering courses at Stanford." The
responses were revealing:
S8: Has any engineering-related ethical issue
ever been discussed (not just mentioned) in any
of your technical engineering classes at Stanford?"
(emphasis in original)
|
|
Yes |
No |
No Answer |
| Group Si |
20 (29.9%) |
47 (70.1%) |
3 |
| Group Sii |
61 (34.9%) |
114 (65.1%) |
3 |
Several observations are in order. First, reference was
made here to engineering-related ethical issues being raised
in technical engineering classes at Stanford, not to
either non-engineering courses, such as standard
philosophy-department ethics classes which typically are
oblivious to engineering ethics and its issues, or to
non-technical engineering classes, like engineering
economy or communications for engineers. Second, the response
structures are quite similar for the two student groups.
Third, the percentages of students answering in the
affirmative seem quite low in both cases: 30% and 35%. The
likely reason for these figures lies in the deliberate
formulation of the question: "ever been discussed
(not just mentioned)" The student was encouraged not
to answer in the affirmative if such an issue was merely
raised but not explored in any detail. This confirms a
familiar phenomenon: treatment of ethical issues in
engineering is usually neglected or given short shrift in
technical engineering courses. Some engineering deans and
faculty members have asserted in recent years that if
engineering ethics is to be taught to engineering students it
should be done in their technical engineering classes rather
than in dedicated engineering ethics classes. Barring
multiple conversion experiences akin to that of St. Paul on
the road to Damascus, or the unlikely offering of potent
incentives for engineering faculty to alter the content of
their courses in this respect, this survey finding suggests
that holding one's breath until such teaching becomes the
rule rather than the exception would be ill advised.
However, if one tends to perceive glasses as being half
full rather than half-empty, encouragement can be drawn from
the fact that roughly a third of respondents indicated that
they had experienced some discussion of
ethical issues in at least one of their technical engineering
classes. In the future it would be interesting to probe this
finding more deeply, e.g., to determine which fields of
engineering were the ones in which students were most and
least likely to be exposed to such discussion, and in what
kinds of courses: introductory, mezzanine, or advanced.
Having been asked whether they had been exposed to such
discussion to date, the students were asked whether they
thought it would be useful to study such issues.
S10: Do you think it might be useful to study
such issues and conflicts as part of your engineering
education? (emphasis in original)
|
|
Yes |
No |
No Answer |
NOp |
| Group Si |
69 (100%) |
0 |
1 |
0 |
| Group Sii |
152 (91%) |
15 (9%) |
0 |
11 |
These affirmative response percentages are extraordinarily
high, notwithstanding the fact that respondents were asked
whether they thought study of related ethical issues and
conflicts would be useful 'as part of their engineering
education,' not just as frosting on the cake.
In light of the responses to S8 and S10, it is not
surprising to learn that Stanford engineering student
respondents believe that the education they have received to
date has not been particularly helpful in preparing them to
grapple with ethical issues which most of them believe they
are likely to face in their engineering careers.
S13: How much has your undergraduate education
helped prepare you for coming to grips thoughtfully and
effectively with engineering-ethical challenges that you
might encounter in your career?
|
|
not at all |
little bit |
somewhat |
good deal |
great deal |
No Answer |
| Group Si |
11 (15.7%) |
38 (54.3%) |
16 (22.9%) |
4 (5.7%) |
1 (1.4%) |
0 |
| Group Sii |
26 (14.7%) |
59 (33.3%) |
62 (35%) |
22 (12.4%) |
8 (4.5%) |
1 |
In short, more than two thirds of those who attended class
the first day and about half of those subsequently recruited
outside of class to complete the questionnaire felt that thus
far their "undergraduate education" had helped prepare them
to come thoughtfully and effectively to grips with projected
future engineering-ethical challenges only a little bit
or not at all. Indeed, so substantial was this perceived
disconnect that only 7.1% of the first group and 17% of the
second felt that their education had helped prepare them
a good deal or a great deal for such challenges.
This situation provides a major opportunity for and imposes a
serious responsibility on teachers of engineering ethics
courses.
Encouragingly, substantial percentages of both groups of
engineering students reported that their "engineering
instructors" had done something that suggested to them that
the instructors themselves believed that taking engineering
ethics seriously is important — 39% of Group
Si and 53% of Group Sii. Even more encouraging is the fact
that only 7.5% of Group Si and 9.7% of Group Sii reported
that their instructors had done something that suggested to
the student respondents that the instructors felt that taking
ethics seriously was unimportant.
S15: Have any of your [School of Engineering]
engineering instructors done anything that led you to
conclude that they believe that taking ethics seriously
is important/unimportant while functioning as an
engineer?
| Important |
Yes |
No |
No Answer/NOp |
| Group Si |
27 (39.1%) |
42 (60.9%) |
1 |
| Group Sii |
94 (53.4%) |
82 (46.6%) |
2 |
| Unimportant |
|
|
|
| Group Si |
5 (7.5%) |
62 (92.5%) |
3 |
| Group Sii |
17 (9.7%) |
159 (90.3%) |
2 |
Additional cause for optimism can be found in the fact
that majorities of both groups of engineering student
respondents reported that in the course of their engineering
education at Stanford they had in fact received a message to
the effect that there is more to being a good engineering
professional than being a technical virtuoso.
S22: In the course of your engineering education
at SU have you ever gotten a message to the effect that
there is more to being a good engineering
professional in today's society than being a
state-of-the-art technical expert? (emphasis in
original)
|
|
Yes |
No |
No Answer |
| Group Si |
36 (53.7%) |
31 (46.3%) |
3 |
| Group Sii |
117 (66.1%) |
60 (33.9%) |
1 |
However, the optimism fueled by these findings must be
seriously tempered by the fact that the percentages of
students in both groups who reported having learned
anything specific from their engineering instructors
about what is involved in being an ethically or socially
engineering professional in contemporary society are
extremely low
S19: Have any of your engineering instructors
ever conveyed anything specific to you about
what is involved in being an ethically or socially
responsible engineering professional in contemporary
society? (emphasis in original)
|
|
Yes |
No |
No Answer |
| Group Si |
9 (13.2%) |
59 (86.8%) |
2 |
| Group Sii |
37 (20.8%) |
141 (79.2%) |
0 |
Finally, on the engineering student side, we come to a
response set that may help explain why, as seen earlier, such
high percentages of respondents in both student groups
answered that they expected to encounter ethical issues or
conflicts in their engineering careers. When asked whether
they had ever been employed in an engineering-related
position, e.g., a summer job, in which they had personally
experienced an engineering-related deed, practice or policy
that they considered morally problematic or outright wrong,
roughly a third of the respondents in both groups reported
that they had.
S24: If you have been employed in an
engineering-related position, e.g., in a summer job or
internship, have you ever encountered an
engineering-related deed, practice, or policy that you
considered morally questionable or wrong? (If you've
never had such a position, write "NA" [not
applicable].)
|
|
Yes |
No |
NA |
No Answer |
| Group Si |
13 (31.7%) |
28 (68.3%) |
29 |
0 |
| Group Sii |
33 (33.3%) |
66 (66.7%) |
74 |
5 |
Such experiences probably led those so exposed to believe
that they would in fact be confronted with ethical issues in
their future engineering careers. Of course, other factors
probably also contributed to such a high percentage of the
students indicating that they expected to be so confronted.
However, the current survey neither sheds light on what those
other factors were nor assesses their relative importance
vis-a-vis the above mentioned employment experiences.
B. Practicing Engineers
I now turn to the other major group of respondents:
currently practicing engineers. With this group, the center
of gravity of questions posed and responses given shifts,
generally speaking, from future expectations to past
experiences and opinions derived therefrom.
After obtaining basic data about each respondent's
specific engineering field and number of years of experience,
the engineers were asked to indicate whether on the basis of
their experience they believed that students currently
studying to become engineers were likely to encounter
significant ethical issues in their future professional
careers. The high percentage of practitioner respondents who
answered in the affirmative was quite in line with the
percentages of students in Groups Si (93%) and Sii (83%) who
expected to face such problems:
P3 : "Are current engineering students likely to
encounter significant ethical issues in their future
engineering practice?"
|
|
Yes |
No |
NOp |
| Group 2 |
81 (85.3%) |
14 (14.7%) |
5 |
We will shortly offer an explanation of this very high
percentage. With such a percentage, it is not surprising that
the responding engineers believed overwhelmingly that current
engineering students should be exposed during their formal
engineering education to study of ethical issues of the sort
that they believe the students are likely to encounter in
their future engineering careers.
P4: "Should [the students] be exposed during
their formal engineering education to ethical issues of
the sort that they may later encounter in their
professional practice?"
|
|
Yes |
No |
NOp |
| Group 2 |
88 (92.6%) |
7 (7.4%) |
5 |
The reason why the "Yes" numbers in P3 and P4 are so high
is probably complex, but practitioner survey responses
suggest that at least three factors are involved. First, most
respondents reported knowing about ethical issues arising in
engineering practice, either personally in their own work or
in the work of other practicing engineers whom they knew or
knew about.
P6: "Have you ever been faced with an ethical
issue in the course of your engineering
practice?"
|
|
Yes |
No |
| Group 2 |
70 (70%) |
30 (30%) |
P10: "Do you know or know of any engineers who
have been faced with an ethical issue in their
professional practice?"
|
|
Yes |
No |
NA |
| Group 2 |
64 (69.6%) |
28 (30.4%) |
8 |
Moreover, a healthy majority of the practicing engineers
acknowledged wishing that they had been better prepared to
deal thoughtfully and effectively with ethical issues
encountered in their work.
P8: "Looking back, do you wish you had been
better prepared or equipped to deal thoughtfully and
effectively with the [ethical] issue at the time it
confronted you?"
|
|
Yes |
No |
NOp |
No Answer |
Erroneous |
| Group 2 |
44 (66.7%) |
22 (33.3%) |
10 |
23 |
1 |
In other words, of the 70 practicing engineer respondents
who said that they had been faced with one or more ethical
issues in the course of their engineering practice, two
thirds affirmed that they wished they had been better
prepared to deal effectively with them. This felt lack is not
surprising, since most reported never having had any serious
discussion of ethical or social responsibility issues in
any of their engineering classes, undergraduate
or graduate.
P12: "Were ethical or social responsibility
issues ever discussed (not just mentioned) in any of your
engineering classes, undergraduate or graduate?"
|
|
Yes |
No |
| Group 2 |
40 (40%) |
60 (60%) |
Note that serious discussion, not mere mentioning, of such
issues was absent from all engineering classes, graduate
and undergraduate, for three fifths of the
responding practicing engineers. It would appear then that
given their experience-based view that there is a high
likelihood that current engineering students will be faced
with such issues at work, given the absence of meaningful
discussion of ethical issues in the engineering classes of
most respondents, and given the quite widespread related
feeling of not being adequately prepared to come effectively
to grips with such issues when they were encountered, these
judgments and experiences combined to engender virtually
unanimous belief that such exposure should be integrated into
formal engineering education. If this survey finding reflects
the beliefs of practicing engineers in general, and if
pedagogical and administrative behavior reflects personal
belief about educational priorities, then practicing
engineers apparently feel more strongly about the
desirability of such integration than do engineering
instructors and deans.
The responses by the practicing engineers yielded two
other surprising and rather encouraging findings. First, the
image of the employed engineer as permanently caught on the
horns of the following difficult professional ethical dilemma
is by now quite familiar: either choose to heed one's ethical
concerns about some work-related engineering activity and
suffer the job consequences of doing so, or choose to
disregard those concerns, act to promote or protect the
economic interests of the employer, and violate one's
conscience. The responses of the practicing engineers who
filled out the survey questionnaire suggest that this
stereotypical image of the plight of the organizationally
employed engineer is overdrawn. For while about a fifth of
the practicing engineer respondents report that one or more
of their employers had tried to deter them from
acting or penalized them for having acted as they believed
they should on ethical grounds, about four fifths reported
no such experience. In the future I intend to
probe this finding further, e.g., to see how the responses
varied with engineering field and years of engineering
experience.
P16. "Has any employer of yours ever done
anything to try to deter you from acting (or to
penalize you from having acted) as you believed
yourself obliged to do on ethical and social
responsibility grounds?" (emphasis in original)
|
|
Yes |
No |
No Answer |
| Group 2 |
19 (19.2%) |
80 (80.8%) |
1 |
Not only is such deterring or penalizing of engineers by
their employers not the norm, au contraire: a bit
more than a third of the engineer respondents reported that
at least one employer of theirs had actually done something
to encourage or reward them for having
acted as they believed they should on ethical grounds.
P18: "Has any employer of yours ever done
anything to encourage you to act (or to reward you for
having acted) as you believed yourself obliged to do on
ethical or social responsibility grounds?" (emphasis in
original)
|
|
Yes |
No |
No Answer |
| Group 2 |
33 (34%) |
64 (66%) |
3 |
This finding is surprising, encouraging, and should be
conveyed clearly to all engineering students so that their
employment search processes can be shaped accordingly.
Second, just as Stanford engineering students were asked
(in S22) whether they had ever gotten a message to the effect
that there is more to being a good engineering professional
in today's society than being a state-of-the-art technical
expert, practicing engineers were asked to indicate the
extent to which they held the same idea. The difference here
is that whereas the students' responses were anchored,
presumably, in whatever messages their engineering teachers
conveyed to them about this notion while they were students,
in the case of the practicing engineers the primary basis for
this belief is, presumably, their concrete engineering work
experience.
P20: "To what extent do you believe that is there
more to being a good engineering professional in
contemporary society than being a state-of-the-art
technical expert?"
|
|
Very much |
Quite a bit |
Somewhat |
Very Little |
Not at all |
No Answer |
| Group 2 |
47 (47.5%) |
28 (28.3%) |
19 (19.2%) |
3 (3%) |
2 (2%) |
1 (1%) |
Remarkably, only about 5% of the respondents answered "not
at all" or "very little," while about 76% answered "quite a
bit" or "very much." When we compare the answers to P20 with
the responses given by the two groups of engineering students
to S22, we see that the percentage of the responding
practicing engineers who believe that being a good
practitioner of engineering in contemporary society is not a
purely technical matter, in other words, who believe that
engineering competence (at least in contemporary U.S.
society) is a profoundly socio-technical matter,
substantially exceedshe percentage of the students who said
that during their technical education at Stanford they had
gotten a message to the same effect. Although, as seen above,
few students reported learning anything specific about what
it is to be an ethical and socially responsible engineering
practitioner from their engineering instructors, concrete
experience as a practicing engineer seems to drive home the
point about the socio-technical character of engineering
competence. More generally speaking, formal engineering
education is apparently failing to adequately equip
engineering students with the ethics background and other
social skills needed to do justice to their early but
seemingly superficial realization that engineering is a
socio-technical endeavor requiring various non-technical
competencies, something driven home much later to
engineers—too much later?—by their concrete
engineering practice. This important gap in non-technical
engineering knowledge and skill needs to be addressed
upstream in the educational life cycle of future engineers,
not merely lamented and adapted to downstream.
IV. Long-Answer Survey Questions: Selected
Findings for the Engineering Student and Practicing Engineer
Groups
Analyzing the answers to all the long-answer questions
posed in both parts of the survey must remain a task for
another paper. However, to give a sense of the kind of
long-answer questions that were included in the survey and of
the kind of findings they yielded, let us briefly explore the
answers elicited by two such questions, one directed at the
engineering students, the other at their practitioner
counterparts.
A. Engineering Students
Question S11 read as follows: "What, as you see it, makes
an issue or a conflict one that falls within the domain of
ethics (as opposed to, say, [the domain] of aesthetics or
law?" (emphasis in original) Analysis of the 248 engineering
student responses to this question disclosed a profoundly
fragmented group understanding of what makes an issue an
ethical issue. This is important because, among other things,
it suggests that whether a particular situation is deemed one
in which an ethical issue is present may often be a contested
rather than a consensual judgment. At least a dozen general
categories of criteriological responses were given, the most
frequently instanced being the following:
- an issue qualifies as an ethical issue if it 'involves
harm/hurt/adverse effects on others',
- 'affects people's lives or well-being'
- 'involves a matter of right or wrong'
- 'involves morality, a code of morals, or morals
questions'
- 'involves violations of rights, freedom, justice, or
morals'
- 'involves moral responsibility and is outside the
law'
- 'is interpretable in multiple ways, 'has no correct
solution to it'
- 'is decidable only by appeal to morals' etc.
- Some students simply circumvented the criteriological
issue and resorted to the easy option of giving
examples of the phenomenon in question instead of
struggling to articulate criteria governing their
respective judgments of when such a phenomenon obtains. In
a nutshell, engineering students' notions of what it is
that makes an issue an ethical issue are highly divergent.
For some, the Consequentialists, it is a matter of whether
an issue has certain kinds of concrete consequences; for
others, the Moral Values Thinkers, a matter of whether
certain moral rights or values are violated or put at
serious risk; for others, the Deontologists, a matter of
whether "right" and "wrong" are involved; for others, the
Epistemologists, a matter of whether the issue in question
contrasts sharply with factual issues believed to have
unique or correct solutions; while for others, the
Extralegalists, a matter of whether the issue falls outside
the domain of law.
- One issue raised by this complicated finding is that of
ethical relativism. Many engineering students bring to
ethics-in-engineering courses a confident belief that,
unlike the supposedly purely objective matters of fact with
which they deal precisely and effectively, making ethical
judgments is at bottom an inherently subjective or
relativistic activity. I devote considerable effort in E
131 (and other classes) to combating this facile,
erroneous, and corrosive epistemological assumption, one
sometimes used to justify cavalier disregard of ethical
conflicts and their stakes.
B. Practicing Engineers
Question P21 read as follows: "What is the most important
non-technical aspect of being a responsible
engineering professional in today's society?" (emphasis in
original) The answers to this question provided by the
practicing engineer respondents were almost as diverse as the
students' answers about what makes an issue an ethical issue.
The bulk of the engineers' responses fell into five general
categories:
- communications skills (writing, speaking, negotiating,
etc)
- social skills (interacting effectively with others,
e.g., with one's boss, fellow workers, and team)
members
- certain personality traits (courage, integrity,
honesty, openness to others' views being the most
frequently cited)
- certain cognitive traits (e.g., ability to see beyond
immediate project impacts, attentiveness to engineering
impact, and an impact assessment orientation re the
environment and society in general, having a global
orientation), and
- common sense.
If nothing else, the diversity of the practicing
engineers' answers to question P21 strongly suggests that the
non-technical component of being a responsible engineering
professional has multiple elements and needs systematic
exploration. While the first two of the above five general
categories do not always have an ethical character, they
sometimes do, e.g., deceptive communication with
clients and manipulative social interaction with colleagues
or regulators. Together with the other three, more obviously
ethics-related kinds of non-technical aspects of responsible
engineering practice, these topics would seem important,
perhaps imperative, to address in a comprehensive
ethics-in-engineering class. Among other things, the
engineers' diverse responses to P 21 underscore a claim that
needs reiteration in engineering ethics classes: the
scholarly literature on engineering ethics notwithstanding,
there is a lot more to the non-technical component of being
an ethically and socially responsible engineering
professional than having the courage to blow the whistle on
egregious engineering misconduct which jeopardizes public
safety.
V. Summary and Conclusion
Brief syntheses follow of the engineering-ethics-related
mentalitys of the Stanford engineering student
respondents and of the engineering-ethics-related experiences
and opinions of the practicing engineer respondents.
Based on findings derived from the survey, Stanford
engineering students bring to any engineering ethics course
in which they might enroll divergent and cognitively
dissonant mental sets. Substantial, latent divergence of
opinion exists about what makes an issue an ethical issue,
something which can fuel a tendency to fall back on either
facile moral relativism or traditional moral intuition
informed by contemporary engineering realities. This
divergence notwithstanding, widespread student expectation
that ethical issues will arise in their future engineering
careers coexists with infrequent, generally superficial
exposure to engineering ethical issues in engineering classes
and a surprising level of exposure to such issues outside the
classroom. Similarly, widespread professed belief that there
is more to being a good engineering professional than
technical virtuosity coexists with a widespread lack of
specific knowledge of what is involved in being an ethically
and socially responsible engineering professional.
As for the practicing engineers, most have been faced with
ethical issues in their personal engineering work, work done
for employers who vary widely in their degrees of receptivity
to engineers' attempts to make their practice conform to what
they think morally ought to be done. The practicing engineers
had little opportunity in their professional studies for
learning how to deal with such issues, wish they had had more
adequate preparation for doing so, believe that current
engineering students will also be confronted by such issues
and should be given the exposure to them that they did not
get, and exhibit quite divergent views about what is the most
important non-technical aspect of being an ethical and
socially responsible engineering professional in today's
society.
In conclusion, this shared epistemological fragmentation
and substantial mismatch between engineering student
expectation and practicing engineer experience regarding
ethics on the one hand, and weak 'equipment'—i.e.,
acquisition of pertinent ethical knowledge, skill, and
perspective—of both groups on the other, pose a major
challenge to engineering ethics teachers. The first step in
overcoming this fragmentation and alleviating this mismatch
is becoming aware of their existence, natures, and
magnitudes. The findings related above can play a role in
realizing this goal.
END
Appendix 1:
E 131: Ethical Issues in Engineering
Spring 1997
Survey Questionnaire (Version 4.0)
Part I: To Be Answered By 6 Current Stanford Engineering
Students
(Y = Yes; N = No; NOp = No Opinion)
1. Major field: ________________ 2. Yr: __________(Fr, So,
Ju, Sr, Grad 1, Grad 2, Grad 3)
3. Nationality: ________________ 4. Sex: _________
5. Do you intend to become a practicing engineer? (Y/N)
______ (If No, go to question 8.)
6. Do you expect to be faced with any ethical issues
or conflicts during your engineering career?
(Y/N/NOp)
7. If you do, what kind of such issue or conflict do you
think is most likely to confront you?
8. Has any engineering-related ethical issue ever been
discussed in any of your technical engineering
courses at Stanford? (Y/N) (Here "discussed"
implies that something more was done with the issue than
simply mentioning it.)
9. If so, what issue in what course?
10. Do you think it might be useful to study such issues
and conflicts as part of your engineering education?
(Y/N/NOp)
11. What, as you see it, makes an issue or a conflict one
that falls within the domain of ethics (as
opposed to, say, one of aesthetics or law)?
12. Assume that you will be confronted by a difficult
ethical issue or conflict early on in your engineering
career. What kind of background or preparation do you think
might help you come to grips with such a challenge in a
thoughtful, socially responsible way?
13. In your opinion, to what extent has your undergraduate
education thus far helped prepare you to come thoughtfully
and effectively to grips with such engineering-ethical
challenges as you may encounter in your career? (0 = not at
all; 1 = a little bit; 2 = somewhat; 3 = a good deal; 4 = a
great deal)
14. Who or what has had the most significant influence on
the ethical/moral values, attitudes, ideals, or approach to
making moral judgments that you would probably call upon if
faced with a difficult ethical situation in engineering
practice?
15. Have any of your Stanford engineering instructors said
or done anything inside or outside of class that led you to
conclude that they believe that taking ethical issues or
social concerns seriously while functioning as an engineer is
important? (Y/N)
16. If so, what gave you that impression?
17. Have any of your Stanford engineering instructors said
or done anything inside or outside of class that has led you
to conclude that they believe that taking ethical or social
concerns seriously while functioning as an engineer is
unimportant? (Y/N)
18. If so, what gave you that impression?
19. Have any of your engineering instructors ever conveyed
anything specific to you about what is involved in
being an ethical or socially responsible engineering
professional in contemporary society?
(Y/N)
20. If so, what specifically have you learned from
him/her/them about this idea?
21. If so, how did you come to learn that from
her/him?
22. In the course of your engineering education at
Stanford have you ever gotten a message to the effect that
there is more to being a good engineering professional in
today's society than being a state-of-the-art technical
expert? (Y/N)
23. If so, how did you come to get that or a similar
message?
24. If you have been employed in an engineering-related
position, e.g., in a summer job or internship, have you ever
encountered an engineering-related deed, practice, or policy
that you considered morally questionable or wrong? (If you
have never had such a position, write "NA.")
(Y/N/NA)
25. If you answered "Y" to #24, briefly describe what you
encountered.
To the E 131 student
: please add here as question # 26 a unique and probing
question of your own design that is pertinent to the focus of
this questionnaire and that you believe might be fruitful to
pose to Stanford Engineering Students.
END of Part I
E 131: Ethical Issues in Engineering
Spring 1997
Part II: To Be Answered by 3 Practicing Engineers Outside
Academia
(Y= yes; N= no;
NOp = No Opinion)
1. Field of engineering: _________ 2. Years of experience
as a practicing engineer: ______
3. Sex: _________
4. In your opinion, are students currently studying
engineering likely to encounter significant ethical issues in
their professional engineering practice?
(Y/N/NOp)
5. Should engineering students be exposed during their
formal engineering education to ethical issues of the sort
that they may later encounter in their professional
practice?
(
Y/N/NOp)
6. Have you ever been faced with an ethical issue in the
course of your engineering practice? (Y/N)
[If not, go to # 10].
7. If so, please describe what kind of issue it was.
8. Looking back, do you wish you had been better prepared
or equipped to deal thoughtfully and effectively with the
issue at the time it confronted you?
(Y/N/NOp)
9. What additional educational background or preparation,
if any, might have helped you come more thoughtfully and
effectively to grips with this issue?
10. Do you know or know of any engineers who have been
faced in their professional practice with an ethical issue?
(Y/N)
11. If you do, please describe the most interesting or
provocative such issue of which you are aware.
12. Were ethical or social responsibility issues ever
discussed (not just mentioned) in any engineering courses you
took, undergraduate or graduate? (Y/N)
13. If so, what kind of a course was it and at what
school?
14. What is the essence of your idea of an ethically and
socially responsible engineering professional?
15. Who or what exercised the greatest influence on your
views about being an ethically and socially responsible
engineering professional?
(If an individual, please indicate your relationship to
her or him.)
16. Has any employer of yours ever done anything to try to
deter you from acting (or to penalize you
for having acted) as you believed yourself obliged to do on
ethical or social responsibility grounds? (Y/N)
17. If yes, which was it; deter or penalize; and what
happened?
18. Has any employer of yours ever done anything to
encourage you to act (or to reward you for
having acted) as you believed yourself obliged to do on
ethical or social responsibility grounds?
(Y/N)
19. If yes, which was it—encourage or reward; and
what happened?
20. To what extent do you believe that there is more to
being a good engineering professional in contemporary society
than being a state-of-the-art technical expert? (Check
one)
very much ________
quite a bit _________
somewhat _________
very little __________
not at all __________
21. What is the most important non-technical
aspect of being a responsible engineering professional in
today's society?
To the E131 student: please add here as
question # 21 a unique, probing question of your own original
design that is pertinent to the subject of this
End of Part II
Appendix 2
Instructions for Discussion of Survey Results in Class On
Thursday, April 17, 1997
- You must have your survey completed by (at least) 6 SU
engineering students and (at least) 3engineers practicing
outside academia. (Let me know if you need more forms.) Do
not wait until the last minute when you may find yourself
hard pressed to secure 9 completed forms.
- Tabulated summaries of answers to the "Y/N/NOp"
questions on both parts of the questionnaire are
due in the instructor's office by Tuesday, April 15, at 5
P.M. On Thursday, April 17, I will distribute a sheet
showing the aggregate responses to the
short-answer questions.
-
On that day, each student member of the seminar will be
asked to indicate:
- what her/his unique, self-designed question
was,
- why he/she chose that question,
- the most interesting response(s) received, and
- what he/she concluded from these responses.
- Each student should be prepared to hold forth for
about 5 minutes.
-
Please hand in at the end of class on 4/17/97:
- a copy of the precise question asked; and
- all survey questionnaire forms that were filled out
and returned to you.
by Robert E. McGinn
Stanford University
International Conference on
Ethics in Engineering and Computer Science
Case Western Reserve
University
Cleveland, Ohio
March 23, 1999