Reimagining Engineering Ethics: From Ethics Education to Character Education

Ethics education is a requirement in undergraduate engineering education, but evidence suggests that there is a limited improvement, and perhaps even diminishment, in moral commitments and capacities in engineering students during college. In the present paper, we gauge the current state of ethics education and identify opportunities for improvement given current trends in teaching ethics in engineering. We find that engineering ethics education has a number of suboptimal characteristics. First, engineering ethics does not show clear links to varying ethical theories that might inform ethical reasoning and decision making. Second, engineering ethics education places a heavy emphasis on compliance or rule-following, which provides fewer opportunities for internalizing moral values and virtues. Third, ethics lessons often emphasize case studies of rare or extreme circumstances, like the NASA space shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986, reinforcing the perception that morality is an infrequent professional concern. In the interest of improving ethics education, we introduce character education as a valuable approach to undergraduate engineering ethics education, one grounded in philosophical and psychological work on developing virtuous dispositions as well as personal, professional, and societal flourishing. We describe what character education in engineering might look like and sketch how it could help the profession and its stakeholders achieve both personal and professional outcomes.