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PROFESSOR: As an overall
statement about the course,

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the aim is to bring the learned
discipline called engineering

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ethics to the students.

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And my goal is to get them
to talk in ethical categories

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and to be able to
understand engineering

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at a philosophical level.

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And my approach to
doing that is to treat

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the costs, or
engineering ethics,

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as an engagement of two
other learned disciplines.

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In this class,
what seemed to work

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was the approach of being
of many disciplines.

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I brought the great pieces
of art into this class

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and I talked about how
Raphael's Mass at Bolsena

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gave a picture of what
engineering really

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is, as distinct
from mathematics,

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for example, when you look at
Raphael's The School at Athens.

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So I brought the high arts in.

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We talked about literature.

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One part of talking, one
way to talk about literature

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is to talk about literature
as presented in the cinema.

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Students go to movies,
they like the movies,

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and what worked in the
class was that the students

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today, young people today, are
very good at critiquing a film.

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So I was able to bring out
ethical points by way of film.

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The third part was that I had
no hesitation in the class,

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or as I do in my writing,
to talk about experiences

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that I've had in my personal
life with my family.

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Ethics as it seems at
first to be very amorphous

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kind of subject, but it can
be approached systematically,

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that not everything that
everybody says is right.

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If they come up to a
conclusion, not every way

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they try to justify it is
something that is defensible.

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So being engineering
students, they

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were very happy
to see that ethics

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is just as rigorous as science,
mathematics, and engineering.

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The engineering faculty here
are skeptical about a course

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on engineering ethics
because many of them

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don't see how they can
use it in their classes.

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But there's a large
literature on how

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to use engineering ethics
in engineering problems.

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And I think that their
attitudes about how

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to fit this course into
an already busy schedule

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will change once they see how
to make an ordinary engineering

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problem an ethical problem.