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PROFESSOR: As an overall statement about the course,
the aim is to bring the learned discipline called engineering
ethics to the students.
And my goal is to get them to talk in ethical categories
and to be able to understand engineering
at a philosophical level.
And my approach to doing that is to treat
the costs, or engineering ethics,
as an engagement of two other learned disciplines.
In this class, what seemed to work
was the approach of being of many disciplines.
I brought the great pieces of art into this class
and I talked about how Raphael's Mass at Bolsena
gave a picture of what engineering really
is, as distinct from mathematics,
for example, when you look at Raphael's The School at Athens.
So I brought the high arts in.
We talked about literature.
One part of talking, one way to talk about literature
is to talk about literature as presented in the cinema.
Students go to movies, they like the movies,
and what worked in the class was that the students
today, young people today, are very good at critiquing a film.
So I was able to bring out ethical points by way of film.
The third part was that I had no hesitation in the class,
or as I do in my writing, to talk about experiences
that I've had in my personal life with my family.
Ethics as it seems at first to be very amorphous
kind of subject, but it can be approached systematically,
that not everything that everybody says is right.
If they come up to a conclusion, not every way
they try to justify it is something that is defensible.
So being engineering students, they
were very happy to see that ethics
is just as rigorous as science, mathematics, and engineering.
The engineering faculty here are skeptical about a course
on engineering ethics because many of them
don't see how they can use it in their classes.
But there's a large literature on how
to use engineering ethics in engineering problems.
And I think that their attitudes about how
to fit this course into an already busy schedule
will change once they see how to make an ordinary engineering
problem an ethical problem.