WIP: How Should We Decide? The Application of Ethical Reasoning to Decision Making in Difficult Cases

This study is a Work in Progress in which first-year engineering students are introduced to four frameworks for ethical decision-making and then prompted to apply them to ethical dilemmas involving engineers. The chosen frameworks are Deontology, Virtue Ethics, Consequentialism and Utilitarianism. The participants were non-traditional-aged first-year engineering students who had recently transferred to our university from other two-year or four-year institutions. Each student identified and analyzed ethical issues in a societal problem by applying these four frameworks and comparing their conclusions as a homework assignment. Our prior studies involving the application of different ethical frameworks with traditionallyaged first-year engineering students indicated that some students could apply each framework independently, logically and correctly, while others formed solutions based solely on what they believed to be “right”, regardless of framework. These ungrounded responses were often devoid of a logical argument based on published evidence. Fortunately, the students in the current study population chose societal problems that tended to provoke less of an emotional response. The study sample consisted of 12 essays in which solutions to a societal problem were recommended according to each of the four frameworks, which were chosen for their contrasting approaches to ethics, i.e, outcome-based or rules-based. Results indicated that a relatively small number of participants were able to differentiate clearly among the four frameworks in offering solutions. In addition, not all of their recommendations were necessarily viable or included any negative consequences. The reasons for these results could have due to lack of effort, lack of understanding, or simply a failure to adhere to the intent of the assignment. Study Problem and Purpose The purpose of this study is to investigate how first-year engineering students apply each of four frameworks for ethical reasoning to the resolution of a chosen societal problem involving both technical and non-technical issues which are ethical in nature. The central problem lies in the fact that many first-year engineering students do not yet realize that that there may be more than one way to solve a problem, especially societal problems for which there is no one “correct” solution, but a number of possible solutions arising from conflicting conditions, interests, and beliefs. There are also multiple ways of determining the “best” solution, through the application of ethical frameworks. The field of engineering ethics has contributed virtual and actual case studies to encourage engineering students to consider what they would do when faced with an ethical dilemma, by applying these well-established theoretical frameworks for ethical decision making. Relatively few studies have been identified, to date, dealing with the understanding of engineering ethics by first-year students, especially when philosophically-based ethical frameworks are considered. This study will inform the engineering ethics community about how well different ethical frameworks are understood by first-year engineering students. In addition, the ability to analyze and resolve ill-structured problems is a common learning outcome that can be met, in part, through in-class exercises and homework assignments which help to build a sense of professional responsibility through the application of engineering ethics. Students often complete these courses without a sufficient understanding of the various ways in which illstructured problems can be analyzed and resolved, because they lack guided practice in doing so. The fact that different solutions could be derived under different frameworks also adds a creative or novel element to an are often considered dry and lacking in interest or relevance to today’s students. The first-year multidisciplinary engineering design course at a research institution in the southeastern United States contains a unit in engineering ethics with an assignment to identify the ethical issues associated with a societal problem, and to suggest solutions to those issues using each of four ethical frameworks: Deontology, Virtue Ethics, Consequentialism and Utilitarianism. For this study, students wrote short essays in which they presented the issues, and then explained how they could be resolved by applying these frameworks. As a Work-inProgress, this study was limited to non-traditional first-year engineering students, who were assumed to possess a greater understanding of the complexity of societal problems than traditional first-year engineering students, whether or not they would be interested in alternative forms of ethical analysis. These four frameworks were chosen because their application could lead to several different decisions, whereby our students would realize that ethical decisions often involve conflicting views and interests. Previous attempts by students to apply ethics to case studies have contained responses with hastily made judgments based only on Deontology, in which they have interpreted an engineering code of ethics as a law that was broken in the case study. This gap in knowledge and lack of acceptance of uncertainty indicated a need to re-design our approach to the instruction and practice of engineering ethics at the first-year level to include the possibility that there could be more than one valid solution to an ethical dilemma, depending on the applied ethical framework. On this basis, our research question is as follows:  How do non-traditional transfer first-year engineering students apply different ethical frameworks to the resolution of issues associated with ill-structured societal problems? Theoretical Frameworks The four frameworks of ethical reasoning employed in this study include Deontology, Virtue Ethics, Consequentialism and Utilitarianism. These frameworks are described below. Deontology is the adherence to specific directions, guidelines or rules for moral conduct, which may or may not be codified, which often specify what is required, permitted or forbidden [1]. Sometimes, though, one or more of these guidelines may conflict with others. For example, one of the provisions of the National Society of Professional Engineers’ Code of Ethics emphasizes the primacy of the health, safety and welfare of the public in the conduct of engineering work, while another admonishes engineers to serve their employers and clients with fidelity. What happens if the welfare of the public could be compromised by the directions of an employer or client? Virtue Ethics directs actions that reflect on the character or moral virtue of the decision maker, as considered by others according to well-known historical attributes of virtue [2]. While people may decide to act based on “the right thing to do”, often the “right thing” is related to a virtue that others would recognize and admire. Examples of commonly recognized virtues include honesty, selflessness, altruism, and compassion [2]. While the origin of deontology is attributed to Immanuel Kant in the late 18th century [1], virtue ethics has a much longer historical tradition, originating with Plato, Aristotle and Confucius [2]. Both Virtue Ethics and Deontology are based on written or cultural expectations for behavior which are independent of outcome. By contrast, an outcome-based system involves circumstances which determine the outcome. By contrast, consequentialism is outcome-based, and is often described as a case where “the ends justify the means. ” Actions can be justified by the outcomes that they produce [1], [3]. People have used this framework to justify dishonesty, selfishness, and even crime, arguing that the positive outcome of their actions outweighs the fact that laws, moral principles, or individual rights were violated. Value is also assigned to Consequentialist outcomes as “good”, where “good” may be an increase in happiness, wealth, advantage, pleasure, etc. [1]. Utilitarianism is favored by engineers as well as by many others, because it proposes the “greatest good for the greatest number”, as a form of cost-benefit analysis [3], [4]. The earliest definitions of what is meant by “good” were later considered to be hedonistic, and therefore contemptible [3]. However, philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, while emphasizing hedonistic pleasure, also supported the “greatest good for the greatest number” approach. Even later views labeled good as “agent-neutral” in that one person’s “good” is equal in importance to that of any other person [4], which ameliorated the stigma of hedonism to an extent, as well as to seek an optimal level of good for everyone involved. Like Consequentialism, Utilitarianism is outcome-based rather than rule-based, so that it would seem that context matters in decisions under this framework to a greater extent than it would under either Deontology or Virtue Ethics. The application of multiple frameworks for ethical reasoning to an ongoing societal problem emphasizes the fact that knowledge, and therefore, judgment, is not static or absolutely certain, but change under the differing conditions contained in these types of reasoning. If someone realizes that decisions can change depending on the framework that is applied, this means that decision making is driven by conditions or constraints in the form of assumptions, and that more than one interpretation, point of view, opinion or position could be as valid as any other. The realization of the validity of multiple contexts and views was described by King and Kitchener [5] as reflective judgment, which is considered to be a higher form of intellectual development than the blind acceptance of one view or set of conditions as absolutely correct in all cases. This conclusion is based on the work of King and Kitchener with college students as well as adults, which expands it applicability to ethical reasoning by