The Mclean Paper: Integrating Ethics And Design

The McLean paper, “Integrating Ethics and Design,” presents many statements about the purpose and application of having engineering students take an ethics course. The primary assertion with which I disagree is that an ethics course is necessary to fill in the gaps left by the technical nature of the field, as it assumes that we have no other moral grounding or experience, however, I do agree that engineering students are not prepared for the type of thinking required to understand an ethics course in the form it is presented.

As an engineering student, I disagree with McLean’s statement that “the important subject of ethics and responsibility is often reduced to only one or two half year courses.” While it is true that there is only one course devoted solely to the study of ethics, it has nevertheless been an integrated part of my education from my first semester in

college.

Cautionary tales such as the Challenger and Columbia accidents, the BP oil spill, and other major events are discussed in classes frequently. Whether they are part of the course curriculum or not, the topics seem to arise from even the most basic engineering principles or subjects. Professors of any engineering subject already have their own understanding of the importance of seeing beyond the numbers and truly understanding the discipline for what it is: “the protection of the social good,” as McLean terms it. It is not the task of a single semester to set the ethical model of behavior for an engineer’s entire career, it is the responsibility of our entire educational program to accomplish that goal.

It is true to even the casual observer than any engineering discipline is highly technical and

focused primarily on the details of being able to design and analyze a machine or process rather than the softer logic of philosophy or ethics. Thusly, the vast majority of courses required of an engineering student deal solely with the calculations and the science of the discipline, not the more “human” side of making a decision for reasons that are not entirely for the sake of improving a design technically. McLean says that any course on ethics “requires students to question the fundamental premise of their technical identity,” inducing an “intellectual vertigo.” This is true even of the students who might identify as being somewhat of a polymath and not restricted to the “I’m good with numbers” identity often prescribed to those in engineering and nearly all STEM fields. It is simply the lack of exposure to content and learning as found in an ethics course that is the struggle for students. Just as a technical jargon surrounds the field of engineering, the terminology of an ethics course revolves around “words, phrases, and concepts which are foreign to the engineer.” The feeling of confusion and overwhelming dread many people see when looking at the complex mathematics that engineers do in routine calculations is the same feeling that affects the engineering student when they read an article on Utilitarianism or are called out on an ethical decision which they can’t explain, they simply know what is right or wrong. This culminates in students that are either uninterested in or intimidated by the study of ethics, which is possibly the most important subject of our education.