Educating Ethical Engineers

In today’s society, the need to graduate engineers who are conscious of their ethical and professional responsibilities is more important than ever. This is especially difficult given the current media environment that publicizes reports of algorithmic bias, drone-based surveillance, and emissions falsification (among other issues) but provides few positive role models for students. While engineering programs have made significant strides to incorporate ethics instruction into the engineering curriculum, there is little evidence about which approaches best prepare students to address the ethical challenges they will face in the workforce. In this session, Dr. Finelli will present research about the state of undergraduate ethics instruction and it’s long term impact, propose a new approach to ethics instruction, and offer two course-based approaches to better educate ethical engineers.