The Importance of Meta-Ethics in Engineering Education

The author of this article discusses some of the limitations of current approaches to engineering ethics instruction , and argues for an approach that leads student from a lower to higher stage of moral development. The author examines the benefits and drawbacks of teaching ethics through codes of ethics, case studies, and heuristics, and finally outlines his goal of having students develop an understanding of diverse ethical theories and meta-ethics which shall allow the students to continue their study of ethics from a metaunderstanding
of both engineering and engineering ethics.