Phil 370: Moral Issues in Engineering
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Welcome!
About the Course
Goals:
- Students recognize that engineering problems have ethical aspects.
- Students learn to identify ethical aspects, e.g. “We could substitute an almost equivalent composite material for material currently used in the fuel pump. Should we tell the customer? ” Ethical issue: deception. Other ethical issues?
- Students learn how to reason about ethical aspects of engineering problems. That is, they learn to analyze the problems in the real world circumstances in which they occur and to use practical reasoning to figure out ethically defensible options to solve problems.
- Students develop moral imagination so that they enter into the perspectives of others as well as engineers in resolving ethics problems.
- Students learn to tolerate and also to reduce disagreement and ambiguity.
- Students can explain key concepts: responsibility, duty, right, wrong, reasonable care, permissible, defensible, justifiable, occupational role, loyalty, profession, professional, conflict of interest, cost/benefit analysis, whistle-blowing, confidentiality, agency, ethical standards
What the course covers:
- ·Engineering as a profession: a) some history; b) the workplace and the wider set of social institutions in which engineering is situated; c) ethical standards of the profession, the codes of ethics.
- Professional ethics in relation to law, common morality, and the market.
- Responsibility: a) role; b) causal; c) liability; d) capacity; e) forward-looking
- The standard of reasonable care
- Loyalty: critical and uncritical
- The engineer’s perspective alongside the business manager’s perspective
- Professional dissent and whistleblowing.
- Honesty, sharing and withholding information, confidentiality, secrecy.
- Conflict of interest, bribery, extortion, grease, gifts
- Managing risk to humans and the environment
- How government/the legal system influences engineering practice
- Design, innovation, and emerging technologies, especially disruptive technologies, e.g. IT, nano
- Issues associated with globalization
Contact Information
Vivian Weil
Professor and Director
Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions
Illinois Institute of Technology
Hermann Hall 204
3241 S. Federal St.
Chicago, IL 60616
Tel: 312 567 3472; Fax: 312 567 3016
weil@iit.edu
