(547d) Should We Teach Ethics In Chemical Engineering?

The Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) has been working with the Engineering Council UK (ECUK) to identify the ethical issues at the core of the Engineering profession; a working party of the RAEng and the Engineering Professor's Council is looking specifically at the issues of teaching Ethics in Engineering. Two documents have been produced: the ?Statement of Ethical Principles? and ?An Engineering Ethics Curriculum Map?. By referring to those two documents, I will try to address the teaching of Ethics within the context of the Chemical Engineering curriculum.

One can think of a number of ways to teach Ethics in Engineering (Davis, 1999, reports eight different ways); personally, I see all the possible ways reduced to just two main broad routes: one consists of devising and teaching a specific module on Ethics, the other involves integrating Ethics into the curriculum. The former poses the obvious questions about ?when? (at which year in the programme) to present the Ethics module and ?who? should teach it. The latter approach, suggested by the Map, is perhaps more challenging. In addition to the ?when? and ?who?, it poses a question about ?where? in the curriculum it should be integrated, and about the degree of training in applied ethics Engineering teaching staff will need. However, this second option, which I refer to as ?integrated? teaching of Ethics, presents a number of advantages: it gives the students the opportunity to see ?Ethics in action?; it shows that Ethics is intrinsic to the discipline; it demonstrates that Engineering is essentially an ethical profession.

The Map proposes a framework (location, content, learning outcome, process) for the teaching of Ethics in Engineering. It represents a good starting point to introduce, in a systematic way, the teaching of Ethics, but of course it needs to be ?adapted? to the wide variety of courses and programmes. As with all novel working tools, it would need to be continuously under ?revision?. In this paper, I will discuss the work to be done at Departmental level to adapt the Map for Chemical Engineering programmes, and illustrate this for a specific university curriculum.

Reference M Davis, ?Teaching Ethics Across the Engineering Curriculum? OEC International Conference on Ethics in Engineering and Computer Science, 1999