Teaching Engineering Ethics to PhD Students: A Berkeley\u2013Delft Initiative

Behnam Taebi,William E. Kastenberg

doi:10.1007/s11948-016-9809-7

Abstract

A joint effort by the University of California at Berkeley and Delft University of Technology to develop a graduate engineering ethics course for PhD students encountered two types of challenges: academic and institutional. Academically, long-term collaborative research efforts between engineering and philosophy faculty members might be needed before successful engineering ethics courses can be initiated; the teaching of ethics to engineering graduate students and collaborative research need to go hand-in-hand. Institutionally, both bottom-up approaches at the level of the faculty and as a joint research and teaching effort, and top-down approaches that include recognition by a University’s administration and the top level of education management, are needed for successful and sustainable efforts to teach engineering ethics.

Highlights

Bringing ethics to the core of engineering curricula has received increasing attention over the last several decades
In their paper ‘‘Ethics Across the Curriculum: Prospects for Broader Teaching and Learning in Research and Engineering Ethics’’, Carl Mitcham and Elaine Englehardt extensively review the history of ethics across the curriculum (EAC) in the U.S, of which engineering ethics is an ‘‘unacknowledged aspect’’ (Mitcham and Englehardt 2016)
The present paper reports on a joint effort by the University of California (UC) at Berkeley and Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands to develop a graduate engineering ethics course for PhD students

Summary

Introduction

Bringing ethics to the core of engineering curricula has received increasing attention over the last several decades. The present paper reports on a joint effort by the University of California (UC) at Berkeley and Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands to develop a graduate engineering ethics course for PhD students. The course was set up with three questions in mind: (1) What is the best way, pedagogically speaking, to teach engineering ethics to PhD students?

Results

Conclusion