Ethical Analysis Process Toward Learning Professionalism in the Applied Sciences Classroom

Professional ethics instruction at the first-year level can too easily fall short of engaging students and assume the less inviting appearance of authoritarian dictate.Alternatively, students frequently claim that, although such discussions allow them to enjoy playing "devil's-advocate," the ethical problems are too "gray" to warrant specific, practical solutions.This paper describes the creation and implementation of a set of exercises to address these shortcomings.Instructors of first-year courses at Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science at Binghamton University have brought the principles of an engineering decision-making tool, a weighted decision matrix, to the analyses of ethical dilemmas.The Markkula Center's list of such ethical situations serves as the basis of an exercise, modeled in part on their Ethical Decision Making app.Rather than looking for the "correct" solution, or engaging in a vague discussion of contradictory positions, students propose both the solutions and the means of gauging their relative success in redressing an ethical tangle.Just as one would choose weighted criteria to evaluate a project, students use generalized ethical positions, such as utility, rights, and virtue, to construct a rubric for evaluating solutions.This exercise is completed in a series of steps to help students orient themselves for ethical considerations before completing the main assignment.It begins with an individual task to identify personal biases using the utilitarian Moral Machine's dilemmas; next, it branches out into other ethical perspectives more realistically representing the viewpoints found in real-world settings.This team-based task, engages students in a process of discussing and recording their reasoning for criteria weights and evaluation scores for each proposed solution.Based on previous years of instruction on similar subject matter which have lacked this ethical decision evaluation process, the instructors observed a much-increased level of engagement and interest in the exercise.