How engineering students think about the roles and responsibilities of engineers with respect to broader social and global impact of engineering and technology

摘要

Understanding the social, environmental, economic, and political impact of engineering is an important aspect of being a professional engineer. Responding to this need, engineering programs increasingly offer engineering ethics education. However, courses in engineering ethics as well as research on students' developing sense of engineering ethics often emphasize the micro-ethics of research, mentoring, and publications. In comparison, research is limited on how future engineers understand the social, ethical, environmental, economic, and political impact of their scientific and technological contributions. In this manuscript, we present 2 case-study accounts of how future engineers think about an engineer's responsibility towards the social and global impact of their contribution. The case studies draw from video-taped semi-structured interviews with engineering undergraduates. Our case-study analysis suggests that how some engineering students construe an engineer's responsibility depends on the particular issue at hand (weaponized drones versus malfunctioning bridges, for example), on their sense of self as a future engineer, views about what is engineering, sense of nationality, emotions, empathy, and ideologies/narratives available to them through participation in the world at large. We argue that students' views towards macro-ethics of engineering are sensitive to context, and that there's need for further research on how identity, epistemology, and emotions are entangled with an engineers' ethical view.