When the periodic ABET review arrives, many of us look around as if to ask, "Who, me? Why me?" and scramble to find documents, lectures or assignments that might be interpreted as having ethical content. Alternatively, we squeeze space into our program and require students to take a humanities course to check off the box and claim, "Whew, dodged that one again."

Is it that we don't think ethics is important? For most of us, I would guess the answer is no; we value students who behave ethically and are disappointed at every cheater that we catch or hear about from our colleagues. We follow the stories of the recent national business scandals and silently condemn the actions of the few (rejoicing that we don't own their stock!). Of course, since they aren't our former students, we are off the hook, and they must have been bad eggs anyway.

Perhaps we don't think engineering (or operations management) classrooms are the right place to address ethics — this should be left to the parents or establishments such as secondary schools or churches. While it is true that students learn much of their morality or judgment from their early environments including parents or even peer groups, some of the biggest shifts in moral development occur at the university level. This may be due to the students' newly independent lifestyles, where they make most of their own choices, or perhaps the increase in the breadth of their schooling, both academic and otherwise.

Besides, can we really teach someone to be moral or not in a classroom setting? Most ethics experts would say the point is to not teach someone your particular view of morality, but rather to focus on components such as sensitivity or awareness of the ethical aspects of a dilemma, which can be achieved through tools such as the discussion of case studies. Additional efforts are focused on improving students' ethical reasoning or judgment, where assessment is not made based on one right answer, but on the basis(es) a student uses for a decision(s), e.g., decision to avoid punishment, decision based on being told what to do, decision based on personal principle, etc.

Well, if we are to teach ethics at the university level, surely this must be the role of the humanities, with philosophers and ethicists leading the way? There may be some truth to this; certainly they are more "expert" at ethics education than we engineers are. Further, there is some evidence that it takes at least three weeks of ethics education to make a significant impact in judgment or reasoning [1]. However, the general ethical experts cannot speak to the kinds of ethical dilemmas that may be specific to each profession, and the evidence is not fully in on how engineers best learn professional ethics. In fact, a colleague told me that an engineering student who recently took a humanities ethics course to fulfill their degree requirements remarked in their course evaluation that they believed the course was not important, since in every other class professors told them to use cost benefit analysis, where money was the only real consideration in decisions.

At the very least, this suggests that we in our roles as engineering (and business) educators need to be aware of what we say that might have ethical implications. We, of course, would never tell students to fudge data to make an experiment come out in a client's best interests, but maybe we might observe out loud that funding will not continue if the results are not favorable, or that we want to do everything we can to keep the client happy, without noting how our words might be interpreted by impressionable students.

However, perhaps we may be able to do more than simply be aware of side remarks that we make. We could try integrating a case study on lying with statistics into our basic courses, or one on the trade-offs of outsourcing to countries with less strict labor standards into our discussions of aggregate planning. We could have discussions about integrity when collecting data and running experiments together with an open dialogue about our responsibilities to our clients and the general public. We could share a story of whistle-blowing with conversations about finding moral courage to make tough choices.

Some of us at Georgia Tech (including myself and Paul Griffin in Industrial and Systems Engineering, and Bob Kirkman in Public Policy) are implementing some of these things to improve the ethical sensitivity and reasoning of our engineers — many of whom will be our future leaders. We will make cases studies and course material available online (www.isye.gatech.edu/~jswann/ethics) along with assessment results from what we already implemented. We have also planned out future assessment studies that we will make available at this site as they progress. We would welcome further dialogue, whether you tell us why you do not teach ethics, you want to hear more about our attempts, or you describe what has been successful for you. We are sure to get some of it wrong, but doing nothing at all may be the bigger danger.

References

1. Schaefli, A., J. Rest, and S. Thoma, 1985, "Does moral education improve moral judgment? A met-analysis of intervention studies using the Defining Issues Test," Review of Educational Research, Vol. 55, No. 3, pgs. 319-352.

Table of Contents

OR/MS Today Home Page


OR/MS Today copyright © 2004 by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. All rights reserved.


Lionheart Publishing, Inc.
506 Roswell Rd., Suite 220, Marietta, GA 30060 USA
Phone: 770-431-0867 | Fax: 770-432-6969
E-mail: lpi@lionhrtpub.com
URL: http://www.lionhrtpub.com


Web Site © Copyright 2004 by Lionheart Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.