Teaching Ethics

To teach a class on ethics seems like a potentially unethical thing to do--what if you get it wrong? You may think you are safe if you just say, "Here are a bunch of ethical questions to consider, and here are the most cited sources in the field," but, even in that case, the structure of the class could lead students astray.

For example, the curriculum of a course on engineering ethics is expected to cover scenarios like "You are working on a product that can save hundreds of lives, and you can double its efficacy by incorporating a discovery you made while working for a former employer, but your non-disclosure agreement with your former employer forbids you to disclose such discoveries (even though your former employer will not implement them)--what do you do?" The question implies that it is an engineer's responsibility to resolve this ethical dilemma, but what if pragmatic ethics is right?

Engineers are good at getting to the "root cause," and fixing it. Tracing through the causes in this example, we see that the non-disclosure agreement creates an obstacle, but we also see that failure to honor such agreements would cause companies to stop disclosing discoveries to their own employees, so a deeper obstacle is the fact that discovery is funded through competitive market forces. But non-profit funding of discovery (e.g. through taxes) would anger voters who expect to be able to achieve sustainable competitive advantage, or who find that publicly funded "discovery jobs" are not available to them personally. So an even deeper cause is the failure of religion/parenting to produce humble voters. Pragmatic ethics approaches this question the way an engineer would, and concludes that the root problem is beyond the individual engineer's responsibility, that society must work as a team to advance morally, so teaching ethics specifically to engineers distracts from real moral progress.

One can have a general ethics class that everyone is required to take (here is what I want my own kids to know), but a specialized class in engineering ethics or business ethics would really be less about ethics than about compliance with modern ethical norms. If engineers and business leaders are bound by laws and law-makers are bound by voters, then specializing ethics classes to business and engineering is blaming the wrong people--the root problem lies with those who influence the voters: the teachers, preachers and media.

For example, consider how Thomas Jefferson would feel about a course on "Ethics for Plantation Owners" where they might debate the appropriate treatment of slaves. Jefferson believed that slavery is unethical, but he was a plantation owner who owned slaves. He felt that the solution to the slavery problem had to be social. Until the social climate changed, he thought freeing a slave would likely lead to that freed slave getting lynched and killed. It is rumored that he financed the creation of pro-black churches in the north (sowing the seeds of the civil war), but such an ethical response would not be in the scope of a "Ethics for Plantation Owners" course--it is a response for more than just plantation owners. For Jefferson, slave owners should not be responsible to address slavery, and one might similarly think engineers should not be responsible to address the ethical issues raised by technology.

You can turn this full-circle and say that the world has become too complicated for teachers, preachers and media, that we need engineers to build super-intelligent machines that can "augment" moral leaders, so they can be effective. But that would be a very different engineering ethics course, and certainly not for all engineers.

My biggest complaint about ethics classes is the teaching that ethics is commonplace--that we can all be moral leaders. While I personally agree with the idea of raising the moral understanding of everyone, it can be very dangerous to suppose that we have no need to invest in the development, support, and empowerment of a moral elite. Imagine if we didn't develop, support, and empower a special elite to advance science--no PhD programs, think tanks or supercolliders--imagine we counted on the common folk to provide science for themselves. Similarly expecting moral leadership to magically emerge from the general population is just as foolish.

My second complaint is with the use of "ethicist" or "ethics teacher" as the title for what are actually compliance jobs. The jobs with these titles do not include shifting ethical paradigms, questioning the foundations of our ethical reasoning like a modern-day Socrates, or inventing and deploying new technologies that will force us to rethink our ethics. Compliance work is valuable, but it does not fulfill the need for moral innovation. This false advertising in the job market prevents us from accurately measuring the lack of support for important ethical work.