I initially signed up for the “Global Perspectives: Engineering Ethics Across International and Academic Borders” program simply because it seemed like a fun way to get out of lab for the week, but at the time, I did not grasp how transformative the program would be.
In my prior experience as a student of engineering, the word “ethics” connoted a brief discussion of morality, followed by a canon of case studies and a technical lecture on error analysis. We would learn that the Ford Pinto should have had a better reinforced gas tank and that the Space Shuttle Challenger should not have been launched on such a cold day, but these cases were presented prescriptively and retrospectively. There was an understanding that ethics was important, but in a program that could barely be shoehorned into four years, ethics became just one more requirement to check off on the path to an accredited degree.
As a graduate student, I do research in the ethically fraught field of nano-engineering. Even now, my day-to-day research is stripped of issues of ethics and policy, which are usually the domain of my adviser and granting agency. The Global Perspectives program was a shock to my complacency. I saw that engineering ethics is not an abstract series of case studies, but an ongoing conversation about the role that new technology plays in society. It is a field with open questions where all actors have agency.
Though spending a week with our new friends and colleagues from TU Delft, we talked about our work and their work, and considered questions of what engineering ethics and ethics education were and should be. We also got to know each other on a personal level, socializing and touring San Francisco together. In this sense, we put a personal face on each other's field. Engineers and ethicists so frequently work in their own vacuums that it is sometimes easy to cast the other in an adversarial light. By deliberating on hard topics together, and by getting to know each other as people, I think we learned to appreciate the struggle that each of us makes in our work. I also learned, from experience, that ethics is not a series of case studies in a textbook, but an involved discussion where you can consider both facts and intuition, and you can change your views many, many times as the conversation evolves.
In this process, we also saw how the way we communicate differs, and how that can stop us from seeing eye-to-eye. This was particularly notable in my field of nano-engineering. In several long conversations that I had with a nano-ethicist, we realized that we actually share a great deal of common thoughts and concerns about the ethics of nano-engineering. At first, our use of different terminology made it seem like our views were irreconcilable, but as we talked about how we felt about a variety of technologies and scenarios, we saw our views converge. Currently, the nano-ethics and nano-engineering communities communicate and publish in their own vacuums, so the issues perceived as pressing to the nano-ethical community may have already become normalized in the nano-technological community. When these communities interact, differences in their basic terminology (for instance, the use of the word “nanotechnology”) causes confusion and the illusion of disagreement.
Through improving communication across our fields, I think that it is more likely that nano-ethics may better engage the nano-technological community in the most cutting-edge and pressing ethical issues of our day. I hope that this will be only my first in a series of collaborations with the ethics community because I now believe combining technical exposure with a grounding in ethical theory can create a better framework for tomorrow's technical innovations.
Notes on contributor
David Rolfe is a graduate student researcher in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He is advised by Albert P. Pisano and researches the printing of inexpensive microscale electrical components using nanoparticle inks. Mr Rolfe received his BS in engineering at Harvey Mudd College.