How to address the volitional dimension of the engineer's social responsibility

Abstract

In this paper I argue that volitional aspects, i.e. ethos, attitude, pathos, will, underlying emotion, in engineering action need to be addressed when teaching social responsibility within the engineering curriculum. After presenting reasons for this claim, I look at two different, but not mutually exclusive, approaches to address volitional aspects. First, the recent revival of virtue ethics can be applied in engineering ethics. A moderate version of virtue ethics can explicitly elaborate on the engineering virtues. The second way makes use of various processes, e.g. research, design, learning, negotiation, decision-making, and reconciliation as processes, as a forum for teaching. This approach can be used to indirectly reveal the functionality and dysfunctionality of different attitudes to the students. Practical didactic suggestions are presented.

Keywords:

• engineering education
• engineering ethics
• motivation
• social responsibility
• virtue ethics
• volition

Acknowledgements

I thank Henk Zandvoort for inviting me to discuss this topic in this special edition and all our conversations on the subject. I thank the Finnish Cultural Foundation as well as the Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation for their grants that enabled my research on the themes of technology and ethics. I thank the three anonymous referees for their comments and Miranda Aldham-Breary for language revision. Further, I am grateful to Carl Mitcham, Juan Lucena, Tomi Kiilakoski, Jaana Hallamaa, Hanne-Maaria Rentola, Erik Fisher, Saku Mantere, Veikko Porra, Guglielmo Gottoli and Marcelo Simmoes suggestions, discussions and correspondence, all of which contributed to this essay. Any faults are solely mine.